Third World America (23 page)

America needs to engage in a similar soul-stirring questioning of many unquestioned assumptions. We need to move from a bottom-line-obsessed corporate culture to a “triple bottom line” approach that calls for corporations to pay attention to both their stockholders and their stakeholders—those who may not have invested money in the company but clearly have a de facto investment in the air they breathe, the food they eat, and the communities they live in.

We can’t afford to just remodel the Wall Street casino. We need to collectively decide that we want to return to being a country where middle-class Americans are put first, and where trickle up—not trickle down—is the economic order of the day.

There is a reason our founding fathers made sure that freedom of the press was guaranteed in the very first amendment. As we’ve seen time and time again, governments—as well as giant corporations and Wall Street banks—are prone to corruption. And when that corruption has metastasized and actually overtaken the political and financial systems, a dogged and independent press becomes more essential than ever.

As Justice Potter Stewart wrote of the Pentagon Papers, “Without an informed and free press there cannot be an enlightened people.” He might have specified a free press not in bed with the government it is supposed to keep an eye on.
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Far too often over the past twenty years, members of the media have traded their independence for an all-access pass to the halls of power.

Don’t forget: With a few honorable exceptions, the media failed to serve the public interest by missing the two biggest stories of our time—the run-up to the war in Iraq and the financial meltdown. In both instances, there were plenty of people who got it right—who saw what was coming and warned about it—but they were drowned out by the thumping sound of journalists walking in lockstep. As a result, we’ve had far too many autopsies of what went wrong and not enough biopsies of what was about to go wrong.

The media is also addicted to covering what Bill Maher describes as the “bright, shiny objects” over here, distracting attention from the real story over there—trivial stories that
draw our attention away from harder-to-understand stories, such as what caused the financial meltdown or why Congress isn’t reforming Wall Street.

We saw this last year with the media’s breathless, wall-to-wall coverage of the Balloon Boy nonstory—coverage that continued on for days even after we learned the balloon was empty, with TV anchor after TV anchor expressing deep concern for Attic Boy (a more fitting name since he never was in the balloon).
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Who knew the media was so worried about the welfare of children? Well, as it turns out, their concern extends only to children in certain circumstances—such as when they are thought to be trapped in a runaway balloon. Why do we feel so much for Balloon Boy and so little for the hundreds of thousands of children affected by the financial meltdown and the downward spiral their families’ lives are in?

What if we could repurpose some of that concern for the more than 1.5 million children who are homeless or the 51 percent of homeless children who are under the age of six?
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How about some attention to the 75 to 100 percent increase in the number of children who are newly homeless because of the foreclosure crisis?
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Or the 14 million American children living in poverty?
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If we are going to halt our transformation into Third World America, we need the media to step up to its role as watchdog and storyteller, holding our leaders’ feet to the fire and speaking truth to power. Stories that put flesh and blood on the data connect us with one another and put the spotlight on the effects that lobbyist-driven laws have on the day-to-day lives of middle-class families.

“People work for justice when their hearts are stirred by specific lives and situations that develop our capacity to feel
empathy, to imagine ourselves as someone else,” says Paul Loeb, author of
Soul of a Citizen
, who has been writing about citizen movements for forty years.
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“New information—the percentage of people out of work or children in poverty, the numbers behind America’s record health-care costs, the annual planetary increases in greenhouse gases—can help us comprehend the magnitude of our shared problems and develop appropriate responses. But information alone can’t provide the organic connection that binds one person to another, or that stirs our hearts to act. Powerful stories can break us beyond our isolated worlds.”

Luckily, thanks to the expansion of online news sources, new media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and the ever-decreasing size and cost of camera phones and video cameras, the ability to commit acts of journalism is spreading to everyone. As a result, citizen journalism is rapidly emerging as an invaluable part of delivering the news.

Nothing demonstrated the power of citizen journalism better than the 2009 uprising in Iran. People tweeting from demonstrations and uploading video of brutal violence taken with their camera phones were able to tell a story, in real time, that a tightly controlled mainstream media was unable to cover with the same speed and depth.

Citizen journalism often works best when filling a void—attending an event that traditional journalists are kept from or have overlooked—or by finding the small but evocative story happening right next door. People are becoming increasingly creative in exploring ways to find these facts and tell these stories.

New media and citizen journalists are taking traditional journalism’s ability to bear witness, and spreading it beyond the elite few—thereby making it harder for those elite few to get it as wrong as they’ve gotten it again and again.

Our slide into Third World America may not be televised … but it will be blogged, tweeted, posted on Facebook, covered with a camera phone, and uploaded to YouTube. And by shining the spotlight on it, we may be able to prevent it.

There is no doubt: Times are hard. The “new normal” is a punch in the gut, a slap across the face, and a pitcher of icy water dumped on our heads. It’s a chill running up our national spine.

The question is, What are we going to do about it? Are we going to shut off the lights, curl up in a ball, and slap a victim sticker on our foreheads? Or are we going to shake off the blows, take a deep breath, hitch up our pants, and head back into the fray?

Are we going to wallow in despair or rage against the fading of the American Dream?

The preamble to the Constitution starts with “We the People.” And we have never needed the active participation of each one of us more urgently than now.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that we’re not going to be able to rely solely on the government to fix things. Yes, we need our leaders to tackle the things on our “How to Avoid Third World America” checklist. But we can’t save the middle class and keep America a First World nation without each of us making a personal commitment and taking action—without
each of us doing our part. We can’t just sit on the sidelines and complain. It’s up to us: We the People.

Leadership is, after all, about breaking old paradigms—about seeing where society is stuck and providing ways to get it unstuck. And right now, the point at which we’re most stuck, the site of the primary bottleneck that prevents us from adequately addressing our problems, is in Washington itself. So the job of getting us unstuck is increasingly going to be the responsibility of those outside that center of power. Learning to mine the leadership resources of ordinary Americans means no longer relying only on elected officials to solve our problems. You don’t have to lead vast nations or command huge armies to make a difference. In looking at the leader in the mirror we are just following that very American urge to take matters into our own hands and get things done.

Tip O’Neill said, “All politics is local.”
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And, in the end, all problem solving is personal. So we have to ask ourselves: What are we going to do to help ourselves—and one another?

Moving your money is a good place to start.

It was a lightbulb moment. A group of us, including economist Rob Johnson, political strategist Alexis McGill, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, and Nick Penniman of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, was having dinner, talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street and Main Street, and the outrageous behavior of America’s megabanks—how they’d taken our bailout money but cut back on lending, paid themselves record bonuses, and kept on with all the greedy,
abusive, ruthless practices that have earned them billions a year—year after year. We were getting madder by the minute.

Then the lightbulb clicked on: Why don’t we take our money out of these big banks and put it into community banks and credit unions? And why don’t we see if we can encourage everyone in America to do the same thing?

The concept was simple: If enough people who had money in one of the Big Six investment banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) moved their money into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks and credit unions, collectively we, as individuals, would have taken a big step toward transforming the financial system so it again becomes the productive, stable engine for growth it’s meant to be.
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And since deposit insurance at small banks is the same as at big banks—up to $250,000—there is zero risk involved.
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While it may not be in our power to change the system single-handedly, we do have the power to take our money out of the banks that undermined our economy and move it to more responsible banks to help rebuild it. We don’t have to wait for Washington to act. We can do a complete end run around the closed ecosystem of lobbyists and politicians.

We launched the Move Your Money campaign on the Huffington Post in late 2009, and it took off like wildfire.
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The video Eugene Jarecki made (playing off the classic film
It’s a Wonderful Life
, where community banker George Bailey helps the people of Bedford Falls escape the grip of the rapacious and predatory banker Mr. Potter) went viral. Bill Maher compared moving your money to ending “a loveless, abusive relationship with your big bank.”
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Media coverage was extensive. Top financial analysts Chris Whalen and Dennis Santiago created a tool that allowed people to plug in their zip codes and
quickly get a list of small, safe banks and credit unions operating in their communities. About 2 million people, in every region of the country, ended up moving their money—more than $5 billion in the first quarter of 2010—as did a growing number of cities, states, and large pension funds.
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The idea is neither liberal nor conservative—it’s productive populism at its best—and has been embraced by those on both sides of the ideological spectrum who are sick and tired of the megabanks and are ready to do something about it.

The big banks may still be “too big to fail”—but they are not too big to feel the impact of hundreds of thousands of people taking action to change a broken financial and political system. The key thing is we don’t have to wait on Washington to get its act together.

People from all walks of life have written in to say how empowering the small act of moving their money was. One of them, H. Lee Grove, wrote, “Thank you so much.
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I have been so depressed about the apathy I had fallen into, being able to do nothing as the bully on the playground beat everyone to hell right in front of my eyes, that I would just lie in bed for days at a time. I moved my money to a credit union and I feel fantastic.”

Leonard Cohen wrote his classic song “Everybody Knows” in the late 1980s, but it couldn’t feel timelier:

Knowing that when it comes to getting ahead in America the dice are loaded—and that it’s getting harder and harder to insulate yourself and your family from the consequences of America’s misguided policies—is fostering anger, resentment, cynicism, and despair across the country. But if we’re ever going to change the rigged game, we first have to break that cycle of despair at the personal level. And the greatest antidote to despair is action. Move Your Money is one example.

Another is arming yourself against the predatory behavior of unscrupulous businessmen—especially bankers, mortgage lenders, and credit card companies. This requires becoming smarter and more vigilant about what kinds of companies we give our business to. When it comes to credit cards, pick an issuer—such as a credit union—that’s not busy figuring out ways to get you to pay a 30 percent interest rate or charging every manner of fee and penalty to fatten its bottom line.

Consumer credit unions are not owned by shareholders, who are looking for maximum quarterly profits, but by members, who are looking for stability and service.
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Since their goal is not to maximize short-term profit, credit unions by and large steered clear of risky subprime loans.
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Nearly ninety million Americans belong to credit unions, which usually offer lower fees and higher interest rates on savings.
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Around 70 percent of credit union mortgages are held by
the credit unions themselves, as opposed to being sliced up into pieces and sold off on secondary markets for players in the Wall Street casino to bet on.
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(The exceptions are corporate credit unions that began behaving like investment banks and dove into the toxic securities market.)