Bailout For Deadbeats

The U.S. Government has committed in the neighborhood of 12 trillion dollars in order to bailout the banks.  It amazing that there has been more demands coming from the “Left” demanding a bailout for deadbeats.

With unemployment up and nearly 12% of the American people are behind on their mortgages and clearly falling behind on their credit cards debts. This is not to even mention the growing student loan problems as well which will have a chilling effect for the future.

The real basis of the crisis is due to the past 30 years of stagnant wages and the growing gap between the rich and the working class.  Why is this important?  Because inequality lowers the standard of living of working people because the increasing concentration of wealth forces up prices and create bubbles that leads to crisis.  Working people maintained their demand through borrowing as the cost of housing, transportation, health care, child rearing and education skyrocketed.

Which means that the current crisis is not really a “banking” crisis but a crisis due to inequality.  Since the government found $12 trillion to commit to the banks the government could have offered relief to all deadbeats by simply canceling their debts.  Clearly the banks and the ruling class would abhor such a solution but where is the Left in offering such a demand?  The Left was in the front lines with their protest of debt cancellation for third world counties IMF loans you’d think they would adopt a closer to home demand for working class relief.

It is clear there is enough resources to resolve inequality but unfortunately the working class is just too unorganized and too weak to demand for their own bailout.

Stop Blaming The Victims

Now that Obama has been elected and has moved away from his canard of “hope”  there has been a rash of “I told you so” articles by so-called “leftist” gloating at the “rubes” who voted for Obama.

This kind of elitism and lack of analysis is one of the reason why the “Left” is so alienated from working class people especially people of color.  The assumption being made by these writers is that the Left offered a cohesive alternative.  The Left, unfortunately, is too fictionalize, lacks solidarity, and started out in 2008, in an even weaker position than they were in 2004.  Understanding that the Left was in a weaker position then fielding two candidates, Nader and McKinney, run extremely counter to building a united front.

A Nader/McKinney ticket would not be assured of winning the election but it would have built a more cohesive effort to challenge Obama and the Democrats.  It would have provided a better alternative and helped to bring together the outreach of the McKinney clique who better highlighted issues that concern people of color with the Nader clique and could have consolidated the Green Party.  But alas that didn’t happen.   So what does the Left do?  Blame voters for selecting the Democrats rather than analyze their own missteps and deficiencies.

People of color especially are always the scapegoat of the Republican Party rhetoric.  If there is no real alternative to the Democrats, people of color will vote for the “lesser evil” as a matter of practicality.  Blaming them and offering “I told you so’s” is arrogant and counterproductive to the goal of attracting working people away from the Democrats.

The demographic of the votes told the story.  Obama won 95% of the black vote, 80% of the Latino vote and white voters under 30 years old.  If it was up to white voters only, John McCain would have won the election.  This doesn’t mean the policy would be any better but what the election means is that there is a demographic that the Left can attract into its ranks if it can achieve solidarity and cohesion within its own ranks.