Budowsky: "Voters are not stupid" (with video)

Brent Budowsky (The Hill):

From sea to sea there is voter unrest that poses extreme risks for incumbents of both parties. There is almost universal revulsion against Washington and a belief that politicians don’t protect citizens from hostile forces that threaten them.

The conservative base threatens insider Republicans. Unrest spreads among the Democratic base about Democrats who are high-profile, low-courage, and possess no fight for real transforming change. Independents lose faith in them all. The contagion of anti-Washington sentiment reaches pandemic proportion.

The voters are right. The fix is in. The word is out. The discontent is everywhere. Official Washington becomes a besieged fortress of insiderism surrounded by voters demanding change and agitated as business as usual continues despite the speeches, sophistry and spin poured by politicians divorced from the powerful forces of worry and fairness that motivate the people of the nation.

The voters are not stupid. The voters are not happy. The politicians do not listen.

America has ended a rip-off recession and entered a rip-off recovery that is a Depression for many Americans and a life of deep worry and genuine trepidation for many others. Soon the jobless rate will reach 10 percent, a politically explosive moment. Americans know the real jobless rate is much higher.

Voters are gouged by gasoline prices that are rising again. They are gouged by banks that raise their interest rates and increase their fees with lending practices worthy of “The Godfather” under a law the president and Congress falsely claimed would protect them.

Voters are gouged by insurance premiums that rocket to the skies. They worry (correctly) that premiums will soar even higher after the current bill is enacted. Even a lobotomized public option that voters strongly support is squeezed between a president who does not really support it, insurance lobbyists who try to kill it and a Congress drenched in special interest money.

Voters are not stupid. They know they paid a king’s ransom to bail out banks that treat them like they are serfs in feudal England, pay themselves titanic rewards for it and grease palms in Washington with legal bribery called campaign donations.

The fix is in. The word is out. The voters are not happy. They know that nothing has changed. They know that pain has risen in their lives while the president claims credit for doing little. The Republicans claim credit for doing nothing. Big donors are promised secret access to high-level officials in a town that has no shame and will not change.

Real wages continue their 20-year decline. Wall Street compensation reaches all-time highs. Foreclosures continue to mount. The president and Congress do nothing to stop it. Many homeowners fear they will be next. All suffer as the value of their homes decline.

Nothing has changed in Washington. Money talks and the public interest walks. Nothing has changed on Wall Street. Speculators reign while taxpayers pay. Nothing has changed on Main Street. Eloquent speeches do not stop the pain, worry or truth that the John and Jane Does of America are still being scammed.

The fix is in. The word is out. The jig is up. The voters are not stupid. The people are not happy. Washington would be well-advised to listen.

Howie P.S.: Want to get pissed-off and "fired-up"? Watch this video (03:08). Alan Grayson asks questions about the expenditures by the Federal Reserve with money authorized in the bailout of the financial services industry.

"Stop Whining About Populist Anger!"

Matt Taibbi:

We simply do not have a real functioning mechanism in American politics for converting public anger into tough government policy.

The closest thing we have in that regard is the relationship between elected officials and the media: when TV news decides to flip out about something like the AIG bonuses for more than a day or two, we might sometimes see public officials do something about... something like the AIG bonuses. But that's about it. In point of fact the only significant "reforms" to date, even in the face of this most extreme financial crisis, have been moves instituted to restrict short-selling and a relaxation of mark-to-market accounting rules, both measures on the deregulatory wish list of the big firms.

More significantly, there has been almost nothing in the way of punishment of the major figures responsible for this crisis. If there were a real correlation between public anger and government policy, we'd have seen at least something in that area. Maybe there wouldn't have been public floggings, but there would have been some serious frog-marching of unscrupulous assholes to prison.

And this isn't about vengeance, it's about policy: if the "consequence" for blowing a $4 trillion hole in the economy is seeing masses of government officials line up to hurl billions of taxpayer dollars at you, that doesn't provide much of an incentive to fix your behavior. This is one area where there should have been a seamless melding of public outrage and government policy: we should have swooped in, rounded up 200 of the most guilty executives, hauled them before congress in a public trial, and packed them all off to a Supermax in Florence, Colorado to do real time with murderers, rapists and terrorists. Reality shows should have been quickly greenlighted to track their progress in the hole (can you imagine the ratings for a show called Project D-Block starring John Thain, Angelo Mozilo and Dick Fuld?).

All joking aside, this would have been an incredibly healthy step for our society to take -- just as it would have been healthy (and still might be) for someone to go to jail for torture during the Bush years, or for contracting fraud in Iraq, or for any of the other countless crimes committed this past decade that will almost certainly go unpunished.

The social contract has to be considered broken when some dumb schmuck can go to jail for five real years for selling a bag of weed while a guy who went to Harvard and Wharton and had all possible advantages gets nothing but a bailout and a temporarily lowered bonus regime for destroying billions of dollars of public wealth.

Hewie P.S.: The complete post is here.