Shut Up and Get Out of the Way

Right-wingers in Congress and on the corporate media were all frothy over Congressional Budget Office estimates last week of the Obama budget deficits running into ten trillion dollars over ten years.

Where were these guys when Bush and company were squandering the Clinton surplus and doubling the debt to world record levels? They applauded as wealth was redistributed upwards and jobs and investments sent overseas. No corporate piracy or financial freebooting was beyond the pale for these plutocrats. Suddenly they got religion?

Obama should at least get credit for including war spending in his budget, something that Bush, Cheney, and their rubber stamp Congress were never honest enough to do.

As the Congress grandstands over claw-back tax schemes to recover bonus money paid to execs of companies that received TARP funds and other bail-outs, I wonder how many of them voted for the Gramm/Leach/Bliley Act in 1999 that repealed banking regulations from the Glass Steagall Act of 1933, or voted for Gramm’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000? These measures brought about the financial meltdown that the new administration’s been left with. There’s sure to be at least a couple of hundred of these guys still in Congress, how about if they cough up half of their salaries in reparations?

I have to say that the thought of Ten Trillion Dollars got my attention. It’s sad that so much of it is just pissed away because our captains of finance and industry all invested us in tulip bulbs. At least much of this stimulus package is targeted at public works, because we got work to do.

In Jesse Jones’ book he wrote about ‘self-liquidating loans.’ Some of these were for commodities; the RTC bought cotton, lumber, corn, wheat, even whiskey and was able to eventually sell of most of it at a profit because they had supported the prices by keeping these goods off the market when it was glutted. But these self-liquidating loans also built projects that employed people, created a market for suppliers, and left us with things of value. The RTC financed power lines in 46 states that supplied electricity to 2 million rural customers, built paper mills in Texas and Arkansas, creating jobs and a market for local timber. The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge, the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, and the Huey P. Long Bridge were all built with RTC money. We spent ourselves out of the depression and later had something to show for it.

If we borrow trillions and use it to become energy independent, we’ll have made our country more secure. If we spend to reverse environmental degradation, our health and safety is enhanced. If we invest in wireless networks in the inner cities and computers in schools, we will give poor children a leg up instead of shoving them into the prison pipeline. Mass transit and rapid transit systems will stimulate commerce in a cleaner, greener way. And reform of our abusive healthcare system will bring us a healthier and more just society while bringing costs under control.

What an opportunity.