The American people are
angry. They are angry that they are being forced to live through the
worst recession in our lifetimes -- with sky-high unemployment, with millions of
people losing their homes and their life savings. They are angry that
they will not have a decent retirement, that they can't afford to send their
children to college, that they can't afford health insurance and that, in some
cases, they can't even buy the food they need to adequately feed their
families.
They are angry because they know that this recession was not caused by the
middle class and working families of this country. It was not caused by the
teachers, firefighters and police officers and their unions who are under
attack all over the country. It was not caused by c onstruction workers, factory workers,
nurses or childcare workers.
This recession was caused by the
greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street. And, what makes
people furious is that Wall Street still has not learned its lessons.
Instead of investing in the job-creating productive economy providing
affordable loans to small and medium-size businesses, the CEOs of the largest
financial institutions in this country have created the largest gambling casino
in the history of the world.
Four
years ago, after spending billions of dollars to successfully fight for the
deregulation of Wall Street, the CEOs of the big banks -- JPMorgan Chase, Bank
of America, Goldman Sachs and the others -- went on a losing streak. The
enormous bets they made on worthless, complex, and exotic financial instruments
went bad, and they stuck the American people with the bill.
Wall
Street received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world.
But it was not just the $700 billion that Congress approved through the TARP
program. As a result of an independent audit that I requested in the
Dodd-Frank bill by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, we now
know that the Federal Reserve provided a jaw-dropping $16 trillion in virtually
zero-interest loans to every major financial institution in this country, large
corporations, foreign central banks throughout the world, and some of the
wealthiest people in this country.
And,
instead of using this money to provide affordable loans to small businesses,
instead of putting this money back into the job-creating productive economy,
what have they done? They have gone back to their days of running the
largest gambling casino in the world. In other words, they have learned
nothing.
The
American people are angry because they see the great middle class of this
country collapsing, poverty increasing and the gap between the very rich and
everyone else grow wider. They are angry because they see this great
country, which so many of our veterans fought for and died for, becoming an
oligarchy -- a nation where our economic and political life are controlled by a
handful of billionaire families.
In the
Today, the six heirs to the Wal-Mart
fortune own more wealth than the bottom 30 percent.
Today, the top 1 percent own 40
percent of all wealth, while the bottom 60 percent owns less than 2
percent. Incredibly, the bottom 40 percent of all Americans own just 0.3
percent of the wealth of the country.
According to a new study from the
Federal Reserve, median net worth for middle class families dropped by nearly
40 percent from 2007 to 2010. That's the equivalent of wiping out 18
years of savings for the average middle class family.
The distribution of
income is even worse. If you can believe it, the last study on this
subject showed that in 2010, 93 percent of all new income created from the
previous year went to the top one percent, while the bottom 99 percent of
people had the privilege of enjoying the remaining 7 percent. In other words, the
rich are getting much richer while almost everyone else is falling behind.
Not only is this inequality of wealth and income morally grotesque, it is
bad economic policy. If working families are deeply in debt, and have
little or no income to spend on goods and services, how can we expand the
economy and create the millions of jobs we desperately need? There is a
limit as to how many yachts, mansions, limos and fancy jewelry the super-rich
can buy. We need to put income into the hands of working families.
A
lot of my friends in the Senate talk a whole lot about our $15.8 trillion
national debt and our $1.3 trillion deficit. In fact, deficit reduction
is a very serious issue and will be one of the major issues of this campaign.
Unfortunately, many of my colleagues forget to discuss how we got into
this deficit situation in the first place, and how we went from a healthy
surplus under President Clinton to record-breaking deficits under Bush.
When we talk about the
national debt and the deficit, let us never forget that the current deficit was
primarily caused by Bush's unpaid-for wars in
Despite the causes of
the deficit, our Republican (and some Democratic) friends have decided that the
best way forward toward deficit reduction is to cut Social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid, education, food stamps and virtually every other programs of
importance to low and moderate income families. We must not allow that to
happen.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).