I’m in California tonight for the Critical Resistance conference that starts tomorrow, preparing for this amazing event while also consuming a ton of media trying to understand what’s happening with the economy right now.
I’ve found useful resources and action alerts on United For a Fair Economy and United for Peace and Justice, and I’ve been thinking about how important it is to understand our economic situation. The media is telling us that the circumstances leading to this massive corporate bailout are too complicated for us to grasp and trying to scare us into going along with the Bush administration’s incredibly unjust plan. There’s a lot I want to learn about how all this went down – but corruption, theft, and increasingly extreme inequality are simple enough to understand.
On the airplane today I watched an interview with a Louisiana representative who wants to mitigate economic crisis by coercing poor women into being sterilized. In addition to how unbelievably horrifying this is on its own, its juxtaposition with coverage of the Wall Street bailouts really made me feel like I was living in an apocalyptic dystopian science fiction novel. Watching him repeatedly insist that financial assistance to poor children is an impossible burden on taxpayers – at the same moment as the government is pushing a plan to use billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out the ruling class – was a terrifying representation of the way capitalism works.
What do you know about the economy? How is the Left going to respond to all this? What kind of small alternative economies exist already to help people support each other outside of mainstream capitalism? What else are we going to create?
I’ve heard from several people about how the financial meltdown is so confusing and complicated. Some people will benefit greatly from this myth, because if folks are scared enough, they will accept drastic changes, and if the situation is too complicated for ordinary people to understand, then no one can question the changes.
I would love to know more about how the media is perpetrating the myth that this situation is complicated.
I think it might be pretty simple. Millions of Americans were encouraged to take on debt that they could not pay off, and all of the lenders thought that they could find a way to make a different financial institution suffer the losses. Now the cards are down, some big players have lost, and the gamblers can’t pay up.
I would love it if there was a town hall to talk about this. Maybe I’ll learn it’s more complicated than I think, or maybe others will learn it’s more simple.
By the way, do yinz remember what happens in the movies when a gambler loses and won’t pay up?
tyrone!
i have been trying to do lots of research to better understand this, too, and i would love to talk more about it when we cross paths.
In addition to UFE, I’ve been finding some info/analysis here:
http://dollarsandsense.org/
But I am still feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of it all — or at least by how much I keep being told that it’s so incredibly complex. It’s very disempowering and leading to a lot of mystification that can only be harmful. Would love to see more conversations of people trying to break it down.
Funny, I just subscribed to DollarsandSense a week or so ago. I’m so intrigued by the Grassroots Economic Collaborative that publishes alot in the journal.
I’ve found Dean Baker to be pretty straight up and easy to digest in detailing what’s going on. His bog is: http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press. He writes, “The economy is going into a recession due to the collapse of the housing bubble” which is essentially what happened. Major banks started gambling, taking risks by loaning poor people money via high interest loans that they thought the global capitalist giant of an economy could back, or get away with. But it started biting them in the ass because we don’t pay a living wage in most states and so folks couldn’t keep up with the loans. Banks offered fake money, in other words, and it has caused a trickle effect throughout our markets, and because US capital is tied up with other countries, it’s affected the global economy as well. This is a simplistic answer, but it’s how i understand it. That coupled with the outragious avenues created through hedge funds and massive pay-outs to CEOS, you get economic volatility with so much disparity at the top and bottom of the economic scale.