Phyllis Bennis: A tale of two tragedies at sea

Via OtherWords.org

Recent weeks saw two terrible tragedies at sea.

In one, five explorers died when the Titan submersible imploded in the North Atlantic. In the other, over 600 refugees — most of them women and children — drowned in the Mediterranean when their fishing trawler sank.

Both voyages ended in a heartbreaking loss of life. But there were vast differences between the two tragedies in media attention and government response, highlighting just how unequal our world has become.

On board the Titan were two billionaires and one of their sons, along with a CEO and research director of companies tied to undersea adventure tourism. They were headed for the wreckage of the Titanic, which sank 111 years ago.

When the Titan lost contact with its mother ship less than two hours after descent began, calls for assistance immediately went out. Help came quickly from the U.S. and Canadian coast guards and navies, along with support from France and offers from other countries.

Sonar-equipped planes, undersea diving equipment, trained divers, and search ships of every variety steamed to the area. Meanwhile, breathless coverage of the tragedy stayed on the front pages around the world as TV news counted down the hours of oxygen left in the small craft.

The rescue cost is unknown, but initial estimates are around $100 million — a cost that will be footed by taxpayers.

Compare this to the story of the Andriana, which sank off the coast of Greece just two days after the Titan went down. The Andriana was thought to be carrying over 700 people, of whom just 104 survived. No women or children were among the survivors.

The limited news coverage of the Andriana included nothing like the up-close-and-personal human stories of the lives and dreams of the five men aboard the Titan. Except for a few, we don’t even know their names.

They were desperate migrants, many of them refugees, from countries wracked by war, poverty, climate disasters and human-rights violations — including Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine, Pakistan and Egypt. They were sailing from Libya in a decrepit fishing boat, hoping to make it to Europe alive.

The Greek coast guard quickly realized that the ship was in trouble, but didn’t try to rescue the desperate passengers on the deck. Greek authorities made assertions — vehemently disputed by ship captains nearby, migrant advocates, and the passengers themselves — that the ship had turned down offers of assistance.

The ship had been in distress almost two days before it sank, but help didn’t come until it was too late. How many might have been rescued with one-tenth the resources that were rushed to save the very, very people on the Titan?

Europe’s racist approach to migration starts and ends with preventing African, Asian and Arab migrants from entering European territory. But it’s not just a European problem.

Indeed, the continent’s policies on migrants bear a tragic — indeed criminal — similarity to our own in the United States. As thousands of desperate refugees and migrants have died crossing the Mediterranean, thousands more from Central America, the Caribbean, and beyond have died trying to cross the desert along the U.S.-Mexico border.

How many might have been saved if immigration policy were grounded in keeping migrants safe, rather than keeping them out?

The rescue effort mounted for those lost on the Titan shows what’s possible when those in danger are treated like they matter. U.S. officials should work just as hard to rescue poor and endangered migrants as they do the billionaires — their lives matter just as much.

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

#Titan

#Andrina

#migrants

Sam Pizzigati: Amazon’s business model can kill

From OtherWords.org

BOSTON

Old-school home-improvement contractors have a piece of folk wisdom they love to share with prospective clients. “Listen,” they like to say. “I can do this job fast, I can do it cheap, or I can do it well. But I can’t do all three.”

This wisdom has been around forever. But not everyone gets it — take billionaire Jeff Bezos. His Amazon empire prides itself on delivering good results fast and cheap.

That works well enough for Bezos, now worth around $200 billion. And Amazon consumers, the company PR maintains, can get almost whatever they want quickly and cheaply. But for Amazon workers — and our broader society — Amazon’s empire building has been anything but good.

That became disastrously apparent this month, when a tornado swept through Edwardsville, Ill., leaving six Amazon warehouse workers dead. Debris from their workplace turned up “tens of miles” away, the National Weather Service reported.

Unfortunately, this tragedy should not have taken anyone by surprise.

Why did Amazon locate its Edwardsville operations right in Tornado Alley? No mystery there. Edwardsville’s plentiful acreage and easy access to interstate highways, airports, and other transport offered Amazon the promise of speedy delivery times and lower delivery costs.

Check fast. Check cheap. But the warehouse went up with no special attention to tornado safety. That would have raised the cost.

OSHA — the federal occupational health and safety agency — has now begun an investigation. Since the deaths in Edwardsville, Amazon workers throughout the southern Illinois area have been ripping the company for failing to conduct tornado drills and expecting workers to keep working even after alarms ring out.

Amazon’s “storm shelter” spaces for Edwardsville workers turned out to have another name: bathrooms. Moments before the tornado’s arrival, Edwardsville worker Craig Yost told local news, Amazon supervisors were directing people into their worksite’s bathroom “shelters.”

“The walls caved in, and I got pinned to the ground by a giant block of concrete,” Yost said. “On top of my left knee was a door from the bathroom stall, and my head was on that with my left arm wrapped around my head. I could just move my right hand and foot.”

Meanwhile, the company has been actively exercising its considerable power to prevent the one turn of events that could reliably keep Amazon on its safety toes: a union. Earlier this year, Amazon quashed a union drive at its Bessemer, Ala., warehouse so egregiously that the National Labor Relations board has ordered a do-over on the election.

But the problem goes beyond Amazon. Our nation’s corporate giants have been on a ferocious 50-year offensive against collective bargaining.

In the mid-20th Century, over a third of America’s private-sector workers belonged to unions. Now only 6.3 percent of private-sector workers carry union cards, despite polling data showing that the share of nonunion workers who want a union at their worksite has increased markedly.

Corporate America’s squeeze on unions has kept wages low, share prices high and compensation for top executives at stratospheric levels. Earlier this year, Institute for Policy Studies research revealed that CEOs at America’s 100 largest low-wage employers saw their personal compensation jump by $1,862,270 in 2020.

Over the past year, Jeff Bezos has seen his wealth soar by over $4 billion — seven times the annual budget of OSHA, the agency investigating the disaster at his Edwardsville warehouse. So here’s an idea for lawmakers in Washington: A 5 percent annual federal wealth tax on those Bezos billions could quadruple the annual OSHA budget — and then quadruple it again.

Amazon’s relentless quest to sell goods fast and cheap has rewarded Bezos tremendously, but it’s come at a huge cost for the rest of us. If the company rebuilds its Edwardsville warehouse, Bezos should listen to his handyma\

Sam Pizzigati, who is based in Boston, co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.

Lindsay Koshgarian: The wasted opportunities since 9/11

Flight paths of the 9/11 murderers

Via OtherWords.org

NORTHAMPTON, Mass.

Twenty years have now passed since 9/11.

The 20 years since those terrible attacks have been marked by endless wars, harsh immigration crackdowns and expanded federal law enforcement powers that have cost us our privacy and targeted entire communities based on nothing more than race, religion, or ethnicity.

Those policies have also come at a tremendous monetary cost — and a dangerous neglect of domestic investment.

In a new report I co-authored with my colleagues at the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, we found that the federal government has spent $21 trillion on war and militarization both inside the U.S. and around the world over the past 20 years. That’s roughly the size of the entire U.S. economy.

Even while politicians have written blank checks for militarism year after year, they’ve said we can’t afford to address our most urgent issues. No wonder these past 20 years have been rough on U.S. families and communities.

After often strong growth from 1970 to 2000, household incomes have stagnated for 20 years as Americans struggled through two recessions in the years leading up to the pandemic. As pandemic eviction moratoriums end, millions are at risk of homelessness.

Our public-health systems have also been chronically underfunded, leaving the U.S. helpless to enact the testing, tracing, and quarantining that helped other countries limit the pandemic’s damage. Over 650,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 — the equivalent of a 9/11 every day for over seven months. The opioid epidemic claims another 50,000 lives a year.

Meanwhile, such extreme weather events as wildfires, hurricanes and floods have grown in frequency over the past 20 years. The U.S. hasn’t invested nearly enough in either renewable energy or climate resiliency to deal with the increasing effects climate change has on our communities.

In the face of all this suffering, it’s clear that $21 trillion in spending hasn’t made us any safer.

Instead, the human costs have been staggering. Around the world, the forever wars have cost 900,000 lives and left 38 million homeless — and as the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan has shown us, they were a massive failure.

Our militarized spending has helped deport 5 million people over the past 20 years, often taking parents from their children. The majority of those deported hadn’t committed any crime except for being here.

And it has paid for the government to listen in on our phone calls and target communities for harassment and surveillance without any evidence of crime or wrongdoing, eroding the civil liberties of all Americans.

Fortunately, there’s a silver lining: We’ve found that for just a fraction of what we’ve spent on militarization these last 20 years, we could start to make life much better.

For $4.5 trillion, we could build a renewable, upgraded energy grid for the whole country. For $2.3 trillion, we could create 5 million $15-an-hour jobs with benefits — for 10 years. For just $25 billion, we could vaccinate low-income countries against COVID-19, saving lives and stopping the march of new and more threatening virus variants.

We could do all that and more for less than half of what we’ve spent on wars and militarization in the last 20 years. With communities across the country in dire need of investment, the case for avoiding more pointless, deadly wars couldn’t be clearer.

The best time for those investments would have been during the past 20 years. The next best time is now.

Lindsay Koshgarian directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She’s the lead author of the new report “State of Insecurity: The Cost of Militarization Since 9/11’’. She lives in Northampton.

On the Connecticut River in Northampton

Jill Richardson: It’s past time to toss Trump’s huge lies about immigrants

Preparing for an immigrant-naturalization ceremony in Salem, Mass.

Via OtherWords.org

As Donald Trump leaves office, it’s worth remembering how he first launched his campaign: by calling immigrants “murderers” and “rapists.”

This was outrageous then. And there’s more evidence now that it was, of course, false.

A new study finds that “undocumented immigrants have considerably lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of criminal offenses, including violent, property, drug, and traffic crimes.”

The study concludes that there’s “no evidence that undocumented criminality has become more prevalent in recent years across any crime category.” Previous studies found no evidence to support Trump’s claim, but now we have better data than ever before.

Put another way, Trump was telling a dangerous lie.

Sociologists Michael Light, Jingying He and Jason Robey used crime and immigration data from Texas from 2012 to 2018 to find that “relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.”

Unfounded accusations of criminality are a longstanding tool of racism and other forms of bigotry across a range of social categories.

When anti-LGBTQ activist Anita Bryant wanted to discriminate against gays and lesbians in the 1970s, she claimed they molested children. More recently, when transphobic people wanted to ban trans women from women’s bathrooms, they falsely claimed that trans women would rape cisgender women in bathrooms.

Consider how much anti-Black racists justified their actions in the name of “protecting white women” from Black men. In 1955, a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, wrongly claimed that a 14-year-old Black boy, Emmett Till, grabbed her and threatened her. White men lynched Till in retaliation. More than half a century later, Donham revealed that her accusations were false.

In 1989, the Central Park Five — five Black and Latino boys between the ages of 14 and 16 —  were wrongly convicted and imprisoned for raping a white woman. They didn’t do it. In 2002, someone else confessed and DNA evidence confirmed it. (Trump, who took out full-page ads calling for their execution then, never apologized.)

Racism and bigotry are about power and status. Yet instead of openly admitting that some groups simply want power over others, most bigots find reasons that sound plausible to the uninformed — even if the reasons are completely untrue. Bigotry is much easier to market if it can masquerade as fighting crime.

It wasn’t just Trump himself. During the Trump administration, officials like the U.S. solicitor general argued before the Supreme Court that undocumented immigrants are disproportionately likely to commit crime. Data: None. Claims: False.

As the late New York U.S. Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

So when you hear a claim that a particular group of marginalized people are criminals, question it. What is the evidence for the claim? What is the evidence against the claim? Why is the person making the claim, and how will they benefit if people believe them?

If someone cites research, who performed the research, and who funded it? Do the funders have a financial stake in the research findings? Was it published in a peer-reviewed journal? Is the data publicly available for others to replicate the findings?

In this case, the research debunking this racist lie was government-funded, peer-reviewed in a major journal, and the data is available to the public.

Hearing that particular group of people poses a threat to your safety can be frightening. But because such claims have been used throughout history to spread bigotry against marginalized groups, they should always be fact-checked.

In this case, the evidence is clear. Trump stoked anti-immigrant sentiment in the name of fighting crime, and his claims were baseless and false. The lie should end with his presidency.

Jill Richardson is a sociologist.

Jim Hightower: Pandemic has been a bonanza for the rich

Via OtherWords.org

Let’s say you’re a millionaire. That’s a lot of money, right? Now let’s say you’re a billionaire. That’s a lot more money! But how much more?

Think of all those dollars as seconds on a clock. A million seconds would total 11 days – but a billion seconds equals nearly 32 years.

Rich is nice, but billionaire-rich is over the moon — and the wealth of billionaires is now zooming out of this world.

There are only 2,200 billionaires in the whole world, but the wealth stashed away by these elites hit a new record this summer, averaging more than $4 billion each. They’ve even pocketed an extra half-billion bucks on average in the midst of the COVID-19 economic crash.

Bear in mind that these fortunate few did nothing to earn this haul. They didn’t work harder, didn’t get one-digit smarter, didn’t create some new breakthrough product to benefit humankind. They could just crank back in their gold-plated La-Z-Boys and let their money make money for them.

Then there are multimillionaire corporate chieftains who are cashing in on their own failure.

Having closed stores throughout America, fired thousands of workers, stiffed suppliers and creditors, taken bailout money from taxpayers, and even led their corporations into bankruptcy, the CEOs of such collapsing giants as Hertz, JCPenney, and Toys “R” Us have grabbed millions of dollars in — believe it or not — bonus payments!

The typical employee at JCPenney for example, is held to part-time work, making under $12,000 a year. Thousands of them are now losing even that miserly income as the once-mighty retailer is shutting 154 stores. Yet, the CEO was paid a $4.5 million cash bonus before the company filed for bankruptcy this year.

And still, the corporate establishment wonders why the people consider them heartless and greedy.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker.

Joshua Cho: Even in Pennsylvania, opposing fracking isn't 'political suicide'

Fracking in progress

Via OtherWords.org

In this year’s vice presidential debate, Sen. Kamala Harris reiterated Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s rejection of a fracking ban, despite her earlier call for one when she was a presidential candidate.

“I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact,” Harris said.

Whenever there are discussions about banning fracking, media coverage seems to prioritize potential “risks” to Democrats’ electoral prospects, or potential economic downturns. Unfortunately, a lot of this coverage is quite sloppy.

For instance, The New York Times quoted absurd claims that a fracking ban would mean “hundreds of thousands” of Pennsylvanians would be “unemployed overnight.” In reality, about 26,000 people work in all of Pennsylvania’s oil and gas sector.

Still, The Times suggested that any presidential candidate who supports a national fracking ban would risk losing Pennsylvania, calling the issue “a political bet.” A fracking ban “could jeopardize any presidential candidate’s chances of winning this most critical of battleground states — and thus the presidency itself,” the paper wrote.

NPR likewise made dubious pronouncements on the opinions of swing-state voters the focal point of the story, reporting that “aggressive” climate action “could push moderate voters in key swing states to reelect President Trump,” and even cited — without rebuttal — a claim from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that a fracking ban would eliminate 17 percent of all U.S. jobs.

Soon after the debate, Quartz explained that Biden and Harris don’t support a fracking ban because it “tempts political suicide in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio where fossil fuels still rule.” And the Los Angeles Times described Biden’s opposition to a fracking ban as a “nuanced position.”

There are two big problems with these arguments.

First, as journalist David Sirota pointed out, “the idea that a fracking ban is political poison in Pennsylvania” simply “isn’t substantiated by empirical data.”

A January poll of Pennsylvania voters found that more registered voters support a fracking ban (48 percent) than oppose it (39 percent). A later CBS/YouGov poll in August found 52 percent of Pennsylvania voters supporting a fracking ban. These numbers hardly suggest “political suicide.”

Second, there’s simple climate science.

In 2018, the U.N. announced that carbon pollution needs to be cut by 45 percent by 2030 to prevent irreversible planetary devastation.

Unfortunately, fracking releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, which can warm the planet 80 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. And recent reporting has suggested that fracking is an even bigger contributor to global warming than previously believed.

At the debate, Harris emphasized that Biden “believes” in science.

She claimed he “understands that the West Coast of our country is burning” and “sees what is happening on the Gulf states, which are being battered by storms,” and that he has “seen and talked with the farmers in Iowa, whose entire crops have been destroyed because of floods.”

But on this issue, the science clearly points in one direction: away from fracking.

Finally, banning fracking doesn’t need to mean eliminating jobs. Environmental and labor activists, economists, and scientists have for years discussed the need for a full employment program based on green jobs to serve as a just transition for workers. Green industries could employ many, many more workers than fossil fuels. 

There is no reason for a fracking ban to be “political suicide” — except, maybe, for the fossil fuel industry.

Joshua Cho (@JoshC0301) is a writer based in Virginia. This op-ed was adapted from a longer piece at FAIR.org and distributed by OtherWords.org.

Chuck Collins/Helen Flannery: America needs emergency charity stimulus

Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy a Puck magazine cartoon by Louis Dalrymple, 1903.

From OtherWords.org

BOSTON

We are living through a time of unprecedented challenges: a major public health crisis and a deepening recession.

Congress has already authorized trillions in stimulus funds. But millions of Americans are still relying on the support of local nonprofits such as food banks and human services. These nonprofits are going to need major infusions of support from charitable donations and foundations.

Fortunately, Congress can help them come up with $200 billion — without costing taxpayers another dime.

We have heard many heartening stories of charitable foundations and individual donors stepping up to fund emergency responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. But this moment has also unmasked a basic design flaw in the U.S. charity system: Donors can contribute to charitable intermediaries that then may sideline the funds for years — or forever.

Right now, there’s an estimated $1.2 trillion in wealth warehoused in private foundations and donor-advised funds. While the donors to these funds have already taken substantial tax breaks for their contributions — sometimes decades ago — there are few incentives to move the money out to charities doing urgent, necessary work.

In fact, America’s 728,000 donor-advised funds, or DAFs — which hold an estimated $120 billion — aren’t legally required to pay out their funds at all, ever. While some DAFs, especially those administered by community foundations, pay out in a timely way, other accounts can languish for years.

America’s 86,000 foundations, which hold over $1 trillion in assets, are mandated by tax law to pay out 5 percent of their assets each year. But many treat that 5 percent as a ceiling, not a floor. And even that 5 percent can include overhead expenses and investments in profit-making companies, rather than direct support for nonprofits.

Remember: these donations are subsidized by ordinary taxpayers. For the wealthiest donors, every dollar parked in their foundation or DAF reduces their tax obligations by as much as 74 cents, leaving people of more modest means to cover public programs.

These wealthy donors have already claimed their tax breaks. Now — in a crisis — ordinary taxpayers need to see the benefit of the funds they subsidized flowing to charities on the ground.

Over 700 foundations have signed a pledge to “act with fierce urgency” to support nonprofit partners and communities hit hardest by COVID-19. And the community foundation sector has set up emergency response systems in all 50 states to channel donations to COVID-19 response efforts.

These are inspiring voluntary efforts. But in this unprecedented emergency, it’s time to mandate an increased flow of funds.

As part of the CARES Act stimulus, Congress increased incentives for charitable giving. In the same spirit, we urge Congress, as part of its next relief bill, to support an “Emergency Charity Stimulus” to inject more than $200 billion into the economy, protect jobs in the nonprofit sector, and help fight the coronavirus disaster.

For three years, Congress should require private foundations to double their annual required payout, from 5 percent to 10 percent. For each one percent increase in payout, an estimated $11 billion to $12.6 billion will flow to charities annually. The same standard should apply to donor advised funds as well.

America’s taxpayers have already effectively paid for these funds. Now we need them deployed to working charities.

Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. Helen Flannery is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was adapted from Inequality.org and distributed by OtherWords.org.

Tracey Aikman: I'm one of those factory workers Trump lied to

From OtherWords.org

My entire working life has been dictated by offshoring. I’ve spent my career jumping from one factory closing to another.

When President Trump was elected, he said: “Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences.” His promises ring hollow to me after I got my latest layoff notice.

My first job out of high school was at a factory owned by United Technologies in Wabash, Ind. I showed up to work in March 1991 and a sign on the door read: “Moved to Mexico.” My mother, who worked for a sister factory, also lost her job when her factory was sent south of the border.

I eventually got a union job at Chrysler in Kokomo, Indiana, which allowed me to give my family a middle-class life and build our dream house on five acres of land. In 2008, I got laid off. I lost my house and had to start over financially.

When I got my job at Schneider Electric’s “Square D” plant in Peru, Ind., five years ago, making electrical boxes and equipment, I hoped that this job would sustain me until I was ready to retire.

Unfortunately, the multinational corporation that owns our plant announced this summer that they would be moving our work to Mexico and other plants. Once our plant closes, all of Schneider Electric’s North American factories will be non-union.

Now I’m facing another layoff, even though our Peru plant was profitable. In fact, the same week I was laid off, Schneider Electric announced profits of $2.2 billion for the first half of 2019.

I’m not alone. Workers across the Midwest are suffering the same fate. And President Trump continues to fail us. Instead of punishing companies like Schneider Electric, he has rewarded them with $120 million in federal contracts and a massive tax break. The closure of my factory is sad proof that Trump’s lies have consequences.

Trump’s broken promises have become a broken record destroying our communities, even though here in Miami County, we gave him the vast majority of our votes in 2016.

Right now, Our Revolution, a political advocacy organization inspired by Sen. Bernie Sander’s historic presidential run in 2016, is helping to organize a miracle effort to save our plant. Joined by workers from the shuttered GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and workers from the Carrier plant in Indianapolis, we are calling on Trump to sign an executive order that would prevent taxpayer dollars from going to companies that are shipping American jobs overseas.

With the next round of layoffs scheduled for Sept. 27, there is no time to waste.

We have one request for President Trump: Use the power of the government over federal contracts to stop our jobs from leaving the United States. Show us that you mean what you said when you promised to be a workers’ champion.

We need your help now — and we’ll remember if we don’t get it.

Tracey Aikman has been laid off by global corporations United Technologies, Chrysler and now Schneider Electric. He is married and is a father of two.

Chuck Collins: Wall St., Trump hope that you've forgotten 2008

This first ran in OtherWords.org

Remember 2008 — the bank bailouts, the spiking unemployment rate, the stock market free fall?

Maybe you lost a job, got a pay cut, or saw your retirement savings or home value evaporate. Maybe you even lost your home altogether, or saw your small business wither and die.

It’s a hard thing to let go. But Wall Street is hoping you’ve already forgotten it.

That’s because their allies in Congress and the Trump administration are poised to scrap the reforms that lawmakers put in place to prevent another meltdown.

For starters, they’re trying to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the first independent agency with the sole mandate of protecting consumers against scam artists, predatory lenders, and bad actors in the financial sector.

The agency proved its mettle last year, when it caught Wells Fargo — the second biggest bank in the country — creating millions of bogus accounts without their customers’ permission. The bureau exposed that cheating and put an end to it.

Dodd-Frank, the law that created the bureau, also made rules to keep banks from making risky bets with your money.

For instance, it requires banks to keep some skin in the game by maintaining a 5 percent stake in loans they originate, so they have a stake in the success of the borrower and the loan. It also encourages banks to keep some cash on hand in case of emergencies, just like the rest of us try to do at home.

Yet lately, bankers have been complaining that financial regulation is hurting the economy. Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs president — and now a Trump economic adviser — whined recently that banks are being forced to “hoard capital.”

If maintaining a prudent reserve is hoarding, then yes. And that’s a good thing.

Bankers like Cohn say abolishing these rules will help ordinary consumers. When you hear things like that, hold tight to your wallets and purses.

The truth is, cheap credit is abundant. The commercial and industrial business industries are booming. Credit card and auto lending are at record highs, and mortgage loans are almost back to their pre-2008 crisis high.

If that’s not enough for Wall Street lenders who want to gamble, they should go to the casino. And if venture capitalists want to take great risks in search of great rewards, blessings upon them. But they shouldn’t expect the rest of us to bail them out after their next binge.

What about Donald Trump? Will he protect us?

Trump campaigned as a champion for the “little guy,” beholden to no one because of his independent wealth. He smeared opponents like Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton for being “puppets” of big banks like Goldman Sachs.

My advice? Watch what Trump does, not what he says.

After all, Trump just installed the most pro-Wall Street team our nation has ever seen. Three of his senior advisers — including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin — have a combined 40 years at Goldman Sachs.

Now they’d like to remove the sheriff from the financial sector. If they get their way, I’ll give you better odds than Vegas that they’ll crash the economy again — and stick you and me with the bill.

Lock up your treasure. Call your lawmaker. Don’t go back to sleep.

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a co-editor of Inequality.org. He’s the author of the recent book Born on Third Base.

Emily Schwartz Greco: So Trump would 'take their oil'?

Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign ad pledges to “take their oil.” That’s what President (gasp) Trump would do after having “quickly cut the head off the Islamic State,” says the deep-voiced narrator.

Along with political decapitation, there are many disturbing things in the Republican front-runner’s commercials besides these three words. But stop and ponder the questions they raise.

First, the U.S. government lacks state-owned oil companies, the requisite drilling equipment, and a fleet of tankers. How would Trump “take their oil”?

He’d get around this inconvenience wrought by America’s capitalist system by giving ExxonMobil the job, and backing the corporation up with “a ring” of U.S. troops.

“You ever see these guys, how good they are, the great oil companies?” Trump crowed in Iowa in November. “They’ll rebuild that sucker, brand new — it’ll be beautiful.”

(Exxon and its competitors aren’t “great” companies. They’re destroying the planet and are dangerous for investors. But let’s stick with those three words.)

Second, much of the territory the Islamic State controls today lies in oil-poor Syria. If a businessman-turned-president is going to deal with all the hassles that making our nation’s fifth-largest corporation an official agent of foreign policy would entail, why operate there?

Further, Syria faces a crisis so severe that babies are starving and the locals are eating cats and dogs to stay alive. Taking their oil would sow more instability and create more refugees. Doesn’t Trump see how bad snatching oil from the Islamic State’s survivors right after it falls would look?

Whether it’s out of humanitarian concern or propelled by the optics, shouldn’t the immediate post-ISIS U.S. mobilization focus on delivering aid and relief rather than further impoverishing the carpet-bombed populace?

Furthermore, the diplomatic conflict now brewing between Iran and Saudi Arabia may spiral into a regional war. Shouldn’t the Pentagon get out of the way instead of forming a “ring” around invasive oil rigs?

Finally, Uncle Sam can’t take oil that doesn’t lie below federal land without stealing it. How would swiping a commodity that belongs to other people foster stability in the Middle East and dial back the threat of “radical Islamic extremism,” three other wordsTrump likes to chant?

He’s also repeatedly criticized the U.S. government for not “taking” Iraq’s oil during Washington’s occupation, which began 13 years ago amid related oily delusions.

“The bulk of the funds for Iraq’s reconstruction will come from Iraqis,” notably including their oil revenue, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrongly predicted in October 2003.

Ultimately, Washington squandered $60 billion on Iraq’s botched reconstruction. The U.S. government left the country in shambles, vulnerable to the Islamic State’s operatives, and ready to forge military ties with Iran.

Trump’s call for easy fixes and letting post-conflict oil pay the bills coincides with our country’s latest Middle Eastern milestone. The Gulf War officially began with the bombing of Baghdad on January 17, 1991. Happy 25th anniversary, everybody!

While shorter and cheaper than the second Iraq War, that misadventure set the stage for the failures that followed. It dragged on in other ways through years of harsh economic sanctions and intermittent bombing.

The conflict inflicted immeasurable misery upon the Iraqi people with relatively little inconvenience on our part. Since it ended, however, cancers and other chronic diseaseshave sickened and even killed some 200,000 Gulf War veterans.

Isn’t it time to stop pretending that Americans can quickly fix the Middle East’s problems and deluding ourselves about how the profits from taking their oil will pay the tab for our military intervention?

It sure would be nice if the GOP presidential debate moderators were to ask The Donald some of these questions.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords.org, where this piece originated.