Main Street

Wall Street Wants You Cynical

It is easy to get cynical about politics. There are plenty of good reasons to feel cynical. Corporate special interests have a huge amount of power and influence. The mainstream media, especially cable news, seems to have little interest in actually informing us about what is going on. It feels like Ohio and much of the Midwest have been losing jobs for 30 years straight. We all feel it, and we hear plenty of it in the community each night from other Working America members and from people who aren’t members yet.

We have to fight that cynicism. It seems like it will keep us from being suckered, but cynicism actually serves the corporate agenda. They fund the think-tanks and cook up the talking points that tell us “government” (a.k.a. our democracy) can’t do anything right; then, they use their influence to try to make their prediction come true. The cynicism that they foster allows corporate lobbyists to block any effort to hold them accountable. Sure, Wall Street destroyed millions of jobs. By now, most everyone knows that the current jobs crisis was started by a blatant fraud carried out by Wall Street’s own Lehman Brothers. After Lehman fell, the rest of the house of cards fell and brought our jobs with them. But if the corporate interests can get away with blaming working families and American democracy for the mess they made, they just might manage to get themselves off the hook.

Yes, we need to be critical of our elected leaders, and yes, there is a lot of money corrupting our political system. But elected leaders are people too, and sometimes, in spite of the immense pressure from corporate lobbyists, they stand up for us.

One elected leader who has stood up for working families repeatedly over the past year is Congressman Steve Driehaus, whose district represents parts of Hamilton and Butler counties in Southwest Ohio. That’s why we held a thank-you event for him last Friday. We delivered over 290 handwritten letters that members had written in the last 2 weeks, urging him to continue to hold Wall Street accountable and continue to support job creation. Here is a run-down of a few votes he has taken for working people, against powerful corporate interest groups:

• He voted for large working family tax cuts and jobs creation measures in the recovery act. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that bill created or saved 1 to 2 million jobs .
• He voted to keep our tax dollars from going to pay bonuses for Wall St. CEOs
• He voted to start holding Wall Street accountable for the millions of jobs they have destroyed. The same bill will also create a watchdog group, called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to protect working families from deceptive rip-offs on things like credit cards and mortgages.

Are these votes going to fix everything? Nope. Wall Street blew an 11 million job hole in our economy. A couple of million jobs helps, but ultimately we are going to have to hold Wall Street accountable for cleaning up the mess they have made of our country. Still, we need to appreciate our victories when they come. It is going to be a long, hard fight to take our country back from corporate lobbyists, and we can’t let them sell us on cynicism.

After we delivered our letters to Rep. Driehaus, he asked us if he could take a large sign that we had made, displaying letters from other members and the message “Thank You for Fighting for Main Street Jobs, Not Corporate Lobbyists”. It now sits in his office, where it will remind him and his visitors who he is fighting for: working families.

Tags: financial regulation, Jobs