It's Not About The Money-It's About The Injustice

In response to the widespread indignance over Barack Obama's having taken $400,000 from the Wall Street firm he'll soon give a speech to, Trevor Noah made a very good point in Obama's defense: "So the first black president must also be the first one to not take money afterwards?"

Noah then made an even more keen observation: "Instead of focusing on how Obama can make so much money from Wall Street for a speech, maybe we should be asking why Wall Street has so much money to give people for a speech: the loose regulations, the intensive lobbying and favorable — you know, the truth is, we can't get into all of this, there's too much, there's too much else that's going on that we have to talk about today." I'd like to get into it a lot more, actually, because there's a lot more to it than what Noah and the other liberals we see coming to Obama's aid on this Wall Street speech issue are saying.

The main defense they like to use seems to be that Obama has a right to take speaking fees, Wall Street firm or no Wall Street firm-sure, $400,000 is a lot for one speech, but why not let him make some money? This argument, similar to the one they like to use whenever a Democratic candidate takes corporate donations of "money makes the world go round," misses the entire reason so many aren't pleased with the situation.

Personally, my attitude wouldn't be any different if Obama's speech had paid a dollar, or if he somehow didn't have a legal right to make money in this way. Because as long as he's being rewarded by Wall Street, there is something deeply unjust about the whole thing.

I'm talking about the fact that, in accordance with Noah's righteous calls for focusing on the deeper problem of Wall Street greed, the resentment from progressives and others about Obama's compensation from the banks has everything to do with said greed. Obama and his party, whose financial relations with the major banking firms go a long way back, can be held responsible for virtually all the excessive power Wall Street currently holds. Obama, along with a crucial amount of other Democratic senators, voted to pass Bush's unnecessary and financial control-consolidating Wall Street bailouts in 2008.

Then, no doubt partly at the behest of the Wall Street insiders within the Obama administration, they took basically no action aside from Dodd Frank. They didn't prosecute the bank executives responsible for the crash, and most importantly they didn't undo the Clinton Wall Street deregulations, which are largely behind the crash in the first place. The results of this were disastrous.

Despite Democrats' (not even accurately founded) back-patting about the unemployment rate having gone below 5% under Obama, the recovery has been what I like to describe as a tower made of toothpicks. The housing bubble has blown right back up, along with the massive overestimation of stock and bond prices. This, coupled with the unprecedented financialization of the economy amid Democrats' failure to break up the banks, along with the record federal debt amid Democrats' failure to sufficiently raise taxes on the wealthy, has created grounds for a new economic crisis. And a crisis that's not far off at all, judging from the bursts in parts of the housing bubble that have already begun to appear.

To be fair, this next crash will also largely involve a reckoning with various larger forms of accounting fraud that society is tied in with too deeply for Obama to have fixed, such our dependence on a petroleum economy. But the reality is that a repeat of 2007-2008 is coming right up, and had Obama and Friends enacted the necessary reforms this crash wouldn't be anywhere near as bad. We also wouldn't have had the resurgence of the GOP and the election of Donald Trump, thus making those reforms here to stay, but that's a different story. My point is that while Noah also protested in his Daily Show rant that change doesn't start with Obama, at a crucial point in history, it did. And the unwillingness of Obama and his party to act at that point has had consequences we'll soon see the full catastrophic scope of.

And now Obama is being paid by the same financial institution whose industry he partnered with for eight years to transfer money away from the lower classes, and which is about to evaporate the money of said classes before quite possibly making another profit through new Wall Street bailouts. You see now, Trevor, why some aren't applauding with your show's audience at that?

In regards to this, along with the countless other hypocrisies and injustices that the Democratic Party has been involved with since its leadership's neoliberal transformation around forty years ago, I doubt the producers of the Daily Show or many other pro-establishment liberals will acknowledge there's a problem. Whatever Noah's personal views on Obama's legacy and the Democratic establishment, he and the rest of the beloved late night liberal comedy crew serve major media institutions that are more than fine with seeing these problems ignored or, better yet, re-framed in a positive light. Thus, it's no wonder Noah was allowed to briefly advocate for standing up to the rigged banking system in the quoted segment-as long as he deflects attention from the root causes of said system, him criticizing Wall Street itself is evidently nonthreatening to the oligarchy.

The good news is that as of the last couple years, every time one of the Democratic establishment's spokespersons has made power-serving statements like the ones mentioned, a consequential facet of the population has reacted by doing something to enact change. And 2016 Democratic primary election theft or not, their efforts are working quite impressively. After a month and a half of Medicare for all supporters leaderlessly pressuring House Democrats to support the H.R. 676 single payer bill, 98 out of the 193 said Democrats are now co-sponsoring it; according to the research of one Warren Lynch, Berniecrats have mostly taken over thirteen state Democratic parties; and as membership in the Democratic Socialists of America has grown rapidly in recent months, so has the electoral success of candidates who share its agenda.

So the types of progressives who aren't cheering on this objectively unfair spectacle of an ex-Wall Street president taking Wall Street money appreciate the concern of the Daily Show's corporate string-pullers, but we're not adopting their cheery attitude about it, not to mention about the monumental flaws in our economic and political systems that it represents. And when extreme financial concentration soon results once again in economic disaster, we expect many of the remaining loyal Democrats, who will suddenly find themselves scarcely able to pay for basic needs let alone cable to watch The Daily Show shortly after Obama left office, to join us in working towards the creation of a society that works for all of us.

But hey, Obama has a right to make money.

Don't Bern Out

The movement that this site is based upon, despite of course being open to individuals of all political leanings, is largely being built (and was made possible) by former Bernie Sanders supporters. And as someone who is part of that group, I feel the need to give my fellow founders of the political revolution some advice.

Mainly, this message is directed towards a certain type of former Sanders supporter: the one who has, in essence, stopped supporting him.

All throughout the campaign, Sanders told us that change always takes place from the bottom up, that no president can ever achieve what the people can achieve when they recognize their own power. He even promoted a campaign slogan that reminded us of that fact-"not me, us."

But after the media, the DNC, and even the FBI worked to sabotage Sanders's chances of becoming the nominee, which gave him little choice but to give in, how his followers reacted would be the test of their character. If they accepted his decision despite not agreeing with it and moved on to continue his movement, they would pass.

And I fear that for the most part, they're failing that test. Far too much, I see Sanders supporters on social media expressing not just disappointment but bitterness for what happened, saying that their former leader "sold us out" and blaming him for supporting Hillary Clinton. I disagree as well with his choice to do so, and I'm also somewhat disappointed with how he largely did not address the election fraud that occurred, but I have enormous respect and gratitude for him nonetheless.

But the trait I witness in these types that I find the most disturbing is how now that many of them have moved on to the Green Party's Jill Stein, they're behaving exactly like they did during the primaries. They act as if she's the answer to every problem, and some of them believe that to such an extent that they've convinced themselves she has a serious chance to win.

I support Stein as well, but I have the realism to know that in the end, the votes she wins will help the Greens become successful in future elections, not somehow propel her to the presidency in this one. But the former Sanders supporters whose mindsets I'm respectfully calling into question just don't want to hear that. As one of my wiser colleagues Michael Sparks put what I'm talking about:

Today I'm seeing a lot of people in my feed saying that they are giving up on politics.
This is my greatest fear.
This is exactly what the establishment wants.
Bernie Sanders laid out an exact plan for us to win and spoke it to stadiums and backyards for 14 months.
Everyone screamed and went crazy, but I don't think very many were actually listening.
I think they heard...
"When I become President everything will be amazing!!"
When what he really said was...
"Not me, US!!"
"When millions of people stand together..."
and
"Change has always happened from the bottom up."
Bernie hasn't changed.
You have.
You were a poser revolutionary and now you expose yourself daily with your
"Bernie betrayed us" lies.
I can tell you were the ones who weren't listening.
They are now the ones who think that Jill Stein is going to be President and "everything will be amazing!!"
They are repeating the same pattern.
They aren't revolutionaries.
They are just looking for the next cult of personality.
They liked Bernie because he was a rock star and they like Jill for the same reasons.
When Bernie was cheated and told them that we could still win if we kept working, they turned on him and put Jill upon the same pedestal that they knocked Bernie off of.
On November 8, when Jill doesn't win a single state, these people will all cry about the rigged system and then quit politics with a bitter taste in their mouth.
They will be sitting on a bar stool twenty years from now complaining about how the whole world is a big setup.
They refuse to accept that change happens from the bottom up, because that is too much work.
These people aren't suited for the war of attrition that is politics.
Those of you who are intent on making actual change by overhauling your local government, I salute you.
You were the ones listening, in between the roars, in those crowded stadiums.

But soon, whether these people were listening or not, they'll no longer be able to afford to wallow in disappointment and refuse to be politically involved. Because for a while, they literally won't be able to afford many other luxuries.

Let's travel back to another moment when many were filled with the belief that one leader could fix everything: eight years ago. You remember that time, don't you? This amazing figure Barack Obama, who came into most of our lives only a year ago, had toppled the Clinton machine and was on his way to creating a new paradigm in human history. In his Democratic convention speech, his words felt like they spoke to us more than any others from a politician in recent memory: "America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this."

And Obama would soon have a very good opportunity to prove that he meant it. When much of America's banking system became undone in the month of September, President Bush, who's empty mind had been filled with banking industry propaganda during the past few months by his Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, proposed a bailout for the Wall Street firms. The way the administration first introduced the bill to the senate made it clear that all later claims of a bailout being necessary to save the economy were false; on September 18, Paulson told members of congress that should they fail to meet the bankers' extravagant demands, the entire world economy would crash "within 24 hours."

The plan was so clearly unreasonable that 95 House Democrats shot it down. But when Paulson rewrote it to seem like something that was simply meant to help homeowners, and presented it in a less suspicious manner, the House and the Senate were on board. Or at least those of them who's political careers depended on donations from the same banks that wanted them to pass the measure. On October 1, when the Senate vote was being negotiated, Obama, who's campaign's second largest contributor was Goldman Sachs, made the best case he could for it, one that was mostly based on the claim that there would be an independent oversight committee to make sure that the banks would pay back the money to taxpayers.

But even after Senator Bernie Sanders (someone you may have heard of) made a solid case against it, informing his colleagues that the committee was not independent at all but handpicked to make it likely to let the banks off, nobody listened. The Senate approved the so-called Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and after the House did the same two days later, Bush listened to what the grown-ups had told him and signed it into law.

But unlike the president, Obama was aware of what would come from his support of the bill. And we knew it; our anointed savior had quite literally sold us out, redistributing $700 billion of the taxes we payed to the nation's top bankers so that they could make the banking industry into an unregulatable monopoly that controlled far too much of the nation's wealth.

And yet, instead of switching to the Green Party, we continued to assume that change would simply happen on its own and kept Obama, and his party, afloat for the next eight years.

And the consequences of our mistakes are about to hit us. Hard.

Had a party that isn't corrupted by corporate interests been voted into prominence since 2008, the damage of the bailouts would be undone by now. The banks would have been broken up, their executives would have been forced to pay their fair share in taxes, and the money that they had stolen from the middle class in 2008-and for the past four decades-would have been returned to its rightful owners. But the opposite has happened; in spite of Obama's Dodd-Frank Act, the economy is now more financialized than ever, with the big banks sharing about a fourth of the country's corporate profits.

This is a disaster in the making. The 2008 crisis was so bad partly because the banks had become so powerful after the Clinton deregulations that when they went down, the effect on the overall market was far bigger than it had been in previous downturns. But now the economy is stuck in a dangerous cycle of accelerated peaks, which are always followed by a massive collapse.

And we've recently passed the latest peak.

Since late July, the stock market has been experiencing its least active period in twenty years. This is the most dramatic result of the many factors behind it; housing and stock prices have reached about the same level as they did in early 2007. And according to monetary historian Mike Maloney, this means that a possibly unprecedented event is fast approaching. "This is the peak," he said on August 29. "We have passed the peak of the bubble. It's now deflating. There is usually a little tiny roll over and then a huge crash. And the little tiny roll over is just starting right now. We are seeing it first in the top end (like luxury real estate), where the currency that was created by the central banks went to that 0.1% first. Within the next few years you are going to see probably the greatest crash in history. I have often said that the crisis of 2008 was just a speed bump on the way to the main event. We are in the process right now of seeing this unwind."

And that's not the only part of our economy that's being run unsustainably. As a result of the drop in fossil fuel prices that's occurred in the past few years as a consequence of increased alternative energy use, much of the fossil fuel industry is soon expected to go bankrupt. This alone, says Prestige Economics president Jason Schenker, could very well cause a recession sometime in the next few months that surpasses the magnitude of the one in 2008.

And here we are, on the brink of catastrophe, arguing about the a presidential candidate who left the race more than a month ago. I'm sorry I didn't come to you with a piece that offered nothing but encouragement and hope for the future, but the dark prophecy I just exposed you to is necessary to precede such material.

When this crash hits-which, I believe, will start sometime very soon indeed-it will serve as a wake up call for most Americans. All of a sudden, people will be directly faced with the fact that there is something deeply wrong with the system. What will they do then? Will the types of former Bernie people I mentioned stop feeling beaten down by the system and step up to change it for themselves? Will the Hillary people and the middle-class part of the Republican electorate stop pretending that the system works and join the Bernie people in revolt? Will the Trump people stop blaming their economic problems on scapegoats like foreigners and Muslims and turn against the class of Trump himself, who are the real culprits?

Some of them will. But in the short term, at least, I suspect that not even an economic collapse cannot jolt many of these Americans out of their stubborn preconceptions about how to approach their country's problems. That does not mean, however, that those of us who will be awake during those times should give up. Me, Bernie Sanders, and the rest of them will be the only ones fighting the all-important battle against the new Wall Street bailouts that Obama and friends will be pursuing, and the neoliberal order that's behind all of it.

So I ask of the Sanders supporters who abandoned Bernie's cause to stew in their unnecessary feelings of hopelessness: snap out of it. We need you. And if you do the work that will be necessary in the coming months and years, you'll be rewarded with something perhaps even greater than a President Sanders or Stein: change on all levels.