The
American People Tsunami
Against A Wall Street Bailout
By Partha Banerjee
04 October,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Pundits said legislations to bail out Wall Street would be a sure fly in Congress. Corporate tycoons and their Washington representatives were ready to toast the champagne. Bush went back to hibernate again after a cursory televised “call the nation” on the urgency of the measure. Cheney was not to be seen. The $700 billion figure didn’t look all that big and bad anymore.
But guess what? Thousands of ordinary, working-class Americans across the country woke up and staged a massive rebellion against the bill. Henry Paulson, Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd, Roy Blunt or John Boehner didn’t anticipate the tsunami. Online chat rooms and street corner rallies alike were filled with people expressing their abomination and outrage at the elite’s attempt to let the Wall Street con artists off the hook.
A House of Representative vote of 228 to 205 stopped one of the biggest scandals of capitalism’s modern history. Dow Jones stock exchange tanked. Over a trillion dollars was wiped out on Wall Street. Pundits and elites were shocked. Just a few days later, Senate passed a sugarcoated version of the bill; however, it’s still not sure if the legislation will be approved in the House.
To us the laypersons, it is indeed a difficult-to-understand development; especially when those pundits portray the historic nay vote as un-American, destructive. A lot of people are clueless why the conservative Republicans voted together with left-leaning Democrats. Big media do not tell the whole story. Even after the Senate vote, they don’t tell us who voted for the bill, what their corporate connections are, and who voted against with what type of voting record.
Let us try to understand the very rapidly unfolding scenario.
The upcoming November elections include both the presidential race as well as Congressional races. As of today, all the polls indicate that Barack Obama is inching ahead to become the next president of the United States, and John McCain’s fortunes are plummeting. The surveys are also pointing toward a Democratic Congressional landslide. Republican incumbents are scrambling to hold their seats: they now smell that American voters are sick and tired of their pro-rich agenda.
Thus, the right wing needed a huge crisis – one of 9/11-like catastrophic proportions – to stem the fast-ebbing tide from under their feet. The Wall Street meltdown – all blown out inexplicably in a matter of two or three weeks – gave them a great opportunity. This was their only chance to go back to their voters, to show them that they are with them, and not with those Wall Street tycoons.
Even though it’s these right-wing Republicans who brought and kept Bush and Cheney to power with active help from Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, National Rifles Association or anti-immigrant vigilante Minuteman – all the above groups have similar ideology to Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal or Vishwa Hindu Parishad – now it’s their only chance to distance themselves from eight years of scandalous wrongdoing and mismanagement of their blessed administration. They must shed crocodile tears now for the “ordinary, God-fearing folks” – and they must shed a lot of it – or their political fortunes are forever doomed.
The left-leaning House Democrats didn’t lag far behind, even though in all fairness, we can never compare Dennis Kucinich, Jose Serrano or Sheila Jackson Lee (and now Russ Feingold in the Senate) with the pro-war, pro-repression far right scions of Newt Gingrich and his now-demised Contract With America. But the end-result would be the same: progressives would have another chance to go back to Washington, now with a fresh mandate from their base including organized labor and immigrant families.
Many Democrats and Republicans who voted for the Wall Street bailout are the insider fat cats; they did it because they’ve always done it: sided with big corporations and their super-rich CEOs, hoping that corporate welfare would trickle down to the average person on the street, saving the U.S. economy. It hasn’t happened before, and it won’t happen in future. Even in a market-driven system, economy only gets stronger when there is vigorous support from the bottom; in this case, it’s the financial well-being of the millions of the ordinary, working-class people. Think about that big oak tree in your backyard (or in India it would be a banyan tree) – look at the enormous root system and robust trunk it has to support the top.
This is what we know about the Wall Street bailout. It has no penalties, fines or imprisonment for the corporate executives who stole or misused billions; it does nothing to force banks and lenders to rewrite people's mortgages to avoid foreclosures; there are no enforced oversights; further, many well-known economists wrote to Congress already and warned about the bill’s unfairness, ambiguity and scary long-term prospects.
But the people in power, both on the stock exchange and Capitol Hill, would not spare a moment to confuse you. Whatever happens in the next few weeks before the November elections is anybody’s guess. For the time being, though, Wall Street and media pundits will keep sending the American people into a 9/11-type panic mode. They will say, without an immediate bailout, people will lose their jobs, their lifelong investment will be wiped out, schools will crumble, hospitals will run out of their blood supply…and who knows, maybe, ET will invade!
Democrats and Republicans who’re now frantically pushing for the unprecedented bailout have never gone back and told their voters how the U.S. economy has been losing ground over the years. They’ve never explained to their voters about the havoc of a one-trillion-dollar war; they’ve never disclosed the true costs of a speculation-based stock market and its fake bubble. They found those cheerleading media experts always on their side – U.S., European, Asian and India media alike.
It’s time we the ordinary people use all the power we have – especially our precious voting and calling power – on the elected representatives to let them know that we are revolting. We are revolting against their lies, half-truths and distortions. We’re revolting against their mismanagement, inaction.
Tell them we know what’s going on.
Dr. Partha Banerjee is a New York City-based immigrant, labor and
media activist.
[Note: the column was inspired by a recent article by progressive filmmaker Michael Moore.]
[email protected]
Brooklyn, New York
