I wrote this Op Ed after attending townhall meetings in Grass Valley. At this point in time the Tea Party movement was still referred to as Tea Baggers. It was originally published on December 1, 2009.

Tea Baggers have it correct but wrong
December 1, 2009
by Ben Emery

The recent Tea Party movement is a populous one that has great justification. I went to both Town Hall meetings in Grass Valley and passed out flyers and spoke to many Tea Baggers. We agreed on just about all the problems with the country but disagreed on just about all the solutions because of one underlying problem — the confusion of cause and effect.

The downfall of our country didn't happen in the last year or two, but in the last 30 years. What we are experiencing today is the product of the biggest threat to democracy in America — the accumulation of wealth, power and corporate personhood.

The founders of our country fought against such a country where a small few controlled so much of the country's wealth and the government's policies. The Tea Party movement is correct in blaming our government for the downfall we are experiencing. But our government was set up for “We The People” to be the government and “We” have elected and supported the neutering of our powers to control our own policies, which threatens democracy and breeds fascism.

The Boston Tea Party was in fact a rebellion against a corporate tax cut. Grass Valley Tea Baggers (GVTB) insisted it was about “no taxation without representation,” but that was the reaction to the Stamp Act of 1765 and carried through the revolution. The Boston Tea Party was, in essence, American colonists saying “Hell No” to Wal-Mart, Exxon, Goldman Sachs and other major corporations of the period. East India Trading Company was one of the first of these types in modern history. The Tea Act allowed EITC to undercut the local tea shops in the American colonies, putting them out of business. It works much like a big corporation today that receives huge tax breaks and land subsidies, giving them an unfair advantage over mom and pop shops who can't compete and eventually go out of business.

Since the Ronald Reagan's administration, we have been told that the private sector knows best and “We The People” are the enemy — the nine scariest words in the English language are “I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” So we elect those who campaign against government and they, in turn, show us how bad government can be run.

In 1980, America was No. 1 in the world in exports of finished goods, importer of raw materials and the biggest lender in dollars to foreign nations.

Today, America is No. 1 in importer of finished goods/ exporting raw materials and the biggest debtor nation in world history.

Before the modern conservative movement or supply-side economics, our national debt was manageable. In 1980, America had a national debt of $909 billion, mainly leftover debt from the Vietnam War. The Carter administration had reduced our national debt by 3.2 percent over four years while increasing the U.S. GDP by 9.4 percent.

From Jimmy Carter's first fiscal year records to George W. Bush's first term fiscal records, we have seen the Democratic administrations increase federal spending by 10 percent, national debt by 4.2 percent, and GDP by 12.6 percent.

Compared to Republican administrations, we experienced increases in federal spending of 12.1 percent, national debt of 36.4 percent, and GDP by 10.7 percent. We are in debt almost $12 trillion today. The Reagan/ Bush administrations are responsible for 92 percent of it — just over $11 trillion.

As of 2009 “We The People” have almost no control over our government and need to balance a budget and pay our way out of this crippling deficit.

As Americans, we all know that Wall St. greed, recklessness and illegal behavior has brought our own and the world economy to its knees. In April 2010, continuing obstructionist partisan behavior, US Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) along with the other 40 Republican Senators sent a letter to Senate Majority leader Harry Reid endorsing Wall St. behavior by rejecting any financial reform that will be proposed by the Democratic majority. On the floor of the Senate, Republicans are making irrelevant talking points written by Frank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster, long before the proposed bill was written. This is typical of the obstructionist Republican minority of the 111th congress who is shattering its own previous record from the 110th with filibusters and holds on any significant legislation or appointments made by the Democratic majority. It has become perfectly clear the minority party is willing to let America to continue its downward spiral in order to win seats in the 2010 election. 
 
The Democrats are proposing a half measure that is a good first step but doesn’t alienate the campaign cash cow of the financial sector too much. In 2009 the financial sector lobbyists spent $300 million on both the republican and democratic parties. If this wasn’t appalling enough, over 3,000 Wall St lobbyists, 250 of them former members of congress, roam the halls of the capital building influencing 535 member of congress. This is a ratio almost 6 to 1. Instead of doing what is needed for the country, the majority party is willing to propose half measures to ensure campaign funding in the next election. We have a two party system that works to the benefit of special interests not the interests of the American people.

How did the banks get such unbridled freedom? Between the years of 1998 and 2008, the financial sector showered congress with $5 billion in campaign donations and lobbying efforts. The two primary pieces of legislation were the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and the, Commodities Futures and Modernization Act (CFMA) of 2000, which contained the Enron loophole. Our so-called representatives passed the deregulating legislation and then stepped out of the way and let the market regulate itself.
 
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allowed investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, to gamble with FDIC insured lending banks’ money after dismantling the Great Depression Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. This is why AIG had to be bailed out.

In addition CFMA of 2000, created a whole new unregulated market of commodities called derivatives. According to Ellen Brown in her book, “Web of Debt”,  “a mere handful of very big banks is responsible for a massive investment scheme known as "derivatives," which now tallies hundreds of trillions of dollars. To put hundreds of trillions of dollars into perspective the US GDP is roughly $15 trillion and the world’s GDP is around $60 trillion. 

Small and medium businesses are not able to expand, produce real products, and create new jobs at the moment because these big banks are not investing in the American economy, after being bailed out by the US taxpayer, but continue with more schemes and derivative betting. One such scheme is taking the audit-proof Federal Reserve 0% interest loans and reinvesting the money into government bonds that pay 3-5% in interest, posting massive profits and giving themselves billions in bonuses. 

Tell Congress to: 

• Audit the Federal Reserve
• Repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act 
• Repeal CFMA of 2000 
• Resurrect Glass-Steagall to its full power

Tell the White House to:

• Enforce Sherman Anti Trust laws on monopolies in every industry but especially the financial sector. Too big to fail companies are too big to exist.

The question is will our so called representatives stand with working people who are hurting or with Wall St. banks who were responsible for crashing our economy, millions of foreclosed homes, and millions of American jobs lost. Wall St. needs to be reintroduced to the United States of America as a part of the productive economy that helps make America strong once again.

Not many in the two major parties will talk about such measures because a big chunk of their future campaign funding will come from these same exact companies and people. Until we control the funding of our campaigns we will continue to be unrepresented in Washington DC.

“Drill Baby Drill” was the ongoing mantra of the summer of 2008 and then Senator Obama did say he would consider it if the compromise would help him achieve the long-term goal of reduction of fossil fuels. I guess I chose to ignore that or had no other choice since the McCain camp wanted to drill everywhere. I’ve heard it described that President Obama was everybody’s inkblot test. We saw our biggest hopes or our worst fears in then Senator Obama. Well, President Obama on March 31, 2010 announced drilling off the east coast and has ordered an environmental study of Bristol Bay in Alaska.

I wrote an Op Ed piece during the last legs of the 2008 campaign cycle about the benefits or lack of benefits of offshore drilling. The money spent on fossil fuel exploration could be invested in the real answer to the future of energy use in America with solar, wind, geo-thermal, tidal, and possibly most important, energy reduction.

I took the color commentary out of the piece and left the meat of the article. We are a couple years out but I doubt the facts have change that much.

Facts about Oil and Gas Drilling





The following facts on oil and gas companies along with their land and drilling permits can be found at resourcescommittee.house.gov/images/Documents/drilling_facts.pdf. 


 

1. More than 91 million acres of public lands and sea have been leased.


2. Only 23 million acres are being used, which leaves 68 million acres leased but not being used.
3. 

More than 28,000 drilling permits have been given, and more than 10,000 aren’t being used.


4. ANWR has less retainable oil than the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska (NPRA), which has drilled wells (but capped) and has the largest known oil reserves on the outer continental shelf — and isn’t being developed.


5. Government study shows that ANWR, if drilling started there today, wouldn’t be into peak production until around 2025. It would reduce the cost of a barrel of oil by $0.57 cents and a gallon of gasoline by $0.14 cents, according to a U.S. Dept. of Energy report at  www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/hr/
6. Since 2001, the top five oil companies have made more than $550 billion in profits.

On June 10, 2008, Republicans filibustered two bills relating to the energy crisis:


7. Windfall profit tax on the top five profit earners (Exxon Mobil Chevron, Shell, BP America, and ConocoPhilips), which made $36 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2008.

View the full video or read the transcript online »

As we just heard, we have a long way to go to fulfill the dream of a multi-racial democracy, with equal justice and opportunity for all. Our Declaration of Independence spoke eloquently of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as inalienable rights, but those rights did not extend to slaves. Abraham Lincoln, the "Great Emancipator," may have been the first of our leaders fully to grasp the meaning of the American promise. In this small but significant book, "The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth," the economist Norton Garfinkle writes that Lincoln believed this country's defining characteristic was economic opportunity. He believed that through hard work, over the course of a lifetime, every American -- including black people --could achieve a decent standard of living.

In Garfinkle's words, "America was the first nation on earth to offer this opportunity of economic advancement to all, even to the humblest beginner, and this was what made the nation unique and worth preserving. Ultimately, it was the largest reason for Lincoln's willingness to fight the Civil War."

In our time, this idea of universal opportunity is once again under assault for working people of every race.

Even before the Great Collapse of '08 destroyed the value of their homes, robbed their pensions, and took their jobs, American families were slipping behind, and are worse off now than they were thirty years ago. Over these past three decades, workers actually increased their productivity but did not share proportionately in the rewards of their labor. Those went largely to the top.

Since 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president, the incomes of people at the top have doubled while those in the middle and at the bottom have remained flat.

Let me throw some more statistics at you. You'll find their sources at our site online. Keep in mind that each of these numbers represents lived human experience.

In this richest of countries, more than 40 million people are living in poverty.

At some point in their childhoods, half of America's children will use food stamps to eat.

Some 30 million workers are unemployed or under-employed, and for those still working, the median wage today is about $32 thousand a year, which is why so many people are working two jobs trying to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, as the economist Robert Reich recently reminded us, in the 1950's and 60's, the CEO's of major American companies took home about 25 to 30 times the wages of the typical worker. By 1980 the big company CEO took home roughly 40 times the worker's wage. By 1990, it was 100 times. And by 2007, executives at the largest American companies received about 350 times the pay of the average employee. In many of the top corporations, the chief executive earns more every day than the average worker gets paid in a year.

And then there's the financial world. Case in point: Ken Lewis, who at the end of 2009 retired as CEO of Bank of America. Only recently did we learn that, not long after his company received $45 billion in taxpayer dollars from the big bailout, Lewis raked in more than $73 million in pension benefits and stock, and was given an insurance policy worth $10 million to his beneficiaries.

But compared to some people, Ken Lewis is a piker. Hedge fund managers, who bet that taxpayers -- you -- would pay to keep the banks from collapsing, hit the jackpot. Last year, one of them alone made a cool four billion dollars. The top 25 scooped up a total of 25.3 billion.

So for those who played their cards right, there were profits galore to be made from the bailout. Just this week, the non-profit Center for Media and Democracy reported that federal agencies poured out a total of $4.6 trillion dollars – trillion dollars - to keep the banks and Wall Street from meltdown. Those financial institutions have yet to pay back about two trillion of that, but who's counting?

You can see the stakes here. You can see why we need to reclaim the economic vision of both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. If you want more evidence, get your hands on this book, "The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger." As carpenters know, a spirit level is a device to measure the level of surfaces. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett are not carpenters; they're epidemiologists who combined have spent more than 50 years taking the measure of different societies, comparing how inequality affects the health of populations.

The more equal the society, they found, the longer its people live, while the most unequal countries have more homicide, more obesity, more mental illness, more teen pregnancy, more high-school dropouts, and more people in prison. The United States, they report, has the greatest inequality of income of any major developed country. That's the betrayal of the American promise.

I'm a journalist, not an epidemiologist. But I've been listening to America for a long time now, and I've come to understand that what the richest and strongest among us want for their families is what most all members of society want for theirs, too: a home, steady work, enough money for a comfortable life and secure old age, the means to cope with illness and other misfortunes, and the happiness of living freely as citizens without fear.

A society whose economic system cannot make those opportunities widely available is in deep trouble, the dreams of its people mocked and denied.

That's it for the Journal. Go to our website at PBS.org. Click on "Bill Moyers Journal" and you can read an interview I conducted with the authors of "The Spirit Level." You'll also find more from Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander, and more about Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I'm Bill Moyers. See you next time.

View the full video or read the transcript online »