Dec 14 2008
The UAW Needs to Evolve
Do unions help or hurt workers during a bad economy? Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont appeared on the Thom Hartman radio show last Friday, as he does every Friday. It’s great to hear a senator talk to regular people on the phone for an hour every week.
The topic was our economic crisis and the big 3 auto makers. Sanders called this the most serious economic crisis since the “Great Depression”. Unemployment is higher than in the last 14 years, over a million Americans have lost their jobs, over 500,000 lost their jobs in November alone. All right-wing talk radio does is complain about it and some even go to the ridiculous lengths of blaming Obama for it.
Sanders puts the blame on “Greed on Wall Street” where people have become involved in enormously complicated, esoteric economic investment instruments, leading to this near collapse of our economic system. He feels our economic troubles were caused by greed on Wall Street (and I agree) and we need to understand how we got to where we are now, to fix the problem.
Our government needs to bring transparency and regulations to the derivatives markets who are playing with trillions and trillions of dollars and we have very little understanding of what they are doing. Sanders said the Senators know we are dealing with derivatives and trillions of dollars floating around in unregulated territory. We don’t know for sure what’s coming because this is all unregulated money. Ponzi schemes for $15 billion and more are out there, and some of these schemes are just now being revealed for what they are. A well-known and “successful” business man in Minnesota, ran a $3.5 billion dollar Ponzi scheme and is currently in jail. We need some radical changes on how Wall Street does business because it’s starting to become evident that much of the deregulation has led to crazy and illegal money-making schemes.
Second, according to Bernie Sanders, we need a very significant stimulus package. We need to create millions of good paying jobs dealing with infrastructure, water systems, school construction, and bridges and roads, and we can put millions of people to work rebuilding this. We also need to end our dependency on foreign oil and move to sustainable energy. If we are going to deal with global warming we need to grow significantly the solar business and wind farms, manufacture small wind turbines, and look into using biomass and geothermal energy. We need a major commitment by our government to do this.
