There’s a small problem with this, though. An old bit of wisdom says: choose your enemies carefully, because over time, you will tend to become the very thing you most strongly resist. One of the most striking things about our victorious corporations now is the degree to which they’ve taken on some of the most noxious and Kafkaesque attributes of the Soviet system — too often leaving their employees, customers, and other stakeholders just as powerless over their own fates as the unhappy citizens of those old centrally planned economies of the USSR were back in the day.

It’s not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that’s awful enough). It’s also that they’ve taken control over — and put serious limits on — our choices regarding what we buy, where we work, how we live, and what rights we have. Our futures are increasingly no longer our own: more and more decisions, large and small, that determine the quality of our lives are being made by Politburo apparatchiks at a Supreme Corporate Soviet somewhere far distant from us. Only now, those apparatchiks are PR and marketing executives, titans of corporate finance, lobbyists for multinationals, and bean-counting managers trying to increase profits at the expense of our freedom.

With tongue only somewhat in cheek, here are a few ways in which Americans are now becoming a new lumpenproletariat, subject to the whims and diktats of our new Soviet-style corporate overlords.

Reduced Choice and Big-Box Censorship

We see it most evidently when we go to the store. Back in the 1970s, the American retail landscape was still mostly dominated by mom-and-pop stores, which in turn carried merchandise also made by small manufacturers (many of them right here in the US). Not only did this complex economy sustain tens of millions of comfortable middle-class jobs; it also produced a dazzling variety of retail choices. Every store on Main Street carried somewhat different merchandise, bought from a different group of preferred suppliers. A shoe store might carry 20 different brands. The shoe store down the street might differentiate itself by carrying 10 of the same brands, and 10 different ones. The result was a very wide range of consumer choices — though you did have to go from store to store to find it — and a rich variety of stores that competed aggressively for their customers’ attention. And if you visited a different part of the country, the selection might be very different from what you’d get back home.

Now, every Macy’s in America carries the same dozen or so lines of bland, middle-of-the-road women’s clothing. You’ll find exactly the same stuff on the racks in Long Island as you do in Long Beach. If you’re looking for something that hasn’t been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, you probably won’t find it at the mall.

Big-box stores have eliminated choice even further: The Supreme Soviet in Bentonville or Atlanta or Minneapolis has decreed what appears on the shelves of your local Walmart or Home Depot or Target store, with very little tailoring to local tastes and preferences. Even our own tap water is being sold back to us by Coke and Pepsi. You have exactly as many choices as they deign to devote shelf space to. Now that Wal-Mart is selling 25% of the groceries in America, if you’re looking for a specific brand that someone back in Bentonville decided Walmart will no longer carry, then you’re just plain out of luck. And since the other grocers in town often close up when a Walmart opens, there’s no place else to turn to find it.

This constriction of choice is most virulent when it comes to media. Big-box stores have very limited shelf space for each product category they carry; yet they are far and away the nation’s biggest purchasers of things like toys and video games. For the past 20 years, this fact has dominated decision-making in both those businesses: manufacturers know viscerally that if the buyers at Walmart aren’t interested in your toy or game, there’s probably no economic point in even making it. So everything is made with these buyers’ sensibilities, prejudices and cost requirements in mind. This became a de facto form of centralized control, where a handful of buyers in Bentonville ended up dictating what the entire country got to play with.

Increasingly, the corporatization of our consumer landscape has meant that there’s less choice and variety in our marketplaces than there used to be. Centrally planned franchise and chain stores have been stripped of quirkiness, uniqueness, local color, and anything that might be challenging to the most easily upset among us. The result is that we’re left with a bland, santized, Disneyfied set of choices in goods, experiences, entertainment, and ideas that’s a far cry from the lively, authentic Main Street scene those stores killed — and which has brought us several steps closer to the scary stereotype of the limited and poorly stocked state-controlled Soviet shops we were constantly threatened with during the Cold War. Yeah, it’s still better — but not as much better as it should be.

The Sovietization of malls and big-box stores has launched a couple of backlashes. Online shopping is the new refuge of people who are looking for a broader set of options. Local producers of food, clothing, grooming supplies, furniture, and other goods are stepping up to scratch our itch for things that are unique and special. These are both end-runs around the corporatized retail order that’s been systematically stripping away consumer choice for decades. But they’ve got a long way to go before they’ll supplant the neighborhood hegemony of Walgreens.

Health Care

The Supreme Health Care Soviet has also done a number on the kind of health care we get, how we get it, where we get it, and who we can get it from. Again: there was a time not so long ago when health care was in the hands of a doctor, who was usually in independent practice (often in a partnership with a couple of other doctors, but that’s it), and who had wide leeway to dictate patient care without being second-guessed. The doctor got sound, reliable information on new treatments from respected peer-reviewed journals, and insurance companies generally paid for most of what he or she ordered without further ado. This extreme level of autonomy notoriously led to doctors who overestimated their capacities; but it also meant that whatever happened in an examination room was — to an extraordinary degree — left in the hands of the doctor and the patient, and nobody else was entitled to interfere. The result was that, in the struggle between science and the doctor’s profit motive, science stood at least a fighting chance of prevailing.

Now, the profit Politburo has had its way with almost every aspect of this interaction. Two-thirds of primary care doctors don’t own their own practices anymore — in no small part because the administrative cost of dealing with Soviet bureaucrats insurance company overseers is so overwhelming. Now, they’re salaried employees of some large corporate entity, where they’re subject to constant pressure to shorten visits, rack up billable hours, stick to narrow protocols of accepted treatment and churn patients through.

Insurance bean-counters second-guess every order, requiring doctors to put in extra shifts each week writing letters and making phone calls to fight for their patients’ right to care. Every channel they rely on for information on new drugs and treatments — from the peer-reviewed journals to the medical conferences to the drug information inserts — has been co-opted by the pharmaceutical companies to ensure that doctors won’t ever get important information that might reflect badly on profitable drugs; and this, in turn, undermines evidence-based medicine in favor of a kind of corporate-driven Lysenkoism.

Increasingly, states are also inviting themselves into the exam room, passing laws telling doctors what they can and can’t tell you about your own condition (and, in some cases, demanding that they out-and-out lie to you, for reasons that are entirely political and seldom supported by science). And as a patient, your access to this co-opted, compromised care is entirely dependent on what the Politburo apparatchiks at your own employer’s corporate HQ have decided you deserve to have.

Again: what we’ve got here isn’t anything like a free or independent system, one in which patients and doctors are at liberty to make appropriate decisions without layers of centralized interference (much of it from people who aren’t even MDs). And most of this interference isn’t from government; it’s from various corporate interests that have subjugated both doctors and patients to a centralization regime in order to extract profits from them. During the Cold War, this is what we were told Soviet medicine was like. Now, we don’t have to go to Russia: we can get the same regimented, over-managed treatment from our own free-market health system — and we’ll pay more for it than anybody else in the world.

Education: Testing, Not Teaching

My eighth-grade civics teacher used to terrify our class with grim stories about the education endured by our unlucky peers in the USSR. Communist education, she said, was nothing but rote learning — no discussion, no critical thinking skills, all aimed at preparing kids for high-stakes standardized testing that would ultimately determine their place in the Party hierarchy. They weren’t free like we were to explore our own interests, or choose professions that pleased them. Rather than being treated like full, autonomous human beings being prepared for a limitless future of their own design, they were sorted and graded like potatoes, and tracked to serve the needs of the state. All of the decisions, we were told, were dictated by the central authorities in charge of determining what kind of workers the state would need, and which schools students would be sent to in order to fulfill those goals.

The ironies abound. Even as China has ramped up its efforts to inculcate creativity and critical thought in its students, the United States has voluntarily given up on those values — our competitive edge over the world for the past 150 years — in favor of a centralized, test-driven schooling regimen that only a Soviet bureaucrat could love. Increasingly, the doors to the best high schools and universities are closed to everyone but those in the top echelons of society, just as the best schools in the USSR were set aside for the children of the Party leadership. But the greatest irony of all is that, far from being done in the name of the state, this is being done by taking education out of the hands of the state and giving it over to for-profit corporations. Again, the more “private industry” gets involved, the more the outcome looks like something from a 1950s John Birch caricature of the horrors of Soviet life.

And On It Goes

These are just three easy examples. There are plenty more to be had:

* Our modern homes are designed by marketing researchers working for Soviet-style large developers that dictate what The People’s Houses should look like.

* Our food supply is dominated by Soviet-style government-mandated (but privately run) monoculture.

* Our voting system is increasingly restricted to people who are acceptable to the party hierarchy, just as the Soviet system limited Communist Party membership to a small percentage of the population; and corporate-owned machines count our votes.

* Our increasingly privatized and militarized law enforcement is starting to owe a lot to the brutal Soviet policing style, too. We have gulags now — and the corporations are running them, too.

* Our response to climate change is being driven by another form of Lysenkoism — a science-denial movement driven by corporations that are threatened by any demand that they change their ways.

* And anybody who’s dealt with a bank foreclosure can tell you stories that would cross Franz Kafka’s eyes about the runaround they get every time they try to contact their lender. Checks and papers vanish, and must be sent over and over. Payments are never posted. And you can never talk to the same person twice. (We used to think the DMV was bad enough, but now we know: it takes a corporation to really screw things up.) This kind of faceless, brutally inhuman bureaucracy used to be the stuff of totalitarian nightmares. Now, it’s everyday reality for tens of millions of American homeowners.

This is corporate-sponsored tyranny that comes at a huge expense to the masses. The great irony of our age is that, over the past 60 years, the more energy we put into resisting Communism by raising up the cult of the consumer (and the corporations that serviced it), the more our own corporate overlords were able to seize our resources and energy, and divert them into the goal of consolidating their power and inflicting their own totalitarian, centrally planned hell on us.

The USSR has been a historical dead letter for over 20 years now — but there are still plenty of earnest Fox-watching Americans for whom “communism” remains the most terrifying of all scare words. They’re vigilantly watching the leftward horizon, scanning for signs of government-inflicted socialism, ready to strip their own democracy of its very ability to thwart totalitarians if that’s what must be done to stop totalitarianism.

Unfortunately, they’re facing the wrong direction. The real threat of dignity-stripping, liberty-destroying, soul-crushing oppression is coming not from government, but from the very corporations those same people believed were the key to our superiority over the Communist menace. Now that the government can’t protect us from rapacious businesses any more, the centrally planned authoritarian state they’ve feared is already coming to pass — privately, for the profit of the few, free from pesky accountability or oversight, and without a bit of resistance from the would-be patriots who have been on guard for decades to ensure it could never happen here.

These are the dog days of summer and the silly season of presidential campaigns. But can we get real, please?

The American economy has moved way beyond outsourcing abroad or even “in-sourcing.” Most big companies headquartered in America don’t send jobs overseas and don’t bring jobs here from abroad.

That’s because most are no longer really “American” companies. They’ve become global networks that design, make, buy, and sell things wherever around the world it’s most profitable for them to do so.

As an Apple executive told the New York Times, “we don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.” He might have added “and showing profits big enough to continually increase our share price.”

Forget the debate over outsourcing. The real question is how to make Americans so competitive that all global companies — whether or not headquartered in the United States — will create good jobs in America.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States but contracts with over 700,000 workers overseas. It assembles iPhones in China both because wages are low there and because Apple’s Chinese contractors can quickly mobilize workers from company dorms at almost any hour of the day or night.

But low wages aren’t the major force driving Apple or any other American-based corporate network abroad. The components Apple’s Chinese contractors assemble come from many places around the world with wages as high if not higher than in the United States.

More than a third of what you pay for an iPhone ends up in Japan, because that’s where some of its most advanced components are made. Seventeen percent goes to Germany, whose precision manufacturers pay wages higher than those paid to American manufacturing workers, on average, because German workers are more highly skilled. Thirteen percent comes from South Korea, whose median wage isn’t far from our own.

Workers in the United States get only about 6 percent of what you pay for an iPhone. It goes to American designers, lawyers, and financiers, as well as Apple’s top executives.

American-based companies are also doing more of their research and development abroad. The share of R&D spending going to the foreign subsidiaries of American-based companies rose from 9 percent in 1989 to almost 16 percent in 2009, according to the National Science Foundation.

What’s going on? Put simply, America isn’t educating enough of our people well enough to get American-based companies to do more of their high-value added work here.

Our K-12 school system isn’t nearly up to what it should be. American students continue to do poorly in math and science relative to students in other advanced countries. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Sweden, and France all top us.

American universities continue to rank high but many are being starved of government funds and are having trouble keeping up. More and more young Americans and their families can’t afford a college education. China, by contrast, is investing like mad in world-class universities and research centers.

Transportation and communication systems abroad are also becoming better and more reliable. In case you hadn’t noticed, American roads are congested, our bridges are in disrepair, and our ports are becoming outmoded.

So forget the debate over outsourcing. The way we get good jobs back is with a national strategy to make Americans more competitive — retooling our schools, getting more of our young people through college or giving them a first-class technical education, remaking our infrastructure, and thereby guaranteeing a large share of Americans add significant value to the global economy.

But big American-based companies aren’t pushing this agenda, despite their huge clout in Washington. They don’t care about making Americans more competitive. They say they have no obligation to solve America’s problems.

They want lower corporate taxes, lower taxes for their executives, fewer regulations, and less public spending. And to achieve these goals they maintain legions of lobbyists and are pouring boatloads of money into political campaigns. The Supreme Court even says they’re “people” under the First Amendment, and can contribute as much as they want to political campaigns – even in secret.

The core problem isn’t outsourcing. It’s that the prosperity of America’s big businesses – which are really global networks that happen to be headquartered here – has become disconnected from the well-being of most Americans.

Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital is no different from any other global corporation — which is exactly why Romney’s so-called “business experience” is irrelevant to the real problems facing most Americans.

Without a government that’s focused on more and better jobs, we’re left with global corporations that don’t give a damn.

Job Creator?

Mitt Romney says he should be president because he and his company Bain Capital created 100,000 jobs at Staples and “created jobs” at other companies that Bain took over. So … did Mitt Romney really “create jobs” at Staples? Or did he and Bain really just follow the Wal-Mart model, using the advantages that come with having large, national chains, putting a number of local, smaller businesses out of business, while shifting a lot of people into lower-paying jobs? Understanding the difference is important because Romney says he will help the country “create jobs” the way he helped “create jobs” at Staples.

He says his experience is just what is needed to solve our national jobs emergency. He wants to apply the methods that “created 100,000 jobs at Staples” to the entire country. He says he will cut regulations and cut government and make the country more “business-friendly.” This means we should take a good look at Staples and the rest of the companies Mitt Romney and Bain Capital and others like them operated, and decide if this is really the way We, the People want to go.

Staples

Staples grew into a major chain because they consolidated what different kinds of stores sold, offering a one-stop-shop for stationery products, office supplies, office-furniture, computers, etc. They also were able to be competitive because of the advantages of scale as they grew into a national chain, centralizing functions like accounting, purchasing, legal, marketing, etc. And never underestimate the power of having a ton of cash at your disposal. This is all just smart business, well executed.

As Staples grew it overtook competing chains like Businessland and others. In other words, Staples took business from other, existing stores — often local retailers. Staples did not “create” jobs, it shifted office-supply jobs from local stores, etc., probably to lower-paying jobs. (The former owners of local businesses certainly were worse off from this.) They likely even lowered overall office-supply, stationery, etc. employment in the larger economy.

Low Wages?

How do these “Romney job creator” jobs stack up against other jobs? Average Staples salaries for job postings nationwide are 51% lower than average salaries for all job postings. The pay at Staples appears to be around $8-10 an hour. That’s $16-20,000 a year, certainly not enough to support a family, or even pay rent in many areas, never mind buying food. (The 2012 poverty guideline for family of four is $23,050.)

Wal-Martization

Big, national chain stores like Wal-Mart have tremendous advantages over local businesses because they are able to take advantage of scale. They buy from manufacturers and distributors in mass quantities, which means they can demand lower prices from them, and offer lower prices to customers. They can centralize accounting, HR and other management functions and employ these people in-house instead of contracting with local accounting firms, etc., also enabling them to offer lower prices.

And when they are big enough they can squeeze, and squeeze and squeeze their workers for lower wages and fewer benefits, their suppliers for discounts and other concessions, and even their customers by reducing support and staff, again enabling them to offer lower prices.

This is just the kind of “job creation” that makes a few people really wealthy at the expense of the rest of us, “hollowing out” the middle class.

(Here’s an industry secret –those multi-page advertising supplements that come in the Sunday paper are profit centers for the chains, not an advertising expense. The market power of these big chains enables them to demand “market development” payments from product manufacturers and distributors before they can gain shelf space, effectively making the newspaper and other advertising into profit centers instead of advertising costs.)

The Effect On America

I wrote about the impact of this “squeeze them all” business model on the American landscape in Lorain, OH Keep It Made In America Town Hall Meeting:

As you drive from town to town in Michigan and Ohio you see one after another a ring of the “big box” stores and national chain stores around each city. You also see the “brownfields” of rusted-out, closed factories, empty, falling-down buildings. Then you go to the downtown and you see boarded up houses, empty storefronts, deteriorating and deteriorated communities, idle people standing on corners. As you drive into these towns you can just see what is happening in a nutshell.

You used to hear about how Wal-Mart was predatory, how it would show up in an area and after a while the downtowns would dry up, local business-owners would go broke, local business employees would be laid off, and the local people would have to work for low wages at Wal-Mart, while the region’s spending money would go off to the wealthy few who run these things.

Well a juicy story of devastation like that one gets around, and there are those who hear it and say, “Hey, that’s a great idea, I wanna get me some of that.” So the Wal-Mart business model has taken off and now there are any number of these vultures, ringing the cities and towns around the country, so often private-equity owned. They are draining away the lifeblood of the downtowns, fighting off the unions to keep wages down, even demanding tax breaks to move in and “create jobs.” You see all the same stores circling every town now, running all of the local and regional businesses unto the ground.

Restructuring?

The changes in our economy that are hollowing out the middle class come from the restructuring that Wal-Martization represents. (And bad trade deals, never forget that.) Big, national chains have natural advantages over small, local businesses. And when they are big enough they have the power to squeeze employees, suppliers and even customers. The same kinds of advantages also hold for other industries.

Big, multinational corporations have advantages of scale over smaller companies. Etc., throughout our system. And big companies have tremendous power to squeeze workers, making them accept lower pay and benefits. They have the power to squeeze suppliers and customers as well.

These giant companies even have the power to squeeze communities and even states, demanding tax concessions with the threat of relocation. This has put our tax base in a downward spiral along with our wages.

These giant businesses have the wealth and power to force changes that move the benefits of business and our economy entirely to a few at the very top.

The Playing Field

As I wrote above, this is all just smart business, well executed. Business are just neutral bundles of contracts that operating on a playing field of laws and regulations. They only do what we let them do with the laws and regulations that we set out there for them to operate under, and those that do that the best and smartest win the game.

But why would We, the People allow businesses to do things the way Wal-Mart and the rest do them with the terrible results we see all around us? Don’t we want businesses that benefit all of us? Isn’t that the point of having a We, the People country? Don’t we want businesses that pay good wages, provide good products and services, and pay us back with taxes that enable us to have good infrastructure, internal improvements, and public structures like good schools, universities, courts, police, firefighters, health care, retirement and a fair share of all the other benefits of modern society?

Why is the playing field defined in a way that is so obviously hurting us and funneling all the benefits of our economy to a very few at the top? This restructuring is occurring the way it is because we let these businesses do these things to us. Businesses are not good or bad — they can’t be, they are not sentient and do not have morals. They are just bundles of contracts. Again, businesses are neutral, operating on a playing field defined by us. We can change that.

Our problem today is that a few people are able to change the rules of that playing field, for their own benefit. Once we allow money to influence our government decision-making and our public attitudes and understandings at all, then of course it will influence that decision making to their advantage, and will do so more and more as they gain more wealth and power from it, until there is nothing left. This is the road we are on.

The playing field is tilting and tilting and We, the People are starting to fall off the edge.

What Can We Do?

Cut to the chase. We currently operate under an economic paradigm, or system, in which the Romneys have so much power they can fire masses of people or force people to take pay cuts, and then pocket the difference for themselves. They can squeeze their suppliers for greater and greater concessions and then pocket the difference for themselves. We have to come to grips with that.

Romney/Bain didn’t really create jobs with Staples, they put small office and stationery retailers and other already-existing competitors out of businesses and moved the workers from those outlets into jobs at Staples that pay very little. In other words, they didn’t create 100,000 jobs, they lowered 100,000 people’s wages.

Romney made his money opertating on a playing field of business rules that let him and Bain and Wal-Mart and the rest do what they do. They were all able to tilt that playing field in their favor using the wealth and power they already had, and they tilted it in ways that gain them more wealth and power.

Mitt Romney gained his wealth and power on that playing field, and is campaigning with a promise to further tilt that playing field in favor of the few who already have great wealth and power.

We can change those rules. We can demand better pay, higher taxes at the top, better products, better service, and all the things sensible people would demand if We, the People were really in charge.

Note – while researching this post I came across Jonathan Tasini making a number of these points in the LA Times in January, in Not all jobs are equal,

Even if he’s telling the truth by some measures, the fact is that private equity buyouts often enrich those who arrange them by sharp cost-cutting, including dismantling pay and benefits for most of the workers who remain or new hires who join the more “efficient” enterprise. It’s simple math: To service the huge debt taken on in virtually every buyout, workers take cuts. And the new jobs aren’t necessarily a path to the American dream.

Take Staples, which Romney trumpets as one of his successes. The company certainly pays some of its employees well: Staples Chairman and Chief Executive Ronald L. Sargent received a total pay package of more than $15 million in 2010. But jobs in retail — one of the fastest-growing job sectors in recent decades — tend to pay poorly, and Staples jobs don’t seem to be an exception to that rule.

Last week, at the Take Back the American Dream conference, Krugman shared the stage with Chris Hayes for the “End This Depression NOW!” plenary session (Videos of all the plenaries are available on our conference videos web page). During the plenary, Krugman held that we could be at 7% unemployment right now, if Congress had extended part of the Recovery Act that sent money to states in order to prevent worker layoffs.

Then, a couple of news items suggest Krugman may be right again.

First, here’s what Krugman had to say at the conference last week.

And as Paul Krugman explained at the Take Back the American Dream conference today, we could have driven unemployment down below 8% if only we extended one aspect of the initial Recovery Act: send money to the states to prevent public worker layoffs.

“Just by filling the potholes,” hiring idle construction workers and saving teaching jobs, said Krugman, we would be at 7% unemployment. We would not incur much more debt to do it, because interest rates are so low. It would not take much time to implement, as opposed to also needed heavy infrastructure projects, because all that’s involved is putting the money into the state accounts.

Krugman wrote in his new book, End This Depression Now, helping states reverse recent budget cuts would “create well over a million jobs directly and probably something like three million jobs once you take the indirect effect into account.”

The issue of saving our public sector workforce is becoming one of the major flashpoints in the upcoming elections, which makes sense sinceit is one of clearest policy reversals that occurred after Republicans swiped the House in 2010.

On Wednesday, a New York Times article underscored Krugman’s point with the news that layoffs of public workers at the state and local level are hurting the recovery.

So while the federal government has grown a little since the recession, and many states have recently begun to add a few jobs, local governments are making new cuts that outweigh those gains. More than a quarter of municipal governments are planning layoffs this year, according to a survey by the Center for State and Local Government Excellence. They are being squeezed not only by declining federal and state support, but by their devastated property tax base.

“The unfortunate reality is our revenue streams have not rebounded,” said Timothy R. Hacker, the city manager of North Las Vegas, which has cut its work force to 1,300 from 2,300 and is about to lay off 130 more. “Shaking this recession is becoming increasingly difficult.”

… If governments still employed the same percentage of the work force as they did in 2009, the unemployment rate would be a percentage point lower, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. At the pace so far this year, layoffs will siphon off $15 billion in spending power. Yale economists have said that if state and local governments had followed the pattern of previous recessions, they would have added at least 1.4 million jobs.

The article goes on to suggest that the political decision to not to send money to state in order to avoid layoff of the very public workers Mitt Romney thinks America needs fewer of — like teachers, police officers, fire fighters, etc. — has a predictable “trickle-down” effect.

“Fourteen states plan to resolve their budget gaps by reducing aid to local governments, according to a report by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers.”

The consequences trickle all the way down Main Street. For citizens, layoff mean “longer response times to fires, larger class sizes, and in some cases lawsuits when short-staffed agencies are unable to provide the required services.” Local businesses, “not only lose prospective middle-class customers but may face long waits for services.”

No wonder Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke begged Congress for help him fix the economy.

But in response to questions from skeptical media, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke reminded reporters that the Fed isn’t the only game in town, and practically begged Congress to take affirmative steps to boost recovery.

Bernanke cited “Fiscal restraint at the federal state and local levels,” as a key head wind threatening the recovery.

“Monetary policy is not a panacea,” he implored. “Monetary policy by itself is not going to solve our economic problems. We welcome help and support from any other part of the government, from other economic policy makers. Collaboration would be great.”

… But in the meantime, he offered Congress his familiar prescription – it amounts to stimulus in the short term paired with a credible long-term path to reduced deficits.

It turns out that Tip O’Neill was right: All politics is local.

Horror of horrors, say the banks.

“If JPMorgan overseas operates under different rules than our foreign competitors,” warned Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of JP Morgan, Wall Street would lose financial business to the banks of nations with fewer regulations, allowing “Deutsche Bank to make the better deal.”

This is the same Jamie Dimon who chose London as the place to make highly-risky derivatives trades that have lost the firm upwards of $2 billion so far – and could leave American taxpayers holding the bag if JPMorgan’s exposure to tottering European banks gets much worse.

Dimon’s foreign affair is itself proof that unless the overseas operations of Wall Street banks are covered by U.S. regulations, giant banks like JPMorgan will just move more of their betting abroad – hiding their wildly-risky bets overseas so U.S. regulators can’t control them. Even now no one knows how badly JPMorgan or any other Wall Street bank will be shaken if major banks in Spain or elsewhere in Europe go down.

Call it the Dimon loophole.

This is the same Jamie Dimon, by the way, who at a financial conference a year ago told Fed chief Ben Bernanke there was no longer any reason to crack down on Wall Street. “Most of the bad actors are gone,” he said. “[O]ff-balance-sheet businesses are virtually obliterated, … money market funds are far more transparent” and “most very exotic derivatives are gone.”

One advantage of being a huge Wall Street bank is you get bailed out by the federal government when you make dumb bets. Another is you can choose where around the world to make the dumb bets, thereby dodging U.S. regulations. It’s a win-win.

Wall Street would like to keep it that way.

For two years now, squadrons of Wall Street lawyers and lobbyists have been pressing the Treasury, Comptroller of the Currency, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, SEC, and the Fed to go easier on the Street for fear that if regulations are too tight, the big banks will be less competitive internationally.

Translated: They’ll move more of their business to London and Frankfurt, where regulations are looser.

Meanwhile, the Street has been warning Europeans that if their financial regulations are too tight, the big banks will move more of their business to the United States, where regulations will (they hope) be looser.

After the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (a global financial regulatory oversight body) came up with a new set of rules to toughen bank capital and liquidity requirements, European officials threatened to get even tougher. They approved a new system of European regulatory bodies with added powers to ban certain financial products or activities in times of market stress.

This prompted Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, to issue — in the words of the Financial Times — “a clear warning that the bank could shift its operations around the world if the regulatory crackdown becomes too tough.”

Blankfein told a European financial conference that while Europe remains of vital importance to Goldman, with less than half of the bank’s business now generated in the U.S., the introduction of “mismatched regulation” across different regions (that is, tougher regulations in Europe than in the U.S.) would tempt banks to search out the cheapest and least intrusive jurisdiction in which to operate.

“Operations can be moved globally and capital can be accessed globally,” he warned.

Someone should remind Dimon and Blankfein that a few years ago they and their colleagues on the Street almost eviscerated the American economy, and that of much of the rest of the world. The Street’s antics required a giant taxpayer-funded bailout. Most Americans are still living with the results, as are millions of Europeans.

Wall Street can’t have it both ways – too big to fail, and also able to make wild bets anywhere around the world.

If Wall Street banks demand a free rein overseas, the least we should demand is they be broken up here.

Families used to want the obituary notices that Dunbar writes up to include a pitch for donations to their dear departed’s favorite charity. Some families are now requesting notices that ask for donations toward their funeral expenses.

You won’t find Anne Dunbar’s story — or any other anecdote about the collapse of America’s middle class — in the latest Changes in U.S. Family Finances study the Federal Reserve Board released last Monday.

What you will find: the most exhaustive set of numbers yet on the devastation that the Great Recession and decades of rising inequality have wreaked on average American families.

Most Americans, the new data help make plain, have essentially spent the last 20 years on a go-nowhere treadmill. They’re working longer and harder and have zero new wealth to show for their labor.

In 2010, the net worth of the median, or most typical, American family stood at $77,300, about the same net worth, after taking inflation into account, that the typical American family held back in the early 1990s.

Most U.S. families today have the bulk of their net worth sitting as equity in their homes. The pop of the housing bubble has zapped that equity. Between 2007 and 2010, notes the new Fed study, typical American families lost 40 percent of their total net worth. The housing crash accounted for three-quarters of that plummet.

But home values, the Fed study reports, haven’t been the only aspect of middle class economic life to take a significant hit. Incomes have plunged as well. The take-homeof the typical American family, after taking inflation into account, dropped 7.7 percent in the three years after 2007, down to $45,800.

All these numbers come from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, an intense series of field interviews the Fed conducts every three years. The interviews usually run an hour and a half, but can last — for families with complicated financial situations — twice that long.

Fed researchers completed just under 6,500 of these in-depth interviews for the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances. The Fed selected 5,000 of these families through a random sampling of American households.

But random samplings don’t generate enough wealthy households to give a statistically rich enough sense of life at America’s economic summit. To help spotlight that summit, Fed researchers supplemented their basic 2010 sample with a list of another 1,500 families, all affluent, identified through tax records.

The resulting data from all these interviews paint the most statistically comprehensive portrait of personal wealth in America available anywhere. But this portrait has one gaping hole. For confidentiality reasons, the Federal Reserve excludes from the Survey of Consumer Finances interview process any family that appears on the annual Forbes 400 list of America’s richest.

That exclusion means that the new Federal Reserve numbers for 2010 understate — by $1.37 trillion, the total wealth of that year’s Forbes 400 — America’s actual level of wealth concentration.

The Federal Reserve Changes in U.S. Family Finances report released last week doesn’t much concentrate on that concentration. The report offers no specific wealth and income breakouts for America’s top 1 percent. Analyses at that level will have to wait until scholars get their hands on the micro data that the Fed’s 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances has generated.

The new Fed study does give us income and wealth breakdowns for America’s top 10 percent, those families that made over $142,000 in 2010. These families averaged $2.9 million in net worth, about 15 times the $199,000 average net worth of families in America’s middle 20 percent.

Between 2001 and 2010, America’s top 10 percent gained net worth. Over that same span, all income brackets below the top 10 percent lost net worth.

Major swatches of American families below the top 10 percent tier, the Fed numbers also show, remain deep in debt. In 2007, only 56.4 percent of the nation’s families found themselves able to do any saving. In 2010, even fewer families — just 52 percent of the total — saved any money.

Those families struggling the hardest? The new Fed data give that unsought distinctionto families headed by 35- to 44 year-olds. Just 47.8 percent of these families did any saving in 2010. Between 2007 and 2010, their net worth fell a stunning 54 percent, down to $42,100.

Add together the net worth of over 80,000 of these families in 2010 and you’ll have a fortune that equals the net worth of a single average deep pocket on that 2010 Forbes list of America’s 400 richest.

Wednesday was the last day of school for public school students in Montgomery County, Maryland, where we live — including our nine-year-old son, who just completed the third grade. I began the morning by sending a one last email to his teacher. I asked her about the summer reading and math packets we were expecting our son to bring. I also thanked her for all the work she’d done to help our son this year.

As I thought about how much our son has grown and improved over the past year, and how very much the dedicated teachers and staff at his school had to do with those changes, I couldn’t help being mystified at Mitt Romney’s assertion that our children need fewer teachers. Mystified, that is, but not surprised.

After saying President Barack Obama does not care about the private sector, Mitt Romney on Friday dismissed unemployment in the public sector, saying the country does not need more firemen, policemen or teachers.

“He wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers,” Romney said at a press conference. “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”

I’m not surprised, because the Romney/Ryan budget would lead to fewer teachers, by making federal dollars for public schools more scarce, thus either forcing teacher’s salaries down, or forcing teachers out of the profession altogether. Even surrogates like John Sununu and Newt Gingrich have doubled down on the notion that fewer teachers would actually be good for American schools and students.

That squares pretty well with Republican efforts to obstruct any form of economic stimulus. The president’s budget proposal included $30 billion in state and local aid for retaining or rehiring teachers and first responders. The goal was to save teacher jobs across the country — just like the 7,715 teacher jobs saved in Virginia, by the emergency jobs act the president signed in late 2010.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? But Republicans filibustered it to death, because it included a modest tax on millionaires and billionaires. That some of the 400,000 jobs that would have been saved were in their own states. Republican’s have opposed even spending even $10 billion — a third of what the president requested — to keep teachers working.

Though he doesn’t come right out and say the “v-word” on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney would rejigger the federal funding for the largest K-12 programs into a voucher-like system, that would introduce “market dynamics” into education by letting students and families use $25 billion in federal education funding to attend the public, private, charter, or online school of their choice. According to the New York Times, the money would come from programs target students most in need of support: Title 1, for economically disadvantaged students; and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Classic, isn’t it? But it doesn’t stop there. Romney’s budget is impossible to sort out. The military comes in for a bigger spending increase than it even asked for, which implies major cuts that Romney hasn’t yet bothered to specify. Can you blame him? The Romney/Ryan/Republican budget would mean over $800 billion slashed from every program that falls under “non-defense spending.”

According to OMB Acting Director Jeff Zients, education programs would suffer some of the deepest cuts.

• the Department of Education could be cut by more than $115 billion, in ten years;
• 9.6 million students would see their Pell Grants shrink by $1,000 in 2014, and in ten years over a million would lose support altogether;
• about two million Head Start slots would be eliminated within ten years, and 200,000 kids would be axed from the program by 2014.

As Zients says, the Republican justification for cuts like these only adds insult to injury.

Keep in mind: cuts of this magnitude are needed in order to give the few Americans who make more than $1 million a year an average tax cut of at least $150,000.

With even bigger tax cuts than Bush, Romney’s budget requires the kind of cuts that tend not to get one elected, or tend to get one un-elected after a single term: bone deep cuts to popular programs (And given how much Romney wants to be president, I don’t seem him planning to be a one-termer). Blowing up the deficit beyond the realms of anything yet seen, and finding someone to blame would seem to be the only politically viable option left. Yet the Romney campaign and its surrogates claim Romney’s budget “would eliminate the deficit” via the magic of tax cuts.

No wonder Romney wants fewer teachers. Most math teachers I’ve met would give his budget a failing grade, because (a) his math doesn’t add up and (b) he doesn’t bother to show his work.

As bad as it is, the Romney/Republican education agenda is merely a continuation of the starving of our public schools that has been underway for years.

Wall Street’s excesses blew up the economy. Now the question is who pays to clean up the mess. And across the country, our children are already paying part of the bill – as their schools are hit with deep budget cuts. A new report - Starving America’s Public Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates are Hurting our Nation’s Students - released today by the Campaign for America’s Future and the National Education Association looks at five states to detail what this means to kids in our public elementary and secondary schools.

Every study shows the importance of early childhood education. Analysts at the Federal Reserve discovered that investments in childhood development have, in the words of Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, such “high public as well as private returns” that the Fed has championed such investments, noting they save states money by reducing costs of dropouts, special education, and crime prevention. Yet across the country, states are slashing funding for pre-kindergarten and even rolling back all day kindergarten.Now only about one-fourth of 4-year-olds are served by pre-K programs. Ten states have eliminated funding for pre-K altogether, including Arizona. Ohio eliminated funding for all-day kindergarten.

Every parent and teacher knows the importance of smaller classes, particularly in the early years, when individual attention is vital. Yet across the country, schools are facing layoffs of nearly 250,000 workers next year, many of them teachers. In Chester Upland, Pa., 40 percent of the teachers were eliminated, with class sizes rising from 21 to 30 in elementary schools and to 35 in high schools, prompting students to walk out.

… School budgets have been cut in some 34 states and the District of Columbia. In Arizona, the cuts average about $530 per pupil. In Florida, $1 billion was cut in next year’s budget, or about $542 per student. Not surprisingly, these cuts fall hardest on the poorest districts that can’t afford to make up for them the way affluent districts can. The kids who have the greatest need for public education are suffering the deepest cuts.

So, it’s no surprise that conservatives think America needs fewer teachers. They’ve done everything they can to accomplish that end, and promise to do much more. What’s mystifying are their claims that fewer teachers would be good for American education.

It would not have been good for our son. That’s the reason I thanked his teacher when I emailed her. Third grade actually got off to a pretty rocky start for him. As his teacher, she ws instrumental in helping turn that around.

We knew he was a smart kid, but his struggles with attention and behavior overshadowed that at times. What was worse was that he knew he was a smart kid, but few increasingly frustrated with the problems that got in in way no matter how hard he tried. He began to change. In the mornings, as the time for him to leave school drew near, I saw dread come over him like a storm cloud. In the evenings, even after school, that cloud remained.

As parents, we grew concerned and met with his teacher and other school staff before the end of the first term, to figure out what kind of support our son needed – at school and at home. Then, we all worked as a team to make sure he got the support he needed.

It worked. Slowly, the successes started piling up, and our son’s confidence rose. The boy who had dreaded going to school began to look forward to events and activities at school, and started coming home excited about what he’d been learning and doing at school. Occasionally, he’d come home talking about a science experiment he’d done in class, and insist on recreating it at home. Upon seeing him so excited about learning, we were happy to oblige.

The school Geography Bee was probably the biggest example. Our son expressed an interest in participating. My husband and I supported his interest, by taking turns drilling him on the material every night, after homework and dinner. It turned out that our son has a knack for recalling what he’s read or heard. Thus he excelled in the event. Not only did he make the class team, but his teammates elected him captain. Even though his team finished a close second in the final event, our son proudly showed me his medal when I came home that evening.

The transformation from a kid who went out the door expecting to fail, to a kid shooting to get another “A” on his report card didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen solely because of parental involvement. Sure, we’ve done everything we can to help; from the nightly 5-minute flash card drills on multiplication and division, to vocabulary reviews every morning, book reports, poetry assignments, and helping with countless other activities. In fact, our son’s teacher responded to my email by thanking my husband and I for all the support we gave our son at home.

But, let’s face it, he’s not with us most of the day. He spends his “peak learning” time with his teachers. Our efforts at home helped to turn things around. But our work at home wouldn’t have amounted to as much without dedicated teachers and school staff who not only cared enough, but had enough time and resources to help our son become the student we all knew he had the potential to be.

Over the past year, I became more involved in my son’s school as a volunteer. I got to see his learning environment first hand, when I volunteered in his classroom. The first thing I noticed was the class size. There were just 25 students in his class. I don’t know what the ideal class size is, but I know that a larger class would mean my son’s teacher would have less time to work with him one-on-one as she did this year.

We were in regular contact with our son’s teacher this year. Whether it was a question about homework or an upcoming assignment, she always responded with the information we needed. Sometimes, we would hear from the teacher, if there anything came up at school that we needed to follow up on at home. I never got the sense that she was in any way burdened by this level of communication. On the contrary, she seemed delighted to work with parents who were were engaged in their kid’s education, and supporting at home what he learned in class.

Again, I’m no expert on class size. Still, I’m pretty sure that with a bigger class, a teacher would also have less time to communicate with parents. Our son’s teacher did have the time to communicate with us on a regular basis, and I think it made all the difference.

Less funding for education means fewer teachers. Fewer teachers means larger classes. Larger classes means that students who need extra help or attention will be less likely to get it, and less likely to be successful.

Still, Mitt Romney doesn’t think class size matters. Thus, he thinks having fewer teachers won’t matter.

Listen, Mitt. We can’t all send out kids to private schools with an average class size of 12.

As the parent of a child who’s excelling in school because dedicated teachers had the time and resources to give him the help he needs, despite having a class twice that size, my response is inspired by a Pink Floyd song that you might consider adopting as a campaign theme song.

Hey Mitt, leave our teachers alone.

The elites who make policy write about it, have dinner parties where they cluck their tongues about it, mostly have good-paying jobs, health care and secure retirements. They are not affected by it. The elite commissions don’t include unemployed people. The Congressional hearings don’t hear from regular people. The news shows don’t spend a lot of time talking to regular people. The newspapers don’t run op-eds written by regular people because the corporate-conservative think tanks don’t hire regular people regular people to write them.

So the elites think about what is happening in the economy like it is a video game, a TV show, an academic exercise.

This concept struck me back during the “run up” to the Iraq war when I was talking to a conservative supporter of George Bush. He didn’t even try to claim, as Bush did, that Iraq had attacked us on 9/11 or there were WMD in Iraq. He asked if I had ever played the board game Risk. In Risk, he said, it is good to capture countries and surround the enemy. He meant Iran. So hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people were killed, we spent what will add up to trillions of dollars, and all of the other terrible consequences of this lie, for what? Because people thought it was a board game?

Unemployment, low wages, union-busting, foreclosures, refusing to prosecute elites for real crimes — all of these have real consequences for real people and for our country. This is not a board game. The elites should get their heads out of their board-game asses and look at what is happening out here in the real world that exists outside of DC and New York and the high-end malls.

Just drive around the midwest, going from one former manufacturing town to the next. Jeeze, drive around Detroit. We are becoming a third-world country, except where the elites live. The elites would never let that happen where they live, and they move when it starts to happen. But they never fix it — because it doesn’t effect them, and because the rules of the board game say it can’t be happening.

Regular people are being affected, and the elites need to get some regular people onto their commissions and into the hearings and onto the boards of the companies and organizations that make a difference to regular people. The economy is broken — the whole system is broken — but not for the elites. Get some input from regular people and you’ll know that.

And no, I do not mean regular banker people.

I was on CNBC Tuesday when Bill Clinton gave an interview saying that, given the deadlock between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, it seemed likely the Bush tax cuts would be extended in 2013 along with all spending. When asked to comment, I said Clinton was probably correct.

But, of course, Republicans have twisted Clinton’s words into a pretzel. They say the former president came out in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy – in sharp contrast to President Obama’s position that they should not be.

It’s typical election-year politics, except for the fact that the Republican megaphone is larger this time around due to all the Super PAC and secret “social welfare” organization bribes, er, donations that are filling Republican coffers.

Here’s the truth. America has a huge budget deficit hanging over our heads. If the rich don’t pay their fair share, the rest of us have to pay higher taxes — or do without vital public services like Medicare, Medicaid, Pell grants, food stamps, child nutrition, federal aid to education, and more.

Republicans say we shouldn’t raise taxes on the rich when the economy is still in the dumps. This is a variation on their old discredited trickle-down economic theories. The fact is, the rich already spend as much as they’re going to spend. Raising their taxes a bit won’t deter them from buying, and therefore won’t hurt the economy.

In reality, Romney and the GOP are pushing an agenda that has nothing whatever to do with reducing the budget deficit. If they were serious about deficit reduction they wouldn’t demand tax cuts for the very wealthy.

We should have learned by now. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were supposed to be temporary. Even so, they blew a huge hole in the budget deficit.

Millionaires received a tax cut that’s averaged $123,000 a year, while the median-wage worker’s tax cut has amounted to no more than a few hundreds dollars a year.

Bush promised the tax cuts would more than pay for themselves in terms of their alleged positive impact on the economy. The record shows they didn’t. Job growth after the Bush tax cuts was a fraction of the growth under Bill Clinton – even before the economy crashed in late 2008. And the median wage dropped, adjusted for inflation.

Let’s be clear. Romney and the Republicans are pushing a reverse-Robin Hood plan that takes from the middle class and the poor while rewarding the rich.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Romney’s tax plan would boost the incomes of people earning more than $1 million a year by an average of $295,874 annually.

Meanwhile, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Romney’s plan would throw ten million low-income people off the benefits rolls for food stamps or cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or both. “These cuts would primarily affect very low-income families with children, seniors and people with disabilities,” the Center concludes.

The rich have to pay their fair share. Period.

Take a look at this video, in which I provide the three key reasons (and pass it on):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Garder54 calls Kevin June “a real scum.”

LadyDawg4 calls him a “sleazeball.”

Proud2bMom calls him a “liar and a thief.”

Kevin June is the reluctant leader for the 37 families of the Riverdale Mobile Home Village in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, who were evicted from their homes, most of which they owned and paid a monthly lot fee. Some of the residents lived there for more than three decades. Most of the residents are elderly, disabled, or living slightly above the poverty line. Several are employed; all are struggling to survive in a bad economy.

In late February, Aqua–PVR, a joint operation of Aqua America and Penn Virginia Resource Partners, bought the 12-acre trailer park for $550,000. It plans to build a pumping station to withdraw up to three million gallons of water a day from the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, and send that water through a newly-constructed pipeline system to natural gas companies that use fracking. The controversial practice involves forcing as much as 10 million gallons of water, sand, toxic chemicals and potential carcinogens deep into the earth to withdraw natural gas. The Marcellus Shale, primarily in Pennsylvania and parts of four surrounding states, is one of the nation’s largest sources for natural gas. Health and environmental pollution problems are widespread near the wells.

Aqua-PVR had originally ordered the residents to leave by May 1, but then extended it a month. It dangled a $2,500 relocation incentive in its eviction. However, the cost to move each trailer is between $6,000 and $11,000 plus any sheds and ramps.

Most regional trailer parks are either at capacity or won’t accept the older trailers. Getting an apartment is also difficult. Because of the natural gas boom, with thousands of out-of-state workers moving into the area, there are few vacancies, and rents have doubled and tripled. Senior citizen housing isn’t a viable option—waiting lists are as long as a year or two in most areas.

Some have been forced to sell or throw out many of their possessions and move into studio apartments or rooms with relatives. Seven families remain at the trailer park.

But the harpies who have written several hundred posts that appear on the online site of the Williamsport Sun-Gazette have been relentless in their condemnation of the residents. Hiding behind anonymous screen names, the writers, who sound like drunks in a bar fight or callers to an afternoon talk show, could be among the thousands of gas company employees who have moved into the area. They could be those who have leased part of their land to the oil companies. They could also be the business owners who have profited because of selling products to the workers. But almost all of them condemn the residents.

Linhk48, who posted several dozen times, believes “the new owner’s only obligation is to give you notice to vacate. He is under absolutely no obligation to subsidize your move, allow you to live rent free until you move, or hire professionals to help you with relocation. Anything he does is a generosity and SHOULD be appreciated!” Linhk48, like many, called them “rabble-rousers/troublemakers/trespassers.” Czkb217 thought the police or National Guard could move in, and advised the residents, “SO just pack your stuff and MOVE, you are now breaking the law.”

It’s doubtful any of the commentators know Pennsylvania state law, but there are legal processes that must be met to evict persons from their homes. One of the issues lawyers for Riverdale will be pursuing is whether those mandated processes were met.

CitizenQ, who opposes helping the residents and who posted several times, claimed, “some of the residents have been seen stealing from others.” However, the facts are that residents who left the trailer park took what they could from their own trailers, many of which could not safely be moved or which would cost too much to move, and specifically told other residents they could take whatever was left.

Linhk48 thought Aqua–PVR should take the residents to court “for leaving the property with trailer shells and trash all over and ask for clean-up costs—and punitive damages after they were so generous.”

Several repeatedly questioned where the donations to Riverdale went. Some specifically accused Kevin June of theft and fraud, apparently not having the time or intelligence to learn about the controls and regulations to release money from a bank-held account that is a registered 501(c) charity. “The residents know exactly where the money went and why,” says June.

When those writing into the Sun-Gazette later learned some of the money was used to buy phone cards, a camera, lawnmower and weed whacker, they increased their assault. Had they taken the time to think or ask questions — something those who type and pound “SEND” often don’t do — they would have learned that June used the phone cards to cover his expenses in numerous calls to and from attorneys, the media, and others who had an interest in the problems of the residents. They would have learned that the lawyers specifically required June to document the appearance of the village and the residents’ activities. They would have learned that both the previous and new owners had no intention of mowing the lawns or killing the weeds. With pride in their community, the residents took care of the grounds. Cutting grass and eliminating weeds also served to help protect their health; living near the river, with the warm seasons approaching, the residents knew there would be increased black fly and mosquito infestations.

Woolrich haughtily wants to know, “Why on earth would you not have saved money for when you eventually had to move your MOBILE home???” Perhaps, Woolrich, it’s because when you have poverty-level income, it’s hard to save anything.

Czkb217 thought the residents should have just gotten together and bought the park. Possibly, Czkb217, since most of the families live slightly above the poverty line, they didn’t have an extra $550,000 plus lawyer fees and closing costs laying around. Nevertheless, Czkb217 believes the residents should “Just man up and put your big boy panties on and MOVE.” He objects that his taxes are supporting some of the residents who are using Legal Aid, which receives state and federal funds to assist the impoverished. In addition to North Penn Legal Services, the Community Justice Project in Pittsburgh and the Williamsport law firm of Murphy, Butterfield and Holland are assisting pro bono.

Justin1 wants the residents to “Get out of the way of progress already.”

On Friday, June 1, the final day of eviction and the day Aqua–PVR said it would start construction, about 50 persons showed up to blockade the entrance to the park. “We are here to fight against the exploitation and abandonment by a society of the economically vulnerable,” says Dr. Wendy Lee, one of the organizers.

The protestors are often identified as “out-of-town activists” or, more specifically, “environmental activists.” Bobbie2 called the scene a “liberal zoo . . . a veritable microcosm of the liberal social system.” Joe123 called the protestors “unorganized morons,” and decided the residents “are on display by ‘Fame Seekers’, like trick-monkeys in a circus.” Proud2bMom, with no facts, something that never stymied any of the others who wrote into the online site, claimed “the residents left that are trying to get out are more or less being held prisoner in their own homes because of the few who feel they need to block the roads.”

Many of those who attacked the residents and defended corporations probably believe they are good Christians; they go to church regularly and, in one of the more conservative and highly Christian parts of the state, undoubtedly praise God publicly.

However, the Rev. Leah Schade doesn’t see them as good Christians. “It is a craven, cowardly way to snipe at people,” she says. Those criticizing the residents “are profiting from the way things are or they are so insulated from the pain and suffering the people are undergoing that they are unable to respond with compassion,” says Schade, pastor of the United in Christ Lutheran Church in nearby Lewisburg. Schade has been to the trailer park several times to minister to the residents.

“As a Christian,” she says, “I make a decision to do what Jesus calls us to do—to minister to those most vulnerable and resist the powers and the principalities that seek their own self perpetuation and their own profit.” Schade, who is completing a Ph.D. in theology, points out, “The church has a long history of offering a prophetic voice to persons who are oppressed and made vulnerable by powerful systems, and who need advocates to speak for and alongside of them in the public arena. The teachings of Jesus would tell us that what is happening to these families isn’t right. He would ask, ‘Who controls the resources; who does not?’ The residents and the surrounding ecosystem are the disempowered ones.”

A meeting between attorneys for residents at Riverdale and Aqua-PVR was held June 5 to discuss improving the incentives and settlement for the residents. Aqua-PVR, at that time, said it has no immediate intention to remove the residents.

To assist the residents, go to www.saveriverdale.com.

Walter Brasch is an award-winning social issues journalist/columnist and the author of 17 books, most fusing history with contemporary social issues. His current book is Before the First Snow: Stories From the Revolution.