Jesse Jackson
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Sen. Bunning’s Screwball
March 4th, 2010
Jesse Jackson
Even while his Republican colleagues admitted that eventually — perhaps soon — they will renew the program, one senator ended unemployment insurance extensions for millions of unemployed. In March alone, 1.2 million people will lose their unemployment benefits if the program is not renewed.
Bunning was aggravated that the Democrats forced repeated votes to try to get the measure passed. He complained that he was missing the Kentucky-South Carolina basketball game.
This is an utter disgrace. Bunning may have missed a basketball game, but state unemployment offices had to send out millions of letters informing people that their unemployment support was terminated, that they wouldn’t have continued aid to help make COBRA payments to extend their families’ health insurance. Doctors were informed that they would suffer 21 percent cuts in Medicare reimbursement. Some 2,000 federal transport workers were furloughed without pay. Federal reimbursement to states for highway programs — about $190 million a day — was suspended, as well as some small business loans.
There are 10.7 million people unemployed in Bunning’s Kentucky. Does the senator have any idea what it is like to struggle with unemployment in this economy? There are six applicants for every job. Every member of the family looks for ways to sustain the home. Every dime is counted; every bill an agony. Harsh decisions are forced. Parents skip meals to ensure their children can eat. Credit cards are maxed out and rolled over, so mortgages can be sustained. The tension goes up as more creditors are owed, more bills missed.
Under the pressure, marriages are strained. Depression, anger, a sense of failure too often lead to drink or worse. A constant search for jobs leads to repeated rejections.
29 million people are unemployed or underemployed in America today. And in the midst of this, one arrogant senator — irritated at being forced to miss his basketball on TV — ensures that millions get suspension notices. And worse, that state agencies bear the increased costs of shutting the programs down and starting them up again.
Bunning’s complaint was that the unemployment extension was not paid for, but was an emergency appropriation. Not only have unemployment extensions traditionally been special supplemental appropriations, but the senator’s economics makes no more sense than his arrogance.
Unemployment insurance and food stamps are the best jobs programs in any recovery plan; they have the biggest return on the dollar. The reason is simple: The unemployed spend every cent on their expenses, and use the food stamps to buy needed food. Every dime spent helps to boost demand and create jobs. Borrowing the money to spend on unemployment insurance is not only humane, it helps the economy recover. That’s why unemployment insurance is built in as an automatic “stabilizer,” and why extensions of unemployment insurance, when the recession is deep and long, have generally had broad bipartisan support.
If Bunning is oblivious to the agonies now visited upon millions of workers and their families through no fault of their own, he is not alone. Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl wants to hold up the jobs bill to force the Senate to a tax cut for the wealthiest multimillion dollar estates that get handed down to heirs. The minority whip is prepared to threaten help for unemployed workers and their families to hike Paris Hilton’s inheritance.
Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid harshly criticized Bunning, but Democrats shouldn’t be given a free pass. They hold the majority. They can change the dysfunctional Senate rules. Reid could have kept the Senate in session through the weekend and longer, forced Republicans to sustain a filibuster and let Americans know who was standing in the way.
Last month, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby put a hold on all of Obama’s nominations to extort funding for pet projects. This month, Bunning adds more uncertainty to the most vulnerable American families to make an ideological point. These senators don’t get it. Our country is in trouble. Homes are being lost. Millions are without jobs. This isn’t about missing a basketball game. People are in pain. It is time for the games to end; there is work to be done.
The Housing Crisis is Getting Worse
February 25th, 2010
Jesse Jackson
Across America, middle-class homeowners — and, disproportionately, African-Americans and Latinos who were targeted by predatory lenders — are facing the loss of their homes. If big banks on Wall Street are too big to fail, why isn’t America’s middle class also too big to fail and deserving of relief?
The figures are stark. More than 9 percent of all mortgages are now delinquent, up from 7.8 percent a year ago, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association surveys. The percentage of home loans that are overdue by 90 days or are in foreclosure is at record highs. A new study from the Center for Community Change and the National Council of La Raza reports that 1.3 million Latino families are likely to lose their homes from 2009-2012, suffering an average financial loss of about $89,000. All told, middle-income Latinos will suffer a staggering $98 billion in lost wealth, a shattering loss to those families who were working the hardest and making their way up the ladder of opportunity.
And African-Americans were particular targets of subprime-loan peddlers. In Massachusetts, a study by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank showed that in 2007, almost half of African-Americans who moved out of their homes did so because of foreclosure rather than a sale.
The Treasury Department program — Making Home Affordable — has proved to be inadequate. About 200,000 mortgages have managed to get permanent adjustments to a lower monthly rate (with no adjustments to lower principle owed). But the plan itself estimated that 3 million to 4 million homeowners would be aided by 2012 when the program expires. This isn’t working.
Part of the problem is that the banks have been reluctant to cooperate. They prefer to hold the loans as if they had their original value as long as possible, so they don’t have to write off losses on their books. The loans that are securitized often make any adjustments almost impossible. And now, more and more homeowners are behind in their payments because they’ve suffered loss of a job or loss of income. Under the current plan, they will have a hard time establishing eligibility for a modification.
This is a costly failure. When a home is foreclosed, the values of homes across the neighborhood plummet. Empty homes often attract vandals and crime. Families who lose their homes suffer massive distress, marriages are tested, children do worse in school and confidence is shattered. And in areas of concentrated loss, the economy is simply devastated. In Florida, 26 percent of all mortgages now are at least one payment or more late.
We need the administration to stop bribing the banks to cooperate and start operating directly to assist homeowners in distress. The one piece of muscle in the Obama program — letting bankruptcy judges adjust mortgages to help keep people in their homes — was defeated in Congress, victim to a massive bank lobby push. Now the administration ought to raise the stakes. The government could do direct refinancing of loans at federal borrowing rates, rather than allowing banks to force people out of their homes. In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation did this, and in the end, helped refinance about 1 in 5 mortgages.
Alternatively, the government could use its power of eminent domain to acquire mortgages or securitized debts. It could then write down the principal to the current value of the house, and pass the savings along in the form of a more affordable mortgage, or accept the homeowner has lost the equity in the home, but enable them to rent it at market rates. For the unemployed, the government could simply provide a loan for payments made while seeking employment, to be repaid over a longer period of time.
The more people who are allowed to stay in their homes, the more quickly the economy will recover, and the less harm will be done to humans in distress. These programs require more federal muscle and will than money, but the cost could easily be recouped by taxing the big banks for the assistance provided to rescue them, or by a tax on excess bonuses or income.
One thing is clear. The banks aren’t going to do this on their own, even though bankruptcy is more expensive than remortgaging. And the current federal program is not enough. We need real action before the housing crisis helps trigger a second recession, and further human misery.
Michelle Obama: Let’s Move on Childhood Obesity
February 19th, 2010Jesse Jackson
Michelle Obama has now challenged Americans to deal with the growing problem of obesity in children. Childhood obesity has Read the rest of this entry “
A Failure to Register
February 4th, 2010Jesse Jackson
Obama’s plan — in a clear concession to Republicans — focuses on tax cuts and loans for small business. He endorses the “jobs tax credit,” that would give small businesses a tax credit for new hires. He calls for eliminating capital gains taxes for some small businesses, and putting a little money into infrastructure and new energy.
Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell scorns the president’s program. He rails about the deficits, but he doesn’t object to adding to them. He wants to extend tax cuts for the wealthy (those making over $250,000 per year), opposes taxing the banks to repay the TARP funds and wants the president to focus solely on other tax cuts. (And, of course, he wants to abandon health care reform, which is paid for and would reduce the deficit over time by slowing the rise of health care costs). “Our problems,” he says, “are not a result of taxing too little, but of spending too much.”
But in the major cities of America, unemployment isn’t at 10 percent; it is at 20 percent and higher. Across the country, one in five men of working age is now unemployed or forced to take part time work. But in our cities, that number surges to one in three. Among the young, it is closer to one in two.
McConnell’s tax breaks for the wealthy won’t help them — and won’t help lift the economy either. They will help fill the coffers of the Republican Party for the election this fall — but they have nothing to do with a real recovery.
The president’s tax breaks for small business are more sensibly targeted, but are likely to be equally ineffective. The credit for new hires will go overwhelmingly to reward businesses for hiring that they would do anyway. Perhaps they will spend the money in other ways, but handing out cash to small business owners is an odd tax cut, generally going to folks who are less likely to spend it than those who work for them.
There really is no question about what is needed. We need direct public service jobs that will reach out to the most impacted areas, put people to work, provide them with training and insure that they do not sink into misery and despair. We need far larger infrastructure spending to rebuild our crumbling sewers, roads and bridges, and put construction workers back to work. We need aid to states and localities so that crippling cuts aren’t made to teachers, police, universities and construction projects. And then we need to sustain assistance to those displaced through no fault of their own — in unemployment insurance, COBRA health care payments, expanded food and nutrition assistance. We also need a real program of mortgage write-downs so that people can stay in their homes. And the scale has to be three or four times the size of the president’s plan.
We need to borrow the money to do this now. Without this, we will witness the decimation of the emerging African-American and Latino middle class — as well as the continued decline of America’s workers. Homes will be lost, families broken, young people forced to drop out of college. Homeless children will struggle to find family on the streets. The crisis is real, stark, and brutal.
Can we afford this? Yes, even now we are borrowing money at remarkably low interest rates. And we can’t afford not to do it — for the costs of failing a generation will be far greater than the cost of investing now.
And in the long term, the reality that cannot be admitted in Washington is that Mitch McConnell is profoundly and cynically simply wrong. We’ve had three decades of conservative domination of our politics — cutting top end taxes and starving both basic investments, with special venom for programs that would provide opportunity for the poor.
The problem is not economics but politics. Americans are worried about deficits. Conservatives and Republicans– the very folks who drove us off this cliff — are stoking fears, obstructing any reforms and benefiting from the resulting disgust with Washington. So, Obama is trimming his sails and Democrats are fleeing for the hills.
In this historic testing, the poorest neighborhoods and the most devastated regions will be left in a downward spiral that isn’t likely to turn up soon. Justice and jobs are left out of today’s Washington debates.
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Jobs and Justice
January 28th, 2010Jesse Jackson
The state of America’s union is stark. The economic collapse triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble continues to take its toll.
We know the statistics. Nearly one in five American workers is unemployed or underemployed. That means wages are losing ground. One in three homes with a mortgage is under water. Millions of Americans are headed to losing their homes.
That will leave families adrift, children displaced.
The desperate effort to keep the financial system from failing has succeeded. It has saved the big banks — leaving them more concentrated than ever — but not succeeded in removing the clot in financing. Small businesses can’t get loans; homeowners can’t get mortgages adjusted. Finance is like the blood of the economy. When there is a clot, the economy can’t work and people suffer.
Republicans argue that the president’s recovery plan has failed. Then they prescribe the same poison that created the breakdown in the first place. They want more top end tax cuts, more breaks for business, more deregulation. We tried tax cuts under Bush; it leads nowhere.
The reality is that the recovery plan created or saved millions of jobs. Aid to states and localities kept teachers and police from being laid off in large numbers. Spending on infrastructure helped put some to work. Investment in new energy created new jobs. Aid to the unemployed — extending unemployment benefits, subsidizing health care COBRA payments, and providing food stamps — put money into the pockets of those who need it most.
The problem with the president’s plan — as any honest economist will tell you — is that it wasn’t big enough. The collapse was far deeper than the president’s economists predicted.
We need another big jobs program. Aid should go to states and localities that now face brutal cuts that will lay off teachers, police and professors. Public jobs programs — a green corps, an urban corps — should target hard-hit areas like the Midwest and urban centers. We should invest in infrastructure by repairing schools, weatherizing public buildings and creating the projects that will hire construction workers.
Without these commitments, there will be no recovery. Businesses won’t expand into an economy in which one in five people are unemployed. Exports won’t increase — particularly with the Chinese continuing to manipulate their currency. Consumers have taken a $10 trillion hit on assets, and are tightening their belts. States and localities are facing brutal cuts.
People are confused and angry. They see high deficits and think the money is going to Wall Street. There is a crisis of confidence as well as a grinding fear of what comes next.
Here we need the president to lead and take on the naysayers and the false leaders. He must lay out what needs to be done, and rally the country to act.
The pollsters say independents are angry about deficits, so Washington is talking about deficit reduction. “If we expect families to balance their budgets in hard times, shouldn’t the government do so also?” goes the mantra.
That is the big lie because, in reality, when everyone else is cutting back, government must step in and put people to work. This will require deficits because tax revenues are down and expenditures on unemployment and food stamps are up.
The simple fact is, you can’t balance the budget without generating economic growth. Any attempt to do so now will deepen the downturn. Once people go back to work, and the economy gets going, tax revenues will go up, emergency spending will decline and steps can be taken to bring the deficit down. But it is utter foolishness to do so before people are at work.
That’s why the State of the Union is so important. It is vital that the president use this moment to set the direction, to rally the country, to take on the naysayers and to call this country to move forward.
We faced a huge emergency in World War II. We borrowed massive amounts, ending with a national debt some 120 times greater than our annual economic production. Then as the war ended, we passed the GI Bill and sent a generation of soldiers to college and advanced training. Eisenhower, a Republican, invested in the Interstate highway system. We generated jobs, growth, and over time the debt was paid down.
This is a national emergency also. We need to borrow what we need to put people to work and make vital investments in our future. And then, jobs and growth will help bring the debt down over time.
Creating jobs is the right thing to do in human terms. It is also the utterly essential thing to do in economic terms. We must build the new economy around a job for everyone willing to work, not condemn families to desperation while pretending the economy is healthy.
It is time to act boldly to put Americans back to work.
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Haiti’s Agony
January 22nd, 2010Jesse Jackson
What can we learn from this tragedy? First, the obvious. In 1994, an earthquake of nearly similar force hit Southern California. The Northridge quake caused more than $25 billion in damage; and killed 72. In Haiti, the same force has all but destroyed the capital city; there are no exact figures on casualties, but death toll estimates now range from 150,000 to 200,000.
Poverty, we now know, is bigger than the earthquake. Poverty saps the government’s ability to respond. Worse, poverty leaves the citizenry exposed. Even the Wall Street Journal editorializes about how strong regulation in building codes marked the difference between the damage done by the two earthquakes.
Second, relief is vital — but not enough. The outpouring of human sympathy to the victims of the natural disaster must not turn sour when faced with the victims of manmade disaster. The appeals of former Presidents Bush and Clinton must turn from emergency relief to long-term reconstruction.
The United States, of course, is in deep need of reconstruction at home. With two wars going on, budgets in deficits and nearly 25 million unemployed, it is time to rebuild America.
But Haiti has a higher place in our priorities. It is our neighbor. The U.S. cannot thrive as an affluent city on the hill surrounded by impoverished neighbors. Because it is our neighbor, even little Haiti can have a major effect on us. If Haitians cannot find a future in their island, they will come in large numbers to these shores. We’ve seen them risk their lives making that treacherous journey. And we’ve seen the U.S. response — embracing the Cubans who make their way here, while sending the Haitians back. The answer is not to trample the lives of the desperate. The answer is to remove the conditions of their desperation.
Because it is our neighbor, Haiti has a call upon us. Across the world, American good will is measured, in part, by how we treat the poorest of nations — particularly in our own neighborhood. Is America peddling an economic model that works only for America and for dictatorial China? Or does it have a model that works for both the poor and the affluent? In this, Haiti will be an international measure.
Haiti also has an historical call upon us. It is only in the tragedy that Americans are reminded of the Haitian contribution to America. The revolt against the French in 1791 consolidated an independent Haiti. Without a safe port in Haiti, Napoleon decided to abandon New Orleans. He thus was willing to sell what became the Louisiana Purchase, after the revolution and the Constitution the most important contribution to America’s future. Had the Haitians not been successful, the U.S. might have never become a continental power. We owe Haiti deep gratitude.
Long-term reconstruction isn’t easy. We must empower Haitians, not overwhelm them. Haitian agriculture suffers now because the U.S. dumps excess food on the island and calls it aid. That’s why we need an effort guided by those in Haiti — and in the U.S. such as Rep. Kendrick Meek, D-Fla., and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. — who have experience and wisdom about the island.
And we need to think once more creatively. For example, when he was in office, former President Aristide was working to transform Guantanamo from a U.S. naval backwater to a regional medical center that could tap both U.S. and Cuban medicine to provide research, emergency services and modern medical facilities for the region. After Sept. 11, of course, Guantanamo was turned into a prison rather than a hospital, and served as a recruiting tool for al-Qaida across the world.
President Obama has vowed to shut down the prison at Guantanamo. What better time to announce an initiative to turn the facility into a medical center and hospital for the region? That would not only earn the U.S. good will across the world; it would provide the peoples of the region with a vital center.
The world already takes note of America’s generous response to the Haitian tragedy. Now let us demonstrate our commitment to the long-term emergence of Haiti, not simply its short-term survival. That will earn us respect not only in Haiti, but throughout the region and the world. If we can build hope out of this despair, we will show that we truly are good neighbors.
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Rising Yachts Lift No Tides
January 15th, 2010Jesse Jackson
Under Presidents Bush and Obama, the Federal Reserve’s Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner repeated one constant argument. They had to resuscitate the banks, they said, because finance is the lifeblood of the economy. If the banks went down, financing would freeze up, and the economy would die. They rescued the banks not to save the banks, but to save the real economy. So they pumped billions into the banks, created trillions in subsidies and swaps, and kept interest rates near zero to bolster the banks’ balance sheets, and stave off financial collapse.
It worked in a fashion. The banks are back, making profits, and are gearing up to announce lavish bonuses — six, seven, eight-figure (that’s over $10 million) bonuses for their leading producers.
But refloating the banks didn’t create a tide. Unemployment is in double digits and rising. Foreclosures of homes are rising. Personal bankruptcies are at record levels. Incomes are stagnant or worse. State and local budget crises will be worse this year than last, with cuts and layoffs growing. American families aren’t recovering even if the economists say the economy is.
There is a fundamental disconnect. The economy can’t revive without a functioning financial system, but the banks can profit big time without Americans benefiting. Banks can borrow money at zero percent from the Federal Reserve and buy into rising stock markets abroad. They can invest in companies moving jobs to growth areas like China. They can profit by making bets on minute movements of stock and bond markets that have nothing to do with helping small businesses with the financing they need.
So the banks are making money, but the U.S. economy isn’t benefiting very much. Small businesses still can’t get loans. The banks are still resisting rewriting mortgages, so home foreclosures keep rising. Wall Street is thriving, but the rest of the country is not.
That’s why the debate on jobs and on financial reform that is about to heat up in the Congress is so important.
It isn’t enough to get the financial system operating; we have to put people to work. Businesses won’t hire until they see customers. States and localities won’t stop layoffs until they see tax revenue. None of that will happen unless people go to work. But the financial collapse cost Americans literally trillions of dollars. Consumers are tightening their belts. So to counter the Great Recession, we need the government to put people to work, issuing contracts to weatherize government buildings, renew our sewers, repair our schools, or extend our parks. There is a lot of work to be done that requires public funding; now is the time to do it.
And it isn’t enough to rescue the banks; they have to be reformed. We’ve got to separate the speculators from the banks that take deposits and get federal guarantees. We’ve got to demand that banks offer plain vanilla products — simple, fixed rate mortgages, credit cards without surprises — so consumers don’t get gouged. We have to create more incentives for lending money to small businesses, and put some speed bumps on excessive speculation.
And there must be an effort to enforce the civil rights laws. One of the reasons for the financial collapse is that basic protections against discrimination went unenforced. So, the banks could target minority neighborhoods that they used to ignore, and give brokers incentives to peddle complicated mortgages with rising interest rates and balloon payments, even when they knew the borrower had no chance to repay the loan.
In the House of Representatives, the first steps toward financial reform passed without a Republican vote. But these aren’t partisan matters. Conservatives and liberals, red state and blue state, we all have a stake in creating a financial system that functions to fuel the real economy, not speculative excesses. As former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan admitted, the notion that markets regulate and police themselves proved, at staggering cost, to be simply wrong. We have to create new rules of the road.
At this point, that hasn’t happened. The big banks are emerging from the crisis more concentrated than ever. They’ve been told they are “too big to fail,” but have no limits on the bets they can make. That means they pocket the profits if they win, and taxpayers clean up the mess if they lose. This is like handing out liquor bottles to drivers while offering insurance for any damages to the car. The ride might be thrilling, but the crackup is sure to come.
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The Jobs Calamity
January 8th, 2010Jesse Jackson
Don’t believe the hype. The economy may be recovering — but the people have not. And, in the end, the economic upturn won’t be sustained if the unfolding jobs calamity continues to spread.
In contrast with Detroit, metropolitan Chicago is not viewed as a major casualty of the Great Recession. But take another look.
Chicago’s South Side has the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey that was highlighted in The Chicago Reporter.
In 2008, South Chicago suffered a collective unemployment rate of 23.2 percent. Only northeast Detroit fared worse. In all, Chicago had two communities that ranked in the nation’s 10 worst communities for unemployment; Detroit had four of the worst 10. Other neighborhoods in that ranking came from Cleveland, St Louis, Toledo and Atlanta. It is virtually certain that all of them are worse off now. Read the rest of this entry “
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One America In Need
December 30th, 2009Jesse Jackson
With these words at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama electrified a divided country, launching a victorious Senate campaign, and four years later, a triumphant presidential campaign.
He took office amid the worst conditions facing any incoming president since Franklin D. Roosevelt — a great recession, two wars, financial free fall. His first year staved off depression, rescued the banks and labored to pass some health care reform.
But the test of whether this is truly a United States of America still awaits. If we are one America, then we must act together to help those who hit the hardest by the economic calamities. The economists say the recovery has started, but in urban and rural America, things are getting worse. The industrial Midwest is still reeling, and many of the jobs aren’t coming back. California, Florida and Nevada are still staggered by the collapse in housing values — and now brutal cuts are coming from state and local budgets. California is in the process of destroying what once was the best university system in the world, even while hiking tuition by nearly one-third.
With the banks saved and massive job loss staunched, many economists — including some in the White House — now assume the recovery will take its course, and employment is a “lagging indicator.” So it’s time to focus on deficit reduction and closing down the emergency Federal Reserve programs that gave banks a lifeline. And after the big fight on health care, Congress is looking to lower its sights, pass some kind of financial reform, a token “jobs” program,and get out of town to campaign for re-election.
But take one look at Detroit — or at Cleveland or South Chicago. Detroit is devastated. No European industrial country would allow something like that to happen to one of its major cities. Some of Detroit’s — and the Midwest’s — problems are self-generated. But many come from the decade-long decline of manufacturing that culminated in the collapse of the auto industry.
Unemployment among the young is at its highest levels since the government began keeping track after World War II. For low-income black teenagers, according to The New York Times, only 4 in 100 found jobs this fall.
If we are truly one America, we cannot abandon these kids to idleness, crime, drugs and poverty. We cannot abandon industrial cities in despair. We cannot allow millions of Americans to lose their homes while saving the predatory lenders that put many of them in the fix they are in.
This administration and the Congress must step up to this challenge. We need a bold new initiative to Rebuild America. Across the country, our basic infrastructure is in dire need of repair and renewal. Leaking sewer systems expose millions to befouled water dangerous to their health. Outmoded or absent mass transit clogs streets, wastes hours in gridlock and exacts a cruel tax on our lives as well as our economy. An outmoded energy system leaves us ever more dependent on foreign oil, while we fail to lead the new green industrial revolution that will generate the growth markets of the future.
President Obama called us to build our economy on a new foundation — investing in infrastructure, in new energy, in education and training. We now need a policy to fit the vision. Establish a national infrastructure bank, providing guarantees for pension funds, to invest in building the new green infrastructure of the 21st century and put people to work. Invest in children, ensuring that they have the best education available in the world, from pre-K to affordable college, no matter where they are born.
And then target those investments on the areas most in need — on our cities in despair, our depressed rural areas. Provide direct public service jobs so young people can get the discipline and skills and hope that comes from work.
If this is one America, it is not enough to rescue Wall Street and abandon Detroit. It is not acceptable to write off our cities or our rural areas as lost. The Pentagon and the State Department are elaborating plans to develop Afghanistan, providing security, aid, infrastructure investment and more. The Congress does not even blink at the cost. Surely, if we can plan to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, we can plan to rebuild Detroit and South Chicago.
A United States of America — now is the time to prove it.
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The Real Story
December 22nd, 2009Jesse Jackson
It isn’t about cards or fancy presents. The real story is about two parents, ethnic minorities in the Roman Empire, fleeing for their lives, later to become immigrants in Egypt, traveling to make the census count or be punished. They had no place to stay. The innkeeper took one look at them and said there was no room at the inn, although he might have offered his bed had he known the baby’s kinship to God. Be careful how you treat at-risk babies. Instead the baby was born in a manger, on a straw floor in a working barn. It was cold and harsh. The stars in the heavens provided the heat. The great holy blessing to save the world came from the manger up, not the mansion down.
These weren’t normal times. Among the poor and the oppressed, there grew a mighty expectation. Prophets said a Messiah would come — a prince of princes, a king of kings — to free the oppressed. They expected a mighty warrior able to destroy the Roman oppressors, free his people and liberate the poor. The expectation gave hope to the people.
Wise men from the East saw a mighty star in the sky and knew that the Messiah had come. They traveled far seeking to worship the new king. They met with Herod in Jerusalem on the way, telling him of their mission. Herod, the Bible says, “was disturbed and all Jerusalem with him.” He asked the Magi to report back to him when they found the child so that he could worship Him. The Magi found the child and worshipped Him. But warned in a dream, they avoided Herod and went back another way. Herod was furious and ordered the execution of all the children 2 and under in Bethlehem. But an angel warned the couple; they fled to Egypt and avoided Herod’s wrath.
Why was the mighty Herod so fearful? What was the mission of this Messiah? The prophet Isaiah had predicted that a child would be born and the “government will be on his shoulders,” and he would “preach good news to the poor, bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives.” And as the gospel of Luke tells us, as a young man Jesus read from Isaiah and embraced his charge: The Lord “has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed.” No wonder Herod was “disturbed.” Whenever the oppressed rise up with righteous indignation, whether in Soweto, South Africa, Montgomery, Ala., or Gdansk, Poland, they obligate the nature of God to be in their midst. Nothing is too hard for God — and no good thing will be withheld from those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose.
Let us not forget the real story amid all the commercial trappings. It is too easy to lose the spiritual in the secular, and the political in the pageantry. The birth of the Messiah foretold a revolution, a transformation, one that rightly threatened the Roman governors, the moneychangers, the elites of the time.
Here was a mighty champion who would preach “good news to the poor,” who would free the prisoner, care for the stranger, and heal the sick. At the time, everyone expected a mighty soldier, a general of generals. But the Messenger was very different. He was a mighty prince of peace. He never lifted a sword or carried a shield, yet His gospel overturned an empire and transformed the world. He taught us the power of love and hope and charity.
This country needs to pay attention to this story. We now wage two wars on the other side of the world, but grow less secure. We spend record amounts on weapons, while more go hungry in this nation. Billions are devoted to bailing out banks, but millions remain unemployed. Powerful lobbies frustrate efforts to provide decent health care for all. A record 2 million are in jail, most of them for nonviolent offenses. We have grown fearful and angry at the immigrants in our midst. Bankers are paying themselves million-dollar bonuses while one in four children is raised in poverty. This story speaks directly to us.
Having failed to slay the baby, Herod and the elites of Jerusalem tried to silence the Messenger by executing Him. It was a plan of genocide for all the babies — but even capital punishment could not silence His message of hope and liberation.
Sadly, our great nation in the lineage of Rome has bailed out Herod and the power elite while the manger is now overcrowded with at-risk babies. We are too great and too blessed to repeat this tragic mistake. We must be on the right side of history.
So this Christmas Day, take a moment to think about the real story. The story of a liberator, an apostle of love, a prince of peace. Let us commit to His mission: to raise the poor, to feed the hungry, to free the prisoner, to shelter the stranger on Jericho Road, to bring peace to Bethlehem. Let us remember that the real gift wasn’t the gold, frankincense and myrrh that the Wise Men brought. The real gift was the child whom God sent wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger.
Merry Christ-mass, everybody, as we celebrate the arrival of the Holy and Sacred One, the real reason for the season.
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On Banks: Enforce the Law
December 17th, 2009Jesse Jackson
“I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street,” Obama said on CBS’ “60 Minutes” the previous night. He has every reason to be irate. The banks, saved from bankruptcy by taxpayers, are gearing up to pay themselves record bonuses, but they aren’t making loans to small businesses. And, of course, they’ve unleashed legions of lobbyists to frustrate the president’s effort to reform the finance community in Congress. “What’s really frustrating me right now,” the president said, “is that you’ve got these same banks who benefited from taxpayer assistance who are fighting tooth and nail with their lobbyists up on Capitol Hill, fighting against financial regulatory control.” And when bankers mobilize, they are effective, as Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said, “they control the place.”
Durbin was talking about Congress, frustrated after the banks blocked efforts to give bankruptcy judges the right to adjust mortgages so that families in distress might stay in their homes. That “cram down” provision met defeat once more last week in the House Financial Services Committee. Wall Street may have caused the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and triggered a global recession. But when Wall Street talks, legislators listen.
The president called the leaders of the banks to meet to discuss ways to open up the spigot on loans to small business. At this point, the major banks are happy to borrow money at near-zero interest from the Federal Reserve and deposit it in safe federal bonds, while earning money on trading, often based on inside positions. Loans to businesses, particularly small ones, are lagging as the banks use federal subsidies to strengthen their balance sheets without taking risks.
But U.S. taxpayers didn’t bail out the banks so they could pay themselves large bonuses again. The bailout was said to be necessary to stave off a global depression and to return banks to lending one more to help put people to work. Thus far, it hasn’t worked that way.
One might have thought that limits on lobbying or requirements for lending could have been part of the bailout. The administration shouldn’t have been relying on the good will of the banks that were saved.
But, if he wanted to send a message, it would have been sensible for the president to have the attorney general sitting at his right hand when he met with the banks. Even the AG’s presence would have suggested a new intention to enforce the law.
In fact, the banks trampled civil rights laws on the way into the crisis, and are ignoring them on the way out. Going in, they decided to target previously redlined areas, often minority urban districts, for subprime mortgages. The most aggressive mortgage brokers were unleashed on minority communities, where borrowers consistently paid higher interest with more fees than similarly situated white borrowers. Not surprisingly, African-Americans and Latinos were disproportionately the victims of the banks’ malpractice.
Now on the way out, the banks are going back to redlining minority neighborhoods. African-American and Latino homebuyers pay higher rates and find mortgages harder to get.
This destructive behavior is also illegal, violating basic civil rights laws about equal protection. Already Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has already brought a successful suit about the past practices in Illinois.
This is the basic lesson of the civil rights movement. It didn’t do any good to say to Southern governors that since you’ve received federal assistance, you should do the right thing and end segregation. They weren’t interested in doing the right thing; they were committed to defending segregation by “any means necessary.” It took demonstrations, and aggressive civil rights enforcement to get them to change.
The president can make an eloquent plea — but he has to carry a big stick — and that stick is the civil rights laws. These are particularly powerful as big banks own and operate the worst mortgage lenders, the worst payday lenders that gouge low-income residents.
The president is right to sit the bankers down and reason with them. But if history teaches us anything, it will take more than reason and moral appeal to get them to move. It is time to enforce the law.
It’s Christmastime, and it seems that the government has bailed out Herod, but left the baby in the manger. With 49 million Americans who are food insecure, many of them frail seniors and children, the worth of our work is measured by watering their roots, not just the leaves or the wealthiest among us.
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Let Our Voices Ring
December 10th, 2009Jesse Jackson
He might have begun by convening the summit in Toledo or Detroit, instead of inside the Beltway. The world looks much different from here. Detroit is devastated, an economy that has descended from the Big Three automakers that offered good jobs with good benefits, to one featuring casinos, the tawdry, neon glittered way to legally stiff the desperate. In Toledo, the shelters are full, often with nicely dressed families, working people stunned to find themselves there.
I met with high school students and urged them to study. One lad, a football star named Carlos, said, “I don’t study.” His teacher sadly confirmed that. I met with him separately. “We live in a shelter,” Carlos explained. Where is it, I asked, I’d like to talk with your parents. “We aren’t in any one place,” he said, “we move from week to week, from place to place.” No home, no security, no hope. We need action now.
We lost more than 8 million jobs, many of which aren’t coming back. According to the National Center on Homelessness and poverty, the number of homeless Americans is up by 61 percent since the Great Recession began in December 2007. The number of people in poverty increased by 2.5 million in 2008 and has continued to rise. Some 49 million Americans experience want the government calls “food insecurity,” otherwise known as hunger. More than 36 million now use food stamps, up by about 25 percent in the past year. And, given “welfare reform,” only about 5 million parents and children get any cash assistance. The working poor — particularly single mothers with children — are dropping into a hole with no floor to break their fall.
This reality is ruinous to the poor and to the country. People lose their jobs, and then default on their mortgages. As foreclosures keep rising, housing prices stagnate and decline. Neighborhoods are devastated. Local and state tax revenues plummet. Teachers and police are laid off. Businesses cut back. A vicious cycle continues.
Most of the deficit — as the president pointed out at the jobs summit — comes from the structural deficit inherited from Bush or the fall in revenue and rise in costs associated with the deep recession. The recovery plan added the least amount — and that is spread out over three years. Given the cuts in state and local spending, it was too small, not too large.
We need a bold program to create jobs, starting with direct public service employment, particularly of young men and women in our inner cities and rural areas. We need aid to states and localities to avoid deep cuts. We need to weatherize homes and rebuild parks and put people to work. We need both short-term and long-term commitments to rebuild America. Once the economy gets going and people go back to work, we can figure out how to reduce the deficit — much of which involves getting health care costs under control.
What we can’t do is allow poverty to spread, a generation to be lost. But at this point, the White House is said to be considering only small, “targeted,” programs that the Financial Times labels “thin stuff.”
That won’t do. Those hit the hardest by this crisis must organize. It is time for mass, disciplined collective action, for poor people’s campaigns to mobilize in cities across the country. Dr. King understood the importance of direct action. By acting collectively, the poor express their humanity. They create a forum to tell their stories. Collective action demonstrates not just their desperation, but their discipline. It will mobilize allies. The poor do have power — but unlike the wealthy, to exercise it, they must act collectively, not individually; in the streets, not in the suites.
Today, the malnourished children, the homeless, those families forced from homes to shelters are largely hidden from sight. It is time to act, to come together and march together. Human lives are being crushed by this crisis. They need bold action now. People of conscience must join their call. We must act together to make their voices heard.
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