This is the letter that members of the House of Representatives should be sending out to their colleagues. They should remind them that friends don't allow friends to drive drunk. That this is a bill giving the drunk drivers of this economy new wheels. Remind them that voters will not forget this betrayal but the American public will. We must finally have a government which fears its citizens and not the other way around - to paraphrase a movie line.
Our job is an ambitious one: To rescue the party from corporate control and restore it as the party of the American family. To make the Democratic Party a true opposition party that represents families and workers in their struggles to survive and organize.
Our job is to expose, pressure and, if necessary, remove corporate Republicans who masquerade as Democrats. You are not a Democrat if you adopt a pro-gay rights, pro-choice agenda only to abandon the economic interests of the middle class and poor when your corporate masters call.
America already has one war and greed party. It does not need another. It needs real choices.
And that will only happen when we hold our elected officials accountable. Votes count! Rhetoric does not! The "Yes" votes for this monstrous bill will be a key component of how progressives assess which people to back and which people we need to remove in the next election.
Incidentally, this is not a purge. The skillful hyperbole of the economic elites that “purges” and “class warfare” are taking place masks their actual violence perpetrated on the American family. The people we are seeking to remove from the Democratic Party already have a party they can join
Our movement is about giving people a real choice. Offering voters a party which can help bring peace and economic justice, not forever wars and a plundering plutocracy.
Here is my suggested letter.
House of Representatives
October 2, 2008
Dear Colleague:
The American people will not forgive us if we rush this vote. Nor should they. We must openly discuss the dire warnings against this bailout given by so many of the world's great economic minds. We must not allow the Bush Administration to again march us to folly with a manufactured fear campaign. Cosmetic changes and add-ons can’t change the deeply flawed basics of this plan.
Forgive the bluntness of this letter but time is short and we are about to do something that can only be called criminal negligence in confiscating some $10,000 from each American family to bailout the very people who drove our economy into the ditch. It will enable the inebriated money changers in the temple to continue their war on the middle class while helping the most affluent reap a greater and greater portion of the harvest of American employees. Imagine going over to their car in the ditch, smelling the liquor and then listening to them scream: “Give me new wheels or I hurt you and your family.”
And we are about to give them a new set of keys. Of course, we are telling people that we will now be driving with them. That is nonsense. They will still have the wheel. Why should Americans believe they will be more responsible drivers this time? What American believes that this Congress has a clue as to holding this Administration accountable in any way?
No problem can be solved if it is not first understood. Our failure to hold open hearings on this giveaway will live in infamy. Our acceptance of the panic and fear manufactured by the administration, their collaborators and those who will benefit from this $10,000 theft from each American family stuns me. It will compound their theft of perhaps $50,000 from those families for the Iraq War.
There is tremendous waste in the government budget but it is never looked at in this age of militarism. Based on the research of Chalmers Johnson, it is clear that the average American family of four will see some $15,554 spent in its name in 2008 alone for our military budget. All at a time when no country on earth dare attack us. When we side astride the world as the greatest military uber power that has ever existed. According to Colonel Andrew Bacevich in The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War: “To state the matter bluntly, Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force.” Don’t you think it is time to put the health and welfare of the American family above that of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about and that has now metastasized into every Congressional district?
Let’s examine the fear-mongering of this administration. Imagine members saying that the warnings of the Treasury Secretary terrified them! Were they not around for the presentations of Colin Powell and other respected Administration spokespeople who deceived us into a bloodbath in Iraq? Do you not remember the pre-election speeches of members of Congress in October 2002 that proved not just to be wrong but verifiably wrong at the time? Remember how those members have been justifiably attacked in the intervening years as willfully ignorant.
Do you not remember the mushroom clouds they were peddling? That there was “no doubt” but that Saddam had WMDs? That the suitcase nukes mentioned by the Vice President to Republican members was not a lie? Does this administration’s record not compel you to be cautious?
When this bailout predictably fails will you attempt to tell your constituents that you picked the best of several bad choices when you did no such thing? When you did not allow many of the best minds in America to be heard before rushing into this folly? That you bought the “sky is falling” tale told by the people who created and then concealed this mess? That you couldn't listen - along with the American people - to hearings in which Nobel Prize-winning economists and hundreds of the great minds of our country explain what a terrible mistake this plan is? An act that will make things far worse. An act that will impoverish the middle class when the money will soon be needed for their survival.
You must ask yourself as Willie Nelson does in one song: “What is a liar's word worth?” I know that many of you believe in the meltdown scenario. If you do, you must also ask yourself: How can I possibly accept the judgment of those who put us into this spot either through their own actions or inaction? Yes, I know that the White House, the big moneyed interests in this country and their corporate shills will terrify the American people. They will manipulate and stampede the stock market for a short time. They will tell them that credit no longer exists. Remember they are the masters of creating panic and crises that do not exist. We have serious problems but the short term movement of the stock market should not be tops on that list or that a supply side top-down gift of $700 billion will solve the credit crunch.
As one business owner, Mike of Maple Heights, said on a WCPN radio call-in interview on Oct. 1, he had no problem getting credit. The problem, he explained, was people not having enough money to buy product. When you listen to Administration spokespeople discuss the impending Depression, it is interesting that they leave out that key factor: the growing disparity in income and wealth.
The problem they have intentionally compounded.
The continuing loss of purchasing power by so many Americans consumers is at the heart of our problems. The American worker has been squeezed by those at the top earning $3.7 billion in a year. Always remember that money is an accounting tool for the work someone performs. That one American should be paid more than 74,000 average workers and then pay a smaller tax rate on most of those earnings can only be categorized as rapacious greed. Greed condemned by every religion.
The widening gap between the economic elites and the middle class threatens our economy - and our democracy. As James McElwaine noted in his book, The Great Depression, a root cause of our meltdown in the 1930s was the growing economic inequality. When the middle class in America does not have money, our economy falters.
We are bailing out failed businesses and their shareholders while not directly helping American families that will soon need our aid. We are perpetuating a system where the top 13,400 households have more yearly income than the bottom 96 million Americans, where nearly 50% of Americans are sharecroppers who live on debt treadmills and have no net worth and where 57.5% of income from wealth in the form of dividends, interest, capital gains and rent go to the top 1%. In 1979 that percentage was 37.8%.
I refuse to pay blackmail to the “banksters” as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) called them who create nothing but debt for private profit while sending our jobs overseas. They are the ones who have manufactured this debt bomb which is exploding. When Alan Greenspan became the Federal Reserve Chairman in 1987, our private and public debt was $10.5 trillion and $43 trillion when he left in 2006. Today, it is $51 trillion which amounts to a $3,343 monthly interest payment for each American family. Is this the system we are rushing in to save in its present form? A system which allows 22,000 Americans to die each year from a lack of health care and parents to constantly worry about providing for their children.
How can we come up with nearly a trillion dollars for the banks and not have money to refurbish America's infrastructure to create new jobs? How can we provide the gamblers a trillion dollars more for more trips to the gaming table but have no money for Social Security or pensions or schools?
American investors and consumers can no longer walk Wall Street or Main Street safely. We live in an era where corporations and their hired guns in Congress have killed the financial and consumer cops allowing them to freely prey on the American family. This is what is meant by a “free” market to crony capitalists. Free to overcharge but never responsible to pay one's debts. As Bob Sullivan points out in Gotcha Capitalism the average American pays $946 in excess fees each year on bills ranging from their bank to their cable company. This does not even take into account the exorbitant basic charges of utilities and insurers.
This is the system you are bailing out when we should instead be bailing out the middle class as their boats sink. In fact, hundreds of billions of dollars will be paid to foreign investors who will unload their toxic waste investments on us.
Don’t fall for the main lie that taxpayers will be getting assets at a fair price. If that were true the plan would do nothing to change their reserves and increase their ability to loan. The whole basis of the plan is to unload junk at seriously inflated prices. Seriously, does anyone believe that the banks will unload their mortgages at their true value?
Which of us does not recognize that life is getting tougher for the American family because we have not stopped the new robber barons from stealing from them? At least the old robber barons created some railroad and manufacturing jobs while the new ones only create debt and debt peonage.
Don't you think it is time to have a full debate on these issues of life and death for the American family? How can we not devote time to this discussion? History – and voters – will judge everyone voting “Yes” on this bill harshly. And please, at that time, don't say you had no choice.
You do. Vote “No” to the Administration bill. Let us talk before we rush to a vote and home to campaign. We are at a pivotal time in history just as FDR was in March of 1933. Capitalism was on the precipice and it was his job to save it. Now it is our job. We must recognize that it took FDR 100 days after months of thought, not a week.
One thing is clear: capitalism can’t survive when those who created this inferno are given more gasoline and not held accountable for their destructive acts. Why are we giving arsonists more accelerant? Are we anxious that they finish their job of burning down our economy a little more quickly? Unprincipled or ignorant people do evil or stupid things and allowing the same people to remain in charge of this system thinking things will get better is truly insane.
Represent Main Street and not Wall Street. Vote “No.”
Sincerely,
Member of the House of Representatives
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American Politics 
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