Dave Lindorff

We are witnessing one of the fastest betrayals of the Democratic Party base in modern memory, as President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate slither away from a crucial constituency, the labor movement, and from support of labor's key legislative agenda item: passage of a bill, the "Employee Free Choice Act," which would restore a measure of fairness to labor relations.

Obama, who once supported the measure, and who campaigned saying he would sign the bill, has stood shamelessly silent as a massive corporate campaign mounted by such lobbying powerhouses as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Retail Federation, hiding behind a fake "citizen action" organization called the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (sic), has descended on Congress, and especially the Senate, has worked to peel away support for the bill among both Democrats and swing Republicans who had formally backed the measure.

George Santayana once famously said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." But what about those who don't just ignore history, but who hire and take counsel from those who committed historic follies in the past?

Back in November 1999, Congress passed legislation pushed by then Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX), rescinding the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act. The measure, backed by the Clinton Administration, and overwhelmingly passed by the Senate (90-8) and the House (362-57), opened the way for banks to merge with investment banks and insurance companies, and led directly to the current financial cataclysm.

A report on that Congressional action written by reporter Stephen Labaton and published in The New York Times on Nov. 5, 1999 under the headline "Congress Passes Wide-Ranging Bill Easing Bank Laws," includes some remarkable quotes from key players in that sellout to the financial sector.

Here's Larry Summers, a chief architect of the current financial industry multi-trillion-dollar bailout giveaway being orchestrated by the Obama Administration, where he serves as director of President Obama's National Economic Council:

As the country contemplates a major reform and restructuring of the way we run our national health care system (if it can even be called that), it needs to be pointed out that the mammoth health insurance industry is nothing but a parasite on that system.

Health insurance companies add zero value to the delivery of health care. Indeed, they are a significant cost factor that sucks up, according to some estimates such as one by the organization Physicians for a National Health Program, as much as 31 percent of every dollar spent on medical services (a percentage that has been rising steadily year after year).

Wait a minute! Did I hear correctly? Did Treasury Secretary and former New York Federal Reserve Bank screw-up Tim Geithner really tell a House Financial Services Committee today that he needed "new powers" to allow the federal government to take control of non-bank financial corporations whose actions threaten the financial system or the economy and "break them up"?

The subject under discussion at the hearing was AIG, and Geithner and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, under attack for those AIG "bonus payments" to executives, were trying to talk tough about the evil insurance giant.

But aren't the powers that Geithner is calling for exactly the powers that he and Bernanke already have in the case of the banking industry?

Yes they are.

So why aren't we seeing the Obama Administration and the Fed going after the banking giants that have been co-conspirators with AIG in wreaking havoc with the U.S. and the global economy by creating dodgy structured financial instruments that allowed banks and other financial companies to make huge off-balance-sheet bets that virtually guaranteed a future collapse?

Six months after the failed Bush administration effort to "rescue" the U.S. financial system, and after two months of failed efforts by his own new administration, at an expense to the American public of several trillion dollars and counting, the Obama Administration is announcing plans to blow another $1 trillion in a massive taxpayer giveaway to investors who will be subsidized in an effort to get them to buy the so-called toxic assets on the books of the nation's biggest banks.

The problem with this plan is that its goal -- getting these zombie banks to start lending again -- is not going to work. It doesn't matter how good the balance sheets of the banks are. Good companies, and even individuals and families with good credit, are simply not borrowing. As I wrote last month in an article titled "Follow the Money" in the magazine Treasury and Risk, the problem isn't that banks are too weak to lend (though the zombie banks certainly are), it's that the strong banks don't want to throw money at bad borrowers.

The actions of Obama's chief financial adviser Larry Summers and his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in permitting the payment of $165 million in bonuses to AIG executives (Summers, according to The Wall Street Journal, actually pressed Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) to secretly remove a bar to the payment of such bonuses from the bailout bill) and storm of public outrage that has followed public disclosure of those payments, provides President Obama, whose administration is stumbling badly on many fronts, to turn things around and avoid political disaster.

He should promptly demand Geithner's and Summers' resignations, and should also fire the CEO of AIG, Edward Liddy (as 80% owner of AIG, the U.S. has the power to do that anytime). It would also be a good idea at the same time to fire the CEOs of all the leading banks that are at this point surviving on government bailouts.

For years, advocates of open government, mostly on the left but also on the right, have railed against the growing secrecy of the U.S. government. But the focus, particularly of left critics, has been on the Intelligence budget, a $40+ billion "black box" completely protected from public and even Congressional scrutiny, and on large swaths of the Pentagon budget, allegedly kept hidden for "national security" reasons.

For the most part, the American public has adopted an ovine attitude towards such secrecy, assuming that the "government knows best."

Now, with the economic crisis, and the collapse of AIG, Citibank, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, General Motors, Chrysler, and other leading U.S. firms, and with bailouts that are putting taxpayers on the hook to the tune of trillions of dollars, the people are waking up, or at least are starting to get restless in their slumber.

Perhaps there will be a new awareness soon of the importance of transparency in all parts of government.

For now, the Obama Administration, the Federal Reserve and Congress are all trying desperately to ease the citizenry back into a state of torpor by adopting a position of mock outrage at the $135 million in bonuses paid out by AIG to the very employees who created the disastrous and crooked credit default swap market that precipitated the global economic collapse.

It may not be obvious today, and certainly it's not how the corporate media reported it, but future historians are likely to look back at May 13, 2009 as the day that American imperialism began its inexorable decline. That's the day that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced that his country was "worried" about its holdings of over $1 trillion in U.S. treasury securities, and warned that he wanted the U.S. to assure China that it would maintain its good credit and "honor its promises" and "maintain the safety of China's assets."

There is no way that the U.S. can accommodate Premier Wen and still finance and operate a global military system with over 1,000 overseas bases, massive aircraft carrier battle groups, and with hundreds of thousands of men and women armed to the teeth with the latest high-tech military hardware, not to mention fight endless wars on the far side of the globe.

Back in 1966 when I was a 17-year old and just finished with my junior year in high school, I spent part of the summer working as a dishwasher and busboy at a couple of restaurants on Cape Cod. It was grueling and low-paid work, and by the time I'd done it for about five weeks, I was ready to give it up.

The road beckoned, and so I contacted a friend, Charlie Vidich, and proposed that we hitchhike to Alaska, being the most remote place I could think of that we could get to overland without a passport.

The idea didn't sit well with our two respective mothers, but we prevailed on them with the help of our fathers, who I think were happy to see us out of the house, and so we packed knapsacks and bedrolls, went out on the road, stuck out our thumbs, and headed north and west.

A few days ago, I sent off an article I had just written on assignment to the editor of a magazine that was preparing to run it. A few moments later, I got an e-mail back: he had just been fired and the magazine was being shut down by the publisher. My story, for which I had expected to be paid $1500, was toast.

When I tried to write back a reply to the editor, I got a message saying that my e-mail message was "undeliverable."

I called the editor (who worked from home) on his cell phone and, still sounding shell-shocked, he informed me that immediately after notifying him, with no warning, that he was being axed, the publisher had eliminated his company e-mail account and had blocked him from accessing the company's server, thus effectively cutting him off from all the contacts he had developed over his years at the company.