Tasini has written a short book on the phony debt crisis titled:
It's Not Raining, We're Getting Peed OnThe entire 55-page book can be viewed online at:
www.workinglife.org/imgbin/wlimgs/ItsNotRaining-JonathanTasini.pdfI don't agree with everything Tasini says (like the Government should guarantee everyone a job), but I agree with most of it.
Here are some excerpts from the book:
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To be clear, there is a huge crisis in the country that we SHOULD be talking about. Instead, what we have is a giant scam going on, a kind of shell game where we are being told, “look, underneath this shell, here’s the problem, it’s the deficit and the debt,” while, in truth, the troubles are being cleverly hidden underneath another shell.
What should we be talking about? How about this: our country is collapsing because of an almost religious belief in the so-called “free market”.
We have a financial system that benefits the rich. We didn’t fix much in the wake of the greatest threat to our financial system since the Great Depression, a real crisis that left your 401(k) shattered. We just papered over a few things, put back a few regulations to guard against the most outrageous and criminal behavior—but basically we left the power in the hands of the same people who played us like fools.
And the political system let most of the perps walk away free and clear. Check this out:
Angela Mozilo, the former head of Countrywide Financial, was a central player in the mortgage scam that has rocked our country and the world, causing millions of people to lose their jobs and their retirement —while he became stupendously wealthy. He was caught.
His punishment? A fine—partly paid by the company’s shareholders—that will still leave him a very wealthy person for the rest of his life, while thousands of his victims struggle to make ends meet. Best of all, he didn’t have to admit any wrongdoing. Is American capitalism great, or what?
You can bet on only one thing: knowing not much has changed and prison-time is very unlikely, the financiers will be busy figuring out the next Big Scam. So, the next financial crisis is just a matter of time.
Cutting deals with crooks and allowing them to not even admit their guilt simply exacerbates the deep feeling among people that something has gone deeply wrong in America. No wonder people are angry—they are rightfully angry at the insiders who rarely, if ever, pay the price for ripping off America....
It is a fact of America today: our country’s economic policy and the profits of corporations rely on vast poverty and financial struggle on the part of the majority of the people.
The collapse is right there to be seen in the failure to fight for the cherished idea of fairness and equity. We have the greatest divide between rich and poor in 100 years. And, yet, the richest 1% in America is too busy complaining about having to pay a bit more in taxes.
We should be talking about who should pony up to make sure we have plenty of money to do the things we should be doing, but that money apparently is not going to come out of the pockets of bankers, CEOs or the richest 1%.
No. It’s the average person. The people who are going to be asked— by a Democratic president, no less—to shoulder the burden of the robbery are the people who pack their lunch every day and get paid a wage to work an 8-hour day in a coal mine, factory, office building, firehouse, public service job or school.
Watching that C-SPAN broadcast of the first hearing, I was astonished that
not a single person on that Commission stepped forward to say: the people who were robbed should not pay and, instead, the people who squandered the nation’s wealth should bear the burden."[/font][/ul]