Latest Scape Goat: Public Workers Unions

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I know I’m going against a headwind here, but the problems we face locally and as a nation are not the fault of labor unions. There is plenty of history of graft, mob connections and slackers who are not held to competitive standards and none of that is good for unions or the people they are supposed to serve.

The fact remains that when unions were strong, so was the country. And when unions have been weak, the workers and country suffered from recession to depression to recession to depression. The problems we have now — the ones that threaten our sovereignty and national security — have nothing to do with the strength of unions. And the members of unions, including public service unions have not seen their wages go up any more than private workers — neither one was able to keep up with inflation and they all depended upon credit to try to maintain their standard of living until the money and the credit was gone.

Our problems stem from the fact that Wall Street tricked cities, counties, states and even the Federal government with zany financial instruments which in hindsight even Alan Greenspan admitted he didn’t understand. The megabanks were running things because we trusted them more than they ever earned. We trusted because we had “leaders” who gave us the impression that at least they understood what they were doing. Everybody was hiding the fact that nobody knew anything.

The system was running amok because the regulators were told to lay off Wall Street and because even the regulators who wanted to do their job were presented with a growing monstrosity that was made to appear so complex it was incapable of being analyzed by human eyes. So they trusted the output of a computer whose synthetic programming was designed to give answers that the megabanks wanted people to see.

Anyone who sent out warnings was sent out to pasture. They were marginalized as chicken littles who were delusional about the sky falling. And even though they were right and even though they are saying the same thing now, they are still marginalized and we still don’t want to believe that this thing could get worse and that our system is still running amok in the banks, in the courtrooms and in the legislatures. We still want to believe that now our fearless leaders understand what is going on when the fact is they don’t. We still want to believe that the banks could not be as stupid as I have been saying along with others who preceded my dire warnings in 2007.

Yet here is the truth: banks don’t get smarter, they just grow bigger. And if they are running outside the boundaries of our trust and what the society and financial system needs, they will make the situation worse as they grow. That is exactly what happened. The power of the banks has been consolidated into even fewer banks than we had before the 2007 disaster, and the ones that are left have grown by huge margins — which means that the original horrendous situation that broke in 2007-2008 and became obvious at the beginning of 2009 has worsened proportionately to the growth of these monstrous banks.

This year, 2011, will be the year that cities, towns and even states default on their bond obligation. This year may be the year that U.S. debt might be downgraded by the very rating agencies that should have been replaced when the original problems surfaced. This year, will probably be the year when the U.S. dollar is no longer used as the world’s reserve currency. Absent the capital being hoarded by Wall Street, the business world will see continuing high unemployment, lower wages and more foreclosures, homelessness and “doubling up” by families merging two households into one.

All this is at risk, as well as our sovereignty, our country as we knew it, unless we accept the fact that the situation is getting worse and that current policies, guided by Wall Street data and influence, are hurting everyone and in the end there will be nobody excluded from the economic carnage. Of course if throw aside our belief systems for a moment, if we jettison ideology just for a little while,  and focus on the facts, if we fix things that can be fixed no matter how loud the howls from the Wall Street wolves, then maybe we can have a softer landing or even a positive result. I’ve been trying to come up with a combined word that gives us one party instead of two, since that appears where we really are heading — Republimats? Demublicans?

As long as we see the issues as the fight between one party and another, one ideology against another, then the fight is about power. And that is probably the way it will be. But if we could just have enough people in the country say we’ve had enough of this gamesmanship, brinkmanship, and power plays. If we could really make it clear we wanted results — a shot at prosperity for everyone, individual rights, applying the Constitution (instead of ignoring it) using all ten amendments and not just some of them in the Bill of Rights, then things would be different. Sadly, I’m afraid they hoodwinked too many of us. We support people who should be out of office or even in jail. We allow policies that are an affront to human morality and American ideals. We got in the habit of shooting ourselves in the foot and we have done it for so long — decades — that most of us think that is just the way things always were and just the way the world works.

When I look at history I don’t see anything that was all good or all bad. I see people who did some good and some things that were not so good or even bad. But until now we always had the momentum in the direction of human rights, better conditions for workers, an opportunity for prosperity if you stay within the lines of right and wrong. Until now we always had a moral compass. It’s not the unions who shoved us off the path. We may not like some things about unions but they aren’t to blame for the weather nor are they to blame for our current economic status. We know that isn’t true. We know our moral compass has been defective for years. Let’s polish it up and get it working again.

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