Labor & Employment Law

Lessons of Financial Collapse Can?t Be Ignored

By Mike Hall

If the nation ignores the history of what caused the collapse of the financial system, says Phil Angelides,

“We will be doomed to bail it out again.”

Angelides is chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission charged with finding the causes and culprits behind the nation’s economic disaster. Speaking at panel discussion this afternoon at the America’s Future Now conference,  Angelides said he dubbed the meltdown, “the immaculate financial crisis” because no one on Wall Street, the Big Banks or the deregulating policy makers that controlled the reins of the system, will take responsibility.

There has been almost no reflection by Wall Street over the crisis because the American taxpayers gave them $1 trillion.  Wall Street reform is a start, not an end. We have to commit to changes in our financial system so it works for the many, not the few.

The commission is a 10-member bipartisan panel created by Congress to find the causes of the financial crisis and recommend solutions. It will issue its report in December.

Also speaking at the panel, which explored the next steps for vital issues such as Wall Street reform, green jobs, immigration and civil rights, United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo W. Gerard slammed the deregulation of the economy, and erosion of safety and environmental laws and workers’ rights. Gerard said all have contributed to the economic crash and the nation’s jobs crisis that destroyed 11 million jobs.

If we are going to empower workers and create a new generation of green jobs, we need to eliminate the economic philosophy, the laissez-faire philosophy that has given us 20 years of economic failure and at the same time has eroded workers’ right to organize.

He also said if the nation is to build a green jobs economy that will not only put people back to work but create new jobs, such an economy must be built in the United States. Pointing toward the interconnections between various laws and polices, Gerard singled out BP’s actions.

“At the same time BP was fighting for the deregulation of the oil industry” (which many believe was major contributor to the Gulf oil spill), “they were closing their U.S. solar panel plant and moving China.”

We’ve got to demand U.S. tax payer dollars are used to create jobs here, if we are going to build the green economy, it’s a green economy that should be built here.

Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, said immigration reform, as contentious as it is, must be tackled now.

There is never going to be an easy time to take on this issue… But we can’t ignore the devastating consequences a broken immigration system has on the economy…The civil rights of legal residents and citizens are under attack and U.S. workers are undermined and [immigrant] workers are exploited.

She also called Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, “an all-out assault on our nation’s values.”

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous warned that sitting on the sidelines in the November elections because of disappointment at the pace of change people voted for in 2008, will have long term consequences.

If progressive activists want to end “the dead debates of the 20th century” over civil rights, immigration reform, the right of workers to join unions that the extreme right continues to exploit, and move change forward, Jealous said,

we’ve got to get up off our couches and go door-to-door, because the battle this fall will determine the direction this country takes in the next 10 years.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on June 08, 2010 (boomark / email).