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Inherited merit is perceived as un-American and justifiably so in the land of supposed equal opportunities. Historically, the “Far West” belongs to the enterprising and courageous pioneer, the indentured servant who paves his or her own way after voluntary conscription, the “failure is not an option” entrepreneur, the hard working immigrant, the colonial self reliant.

Tragically, America’s current housing crisis makes a complete mockery of this vision. More than a policy day late and a refinancing dollar short, now we have turned our underwater homeowners into Katrina-like refugees, disenfranchised in their own land.

Recent revelations by National Public Radio, ProPublica, and the New York Times prove that Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac decided to spice up their investment portfolios with Wall Street securitized financial weapons of mass destruction and just like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and so many others, bet against their own unsuspecting clients. According to the New York Times, “Public documents show that in 2010 and 2011, Freddie & Fannie set out to make gains for their own investment portfolios by using complex mortgage securities that brought in more money for Freddie & Fannie when homeowners in higher interest-rate loans were unable to qualify for a refinancing.”

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Concurrently, Freddie & Fannie instituted a policy of approving few if any mortgage modifications including short refinancings with the net result of trying to guarantee that their investment bets based on underwater homeowners continuing to pay artificially high mortgage interest rates would hit the jackpot. Additionally both Freddie & Fannie incentivized mortgage service providers through a series of commissions and paybacks to foreclose rather than modify their portfolios regardless of any devastating effects on affected homeowners, claiming their insistence on this distorted process protected the highest fiduciary interests of shareholders in a national context even though individual taxpayer stakeholders ended up cheated by their own government.

In “Living by Default”, James Surowiecki in the New Yorker (December 19/26/2011) railed against the double standard of corporate borrowers allowed to default while victimized homeowners with underwater mortgages often through no fault of their own have been stigmatized, threatened, and punished. The investment moves by Fannie & Freddie double down on this dichotomy and highlight these two government sponsored institutions in flagrant conflict of interest positions against their trusting citizen clients. Foreclosed by these institutions instead of being helped to keep their homes under better and more realistic mortgage conditions and cheated out of more advantageous refinancing possibilities, between ten to twenty million homeowners have been duly defrauded by this charade masquerading as “the best we could do” government policy which has ended up fomenting national income inequality by destroying what’s left of the home equity safety net at the center of the American Dream.

This is truly a 1% solution against the 99% that have bailed out the 1%. U.S. taxpaying citizen homeowners have the right to claim the burden of “Illegal Triple Indemnity” which means being punished three times for the same misdemeanor under U.S. constitutional law. A triple indemnity burden results in taxing homeowners three times for the same crime committed by others: first by having taxpayers bail out these institutions; second by continuing to have to cover the legal fees and unjustified exorbitant salaries of Fannie Mae officials rewarded for failure as evidenced by sequential loss-producing quarters with public funds; and third by subsidizing home values that no longer correlate to any sense of public trust because both Fannie and Freddie preferred speculative financial bets against their own clients than attending to the welfare of those they were entrusted to serve.

By refusing to modify toxic real estate loan balances to reflect accurate post-Great Recession home values, Fannie and Freddie have forced American homeowners to either pay something for nothing or foreclose and lose their homes. The Financial Times reports using research firm, Core Logic’s figures, that “borrowers with negative equity owe about $700bn more on their housing debt than their homes are worth.” That’s about the price of the bankers’ 2008 TARP, and it has been very apparent to ‘Joe and Josephine Homeowner’ that what’s good for the goose never trickled down to the gander. Bailing out Fannie and Freddie thrice over by the American taxpayer translates into triple indemnity under any normal definition. Double indemnity is considered illegal and un-American. Triple indemnity even more so.

The jury of our peers in this national campaign season holds on a bipartisan basis that our leaders are more interested in self-preservation and ideological crusading than in restoring working class mobility through middleclass homeowner stability to pursue real community sustaining job opportunities across all domestic markets. What’s missing from an enlightened self-interest national portfolio is an easy to understand underwater homeowner version of a “Cash for Clunkers” program where one can trade in an underwater, higher-rate mortgage for a lower rate version that reflects more accurate marketplace values following the post Great Recession home equity tsunami aftershock.

Current polls show an intrinsic national rejection of passive income being taxed at a lower rate than wages earned through present tense toil. Those not in the bailed out class instinctively perceive that politicians and financial sector lobbyists orchestrated banking industry all-cash white collar welfare transfers from the tax receipts of citizen homeowners who four long years later are still being tossed insufficient loan scraps and aggressive involuntary foreclosures by the bankers they saved. What “goes around” has not yet achieved the “comes around” stage and the resulting income inequality tension is killing the country’s spirit, literally, by diluting any willingness to believe again in the unlimited American exceptionalism frontier beyond a superficial folklore memory appeal that elicits emotional applause along the campaign trail.

In short, a civic crime has been committed by the U.S. government against the underwater American homeowner client in an America where one in four homeowners is currently under water. Even if Fannie & Freddie could prove projecting forward that relatively less public money would be lost to the U.S. Treasury by protecting their investment bets at the expense of mortgage modifications, the stalled economic recovery highlighted by stubborn structural unemployment indicates that the spiritual disease already inflicted is more dangerous, pernicious and costly to our collective future than any financial cure however “redistributionist.”

The American taxpayer-underwater homeowner was ignored, defrauded, abused, discredited, and then foreclosed by bailed-out private and public sector institutions that have now been shown to perpetrate crimes against the public trust. Nobody had the peoples’ backs on this and real justice is way, way overdue.

As an activist labor Democrat on a national scale it pains me to admit that Alexandria’s Democratic Party produces elected mutants. Euille, Donley, Pepper, Smedburg, and Krupicka betray everything genuine Democrats are fighting for nationally in rust belt and shuttered economies where not having enough goes without saying. Bereft of Alexandria’s relative abundance, these less privileged cities and townships produce elected Democratic leaders who actually stand for something besides their own venal self interests and dull, uninspired thinking, knowing that the future lies in building a vibrant green economy that defends the working people at the bottom, the ones who play by the rules and who shoulder the burdens.

Here in Alexandria, it is elected Republicans who have the courage to stand for honoring our local environment and history, placing citizen’s rights over developers, and offering a creative vision for our future that integrates our city instead of triangulating special interest power plays pitting neighborhoods against each other to incite municipal civil war so that a specially selected few benefit at the expense of the resident many. While we are blessed nationally with a Democratic President who has the guts to reject the ecologically destructive Keystone pipeline, our Democratic-controlled City Council displays no such qualities but instead has pandered to the lowest possible payola denominator in voting to approve the density destructive, Washington Post-induced waterfront plan in Old Town that aids and abets developer-outsourced upzoning.

Enlightened Democrats free of Alexandria’s corrupt machine politics honor Alicia Hughes and Frank Fannon for their vote against the City’s poorly conceived developer bonanza waterfront conspiracy. So do all my neighbors as evidenced by our super majority petition that now has standing thanks to our collective efforts and their conscience-inspired votes. We will either have transparent democracy in Alexandria or we will become a ward for Gotham-on-the-Potomac practitioners. The jury is still out.

Under Alexandria’s Democratic Party-controlled city machine, waterfront residents are subjected to taxation without representation, double indemnity as the City Government uses our taxpayer dollars to inflict physical harm on our neighborhoods, and back alley corruption reported widely in the local press whose fingered culprits refuse to take any public conflict of interest pledge even when voting their own pocketbooks. Add these crimes against our people to the back room machinations of the Washington Post Company whose only intent is to fatten its bottom line and increase shareholder returns in full collusion with City Hall using Alexandria’s waterfront residents as road kill and we can see how Alexandria’s slave trading past is about to become prologue.

This is a stakeholder versus shareholder struggle to defend our own neighborhoods or get barricaded by unwanted development into ghettos as Alexandria reverts to its former reputation as the nation’s leading slave trading capital with those of us who live along the waterfront being sold as resident chattel down the sleaze river of patronage sewage by Big Development and Big Media. This kind of slavery is skin color-blind but neighborhood vibrant. It smacks of eminent domain in upzoning chains. Democrats who practice eminent domain are overseers of the worst Simon Legree sort.

Apparently, the elected Democrats on the City Council would rather collect their upfront thirty pieces of silver than advocate for transparent, clean, inclusive, and visionary government that does its homework before selling its virtue to the highest bidder. But sooner or later, “virtue” on the waterfront will have its own reward.

- Michael A. Peck, a committed labor Democrat, is a homeowner who lives adjacent to Robinson Terminal North and who leads a two decade-old consulting business registered in Alexandria.

Surviving the Great Recession with undisputable income inequality now the American norm, unfortunately not the un-American exception; too many unemployed, under-employed, foreclosed, and socially abandoned voters on all sides of the political spectrum are ready for something more useful from our political leaders this election year than a predictable and useless zero-sum debate placing all of the blame either on Wall Street or Washington D.C. In fact, the one percent versus the ninety-nine percent “occupy our public squares” protest-context frames this stand-off as the elites against the rest of us, fingering the collusion between big money and big government as the principal barrier to a more democratic prosperity. Extending this perception means that the powered and monied-up in both principal political parties are in the “peoples’ docket” with the “get out of jail free” verdict going to the most credible, the healers, the ones who lead by example, who turn their backs on trickle down and trickle up, who roll up their sleeves and get down in the ditch dregs with the rest of us as we dig our way out in ways we can believe.

The National Journal has run polls indicating that “reluctant self-reliance” is the new American working class norm. Reluctant meaning we have lost faith in the system and feel way too disenfranchised to even try to game it. What happens when “reluctant self-reliance” meets up with capitalism without a heart? Is this the immoveable moment when either something has to change or everything blows up? In today’s America, distorting the system has become a perpetrator-free crime with tremendous pay-offs but where the victims number in the millions. Private equity for multitudes of disenfranchised and shut-down Americans looks like the macro version of a payday loan with the payday lender calling all the shots at usurious rates.

But even this national self-portrait – while borne out by painful home videos as to how massive wealth is squirreled away in today’s oligarchy-forming America – misses the point. The debate before us is not about either defending free market capitalism or supporting redistributionist socialism but instead holding a truth or dare mirror up to our palaces, our ghettoes, and our shuttered main streets to question how capitalism is practiced in the United States, whether it is free market or distorted market, predatory or enlightened, and whether it represents the alienating pursuit of zero-sum advantages for the few at the expense of the many or the expression of individual freedom in its most perfect and productive form. The real question before the country is what kind of capitalism do we want and need for tomorrow’s economy and whether creative destruction is part of a two-way street that is anchored by creative construction at the other end with enlightened compassion and reinvestment generosity running down the middle lane, or just a one way ticket ride to more subtle but pernicious digitized slave-trading by distant boardrooms, financial manipulators, multinational outsourcers, other would-be Davos-travelers and power-seeking merchant marauders who, like the Miss Saigon musical line, treat America as an éclair so that they can suck out the cream?

With working class suffering and income inequality tire tracks running too deeply over the scarred and battered faces of our citizens, townships, inner cities and rust belt junk yards to wave off with convenient electioneering one-liners; neither “you’re-on-your-own economics” that puts free enterprise on trial nor a push for deregulated, downsized, and diminished government that puts collective outreach and community protection in chains will make the sale in this year’s debates beyond the base faithful on either side. Essentially, the country has to stop running against itself and answer a fundamental precept: in our American democracy, is labor sovereign to capital or is capital sovereign to labor? Is human labor merely a market-priced commodity or does America aspire to a more perfect union where place-based economies and worker equity empower families and communities to develop and manufacture the innovative and sustaining Apple corporations of tomorrow in today’s neighborhood garages?

Far beyond a simplistic and misleading “entitlement society” versus job creators characterization, what’s increasingly apparent is that white collar entitlement (such as raided company pension fund losses covered by federal government pay-outs meaning taxpayer bailouts, or privileged access to the Federal Reserve discount window) is no different in character if not in scope than salvation welfare and societal balancing programs for the less fortunate. Both sides believe with equal fervor that each has earned its benefits with massive wealth and privilege locked down by a very few on the one hand compared to multitudes of outstretched hands clamoring for a better chance, for economic justice, for equal opportunities, for a lot less of much less. In the end, welfare is welfare whether it comes in the form of tax code privileges, sole source public sector contracts, or food stamps.

The bane of our hypocritical existence is what the French philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau, noted over two centuries ago, that “man is born free but everywhere he finds himself in chains.” But in today’s social media driven economy, labor must be sovereign to capital and capitol, while necessary, must always be of service to empower labor to its fullest potential if we are to cast off these chains to live as free as the advanced mobile devices we employ. It is becoming common knowledge now that advanced and creative forms of employee ownership, cooperatives, and other hybrid forms of worker empowerment and collective bargaining are job-by-job recreating America’s performance heartbeat. These incremental victories along the rivers of our darkened communities represent the new economic Eden. Being on the side of the people, the ninety-nine percent, means a rebirth of worker-centered entrepreneurship coupled with a social conscience. Investors are flocking to this quadrant not because it feels good in our American soul but because it is backed up by metrics that inspire.

Showing how far the needle indicating the heartbeat of America’s free market inner self has moved from where it was involuntarily stuck with wheels churning but going nowhere since the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession, predatory winner takes-all capitalism is visibly on trial courtesy of the political right. This is a gift without disguise for those wishing to move compassionate market ideology and its lost community and family building practices back to a more enlightened civic quadrant centered on unpolluted American values where self reliance is no longer equated with naked selfishness, and where revolving door self-serving under the guise of serving others gets exposed as hypocritical and traitorous back-stabbing punishable by defeat at the polls, truth in advertizing, and even boardroom exile.

What Warren Buffet and others who follow his example understand is that if corporations are people then they must exist to serve their clients, also people, not the reverse, and that the only consistent path to sustaining profits is to ensure a sustaining, fully employed and fulfilled client base finding its most perfect expression in a rising middle class. Cutthroat competition on labor costs from command and control economies means that our nation needs to rediscover its inner cultural ownership ethos where we empower the settler, not just the baron, and where we make sure our system allows our people to earn enough to be able to afford to shop even in places where nothing on the shelves is made or produced locally by those doing the purchasing.

Free enterprise is not on trial in today’s political debates but freedom-producing enterprise is. If all we are able to exhibit in tomorrow’s America are more pyramids in our midst, more chains holding most of us down, more cliff versus cave dwellers with the latter working for the company stores owned by the former, more inherited or appropriated merit as opposed to earned meritocracies through a prism of ever-widening equal opportunities – then our national game show deserves to be shut down and rebooted and we must elect those capable of making this happen. The defining moment we face is not about class warfare or envy but about the massive, punishing income inequality that is currently strafing and straight jacketing America. We cannot act as a free people without equal opportunities and equal access, and this may no longer be possible when we so obviously live in two Americas, one that has more than everything imaginable where waste is a mere figment of imagination, and the other that is slipping off the edge right in front of our doorsteps, where American workers are bought, sold, and traded without a voice and without recourse as collateral damage and road kill for market practices that may look good on screens and paper before they waste our streets. Creative destruction sounds plausible unless you are the one being destroyed. We must do better than this or we will not make it out of tomorrow’s starting gate as a nation.

We not only have economic class warfare in Alexandria but geographic inequality and political taxation without representation.  Right on cue, the Waterfront4All “Super Pac” that is front-mouthing the pro-development wish list of Alexandria’s Chamber of Commerce in cahoots with the Washington Post Company who owns the Robinson terminals, is starting to treat residents to premature victory bows in the bars along lower King Street.  Increasingly, Del Ray residents from Alexandria’s “protected enclave” are becoming persona non grata for West Enders and Waterfront residents when running for city offices. The Del Ray “your taxation through my representation” modus operandi, exemplified by what emanates from our current City Planning Commission chair, is to ladle out poorly conceived but bombastically pronounced platitudes regarding what should happen in other peoples’ neighborhoods while counting on never having to guess what construction project is coming home to dinner in “do as I say but not as I do” hoods where City Council and Planning Commission members reside.

What we have in Alexandria are elected officials who are searching for revenue while having day jobs that clearly conflict with being objective on land-use decisions.  This insidious conflict of interest is being played out with the City’s waterfront heritage and fragile environment serving as the new civil war battleground between those who would enslave local taxpayers and residents and those who would fight for freedom of choice and self-determination.

Similar to real estate scams in national real estate trouble spots such as Las Vegas, Nevada – we have out of towners joining boards supported by big developer interests and calling the shots.  We have a city planner who does not live in Alexandria, does not pay taxes here, but who is actively campaigning night and day against the waterfront residents of Alexandria whom she considers her enemies because they categorically reject the plan she and Mayor Euille are going to impose one way or the other on the waterfront’s future.  We have outsider special interest money coming in to influence how people who live here will have to deal with their lives after City Hall’s profit-seeking construction Armageddon hits the waterfront.  Instead of historical Old Town as we know it, we will be cohabitating with Crowne Plaza instant architecture redux to the beat of suffocating congestion, view shed destruction, and decaying property values served up as the bitter fruit of greed, power, and perpetrator-free crimes against the peoples’ higher civic interests.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post Company’s media monopoly guarantees there is no transparency in how equal coverage is denied to those who oppose the construction rezoning condominium it enjoys with Alexandria’s City Government.  But given recent disappointing financial returns to its shareholders, it’s no surprise that the paper of former Watergate exposure fame now drinks from the same tainted pool as those it once took down.  FOIA requests have demonstrated how City officials and Washington Post lobbyists cooked up the rezoning answers they needed to optimize developer benefits and therefore land resale profits and then proceeded to frame the questions they wanted in order to concoct a City Development plan without a soul, without a coherent or consistent rationale, and emphatically without local resident support.  Without a soul because as each development rezoning rationale has been successfully challenged by Alexandria’s local residents led by the volunteer Citizens For Alternative Alexandria Waterfront Plan (CAAWP); the Post, City Government, and its developer allies have conspired to change the questions to produce their desired “pre-fabricated” justifications.  One only has to read the outrageous public hearing transcripts to understand that “not fighting City Hall” in Alexandria means always catering to undue influence and special interests to spin the “let’s make a deal” wheel of fortune for those who can pay to play.

When similarly threatened by outsider developer interests backed up by lawyers, false front groups, and crooked politicians, Hoboken, NJ, residents passed a “Pay to Play” ordinance that denies those having a business interest from contributing to campaigns.  But we have been to Hoboken and Alexandria it is not.  Here, we turn over Alexandria’s sacred, historical and environmentally broken waterfront to developers intending to sell human capital once more “down the river” under the guise of loosening current zoning restrictions.  Here, our elected officials conspire not to have to choose between their personal pocketbooks and the right of residents to reclaim their own waterfront for the people and by the people.

If no one on Alexandria’s City Council holds any financial investments interests in the city’s waterfront property, then all sitting members should be open to taking a public pledge that none of their public servant votes will result in any personal private indirect or direct gain.  We need to push for this public clarification because the bought and paid for world of the Waterfront4All crowd oozes obvious double dealing conflicts of interest.

What we have in fact are financial interests with varying interlocking conflicts (e.g. Councilman Frank Fannon & mortgage banking for SunTrust; Councilman Donley and the Virginia Commerce Bank; Mayor Euille who owns and directs his construction company, Wm. D. Euille and Associates;  and Councilman Kruprica who as a dot.com millionaire has federal/state aspirations and wants to make nice with the Washington Post).  In Alexandria, the Democrats outnumber Republicans 2:1 but instead of taxing the rich to give to the poor, what we witness in Alexandria is a reverse Robin Hood version whereby City Hall misappropriates from the middle class to bequeath the city’s crown jewels to the special interest rich all the while throwing out meaningless phrases like “boutique hotels in Founders Park will make sure we don’t privatize the waterfront.”  Indeed, we’ve actually heard this incongruous inanity from the City Planning Commission chair to wit that high-end boutique hotels on Founders Park will democratize the waterfront and open it up to Alexandria’s working class citizenry.  Like the daily free material coming Jon Stewart’s way on Comedy Central whether he wants it or not, you just can’t make this stuff up.

The difference between Arlington and Alexandria is that the former is a one-party county with good planners who defend their residents while the latter is a one-party city whose planner sides with developers against the citizens paying her salary.  Bill Euille’s Alexandria running on its own record has given us the BRAC and Beauregard disasters.  We have elected officials who believe the Crowne Plaza on the waterfront represents the kind of architecture George Washington would approve of.  Now, the city’s hapless waterfront is up against the iron triangle of a pernicious media company that needs to fatten its falling bottom-line by selling public trust real estate on public trust lands to the highest bidder through a rigged rezoning process that has destroyed any residue public trust, aided by salivating hordes of special outside interest developers who will build structures they will never personally want to live next to or in, and abetted by City Government officials who think Alexandria’s waterfront is their personal accessory where they can dabble in local power politics using the fig leaf of color by numbers social engineering for dummies.  Maybe what we have here are a bunch of entitled one-percenters like the Chamber of Commerce and their  Waterfront 4All spawn scratching each others’ backs and scaring folks with the “need for revenue” at all costs, even if it means sacrificing Alexandria’s historical soul and long-term welfare for the apparent pocketbook appeal of the selfish ugliness of the moment.

Budding City Council hopeful, Sean Houlihan, part of the Del Ray political farm team, readily aspires to state and federal elected slots and is using Alexandria as his starting point with blessings and probably financial support from the Waterfront4All “Super Pac” mafia.  As a down payment to this “chicken-out” squad who do not dare to put the City’s waterfront rezoning scam up for a citywide vote knowing they’d lose, Sean Houlihans’ recent thirty pieces of silver attack in the Daily Patch belittling what over 2,ooo Alexandria voting residents have banded together on a voluntary basis to create (the CAAWP Alternative Alexandria Waterfront Plan) got it decidedly all wrong in his maiden editorial voyage advocating for high density waterfront development in a neighborhood he doesn’t live in.  It’s not about “icing the kicker”, Sean, it’s about Pete Rosing the game. There will be no hall of fame for any City official who votes for the City’s plan.  Just shame, blame, and disdain followed by deserved massive rejection at the next polls as we vote out the sell-outs while holding our noses.

We don’t yet have the Koch brothers involved in the Alexandria waterfront massacre but we do have local similar surrogates such as the powerful City Council land-use committees that are weighted heavily in favor of business over residents and definitely commerce over ecology and history.  The City’s Planning Commission, Waterfront Commission, and the Mayor’s handpicked Waterfront Working Group combined with the Alexandria Economic Development Partnership (AEDP), the Alexandria Convention and Visitors Association (ACVA), and the local Chamber (the latter two have interlocking dues structures), plus the Washington Post’s vested interests in upzoning Robinson Terminals North & South, clearly create an uneven, unfair, unethical and without conscience struggle.

Goliath developers-at-all-costs  conspire and backroom end-run against impassioned David Old Town residents who are fighting bravely if vainly to defend the city’s most incalculably valuable legacies from the onslaught of those who just smell payday and who then shark-attack the frying bacon. These David-warriors understand what’s at stake because they are the ones who daily clean up the parks after everyone has left, plant the flowers, tend to the trees, dodge the intense traffic, and do their personal best to keep public access public.  The entire city operates in the shadows but the waterfront limps along amid the dark footprints of truly ugly commercial monstrosities lurking around an over-built, under-planned waterfront that has done too many tricks for too many paying clients without any protection for far too long, a burned out brownfield that is killing its colonial mother. Local residents can hear her screams.

To avoid the criminal environmental investigations that will surely follow, let’s insist that Alexandria officials either serve the conscience of their office or pad their personal developer intake, but not both simultaneously.  Instead of self-naming Old Town streets after our constructing Mayor, let’s have a Mayor who commits to self-construct only once he no longer holds elected office.  Finally, let’s put the City’s plan and alternative citizen waterfront plans to a citywide plebiscite and let the people who live and pay taxes here decide.

It’s time to occupy Old Town’s soul before the top one percent cashes out by building out our common waterfront at the expense of the ninety-nine percent who only want to take their families out to enjoy free public access parks along a de-polluted river without having to peer through private property signs and locked commercial barricades that go dark at night.  It’s time to push back against those who would sell us gated communities tithed to excessive construction, architectural hideousness, density death and overwhelm us with bricks and mortar sprawl for tourists and contractors instead of history and green and space to breathe freely in for residents, citizens and welcome visitors.  We are defending the familiar heartbeat of colonial rhythms flowing serenely with Spring and Fall breezes like our damaged but still living river that waters these historic memories so that they continue to grow among us, the reason we all came here.

-Michael A. Peck-
Old Town resident since 2006

“JC” stands either for “Jesus Christ” or “Job Creators” depending on the eye of the beholder and the smirk of the wearer. The pin is produced as a charity tax write-off by worshipping “Oligarchy Prosperity Gospel” disciples who pray so that only victors get to gorge upon the spoils, the meek are consigned to rate-payer and renter castes, and inherited merit gets taxed at the capital gains 15 percent level with the goal of sparing hallowed wealth accumulators from the excessive burden of having to give back some of what they legally misappropriated.

In this vein, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to kill the bipartisan Senate payroll tax extension bill because job creators can’t handle the uncertainty of how much more they will have to pay to someone other than themselves. Taking a cue from the newly-formed Jobs Creators Alliance, representing the unalienable rights of the top one percent, the House vote shows that the nation is far better off exacerbating the neurotic uncertainty of its working classes over how to make small ends meet in these cold and starved times, over whether buying gas to travel to work is really a better bet than serving three healthy meals a day on the family table, or over whether saving for college or going to sleep knowing health care is an option are still options at all.

It’s no longer guns versus butter but entitlement versus predicament when the America we inhabit is more concerned about the tenor of its job creators’ ability to pursue happiness on a globalized basis than the lifestyle expectancy of those who occupy its streets. What kind of moral signal do we send when our political leaders feel they have not done enough to sacrifice the welfare of ninety-nine percent of their own people to pursue a new manifest destiny? These days, only the chosen few get their prayers answered to expand frontiers of financial faith and pull economic salvation from the Cloud, giving thanks that the system works, that they can legislate effectively against those children of obviously lesser gods.

Read the op-ed here.

Learn more about Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives here.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.”

Presidents Obama and Clinton recently announced the revamped Better Building Initiative to increase energy efficiency profiles of both public sector and private commercial buildings through $4 billion in private sector funding which is recovered in full through energy savings. What’s missing from this welcome initiative is a mechanism to inspire local labor involvement and local repatriation of profits so that communities across the country who have suffered from the extraterritorial real estate manipulations and machinations by others get to participate in solutions that support local sovereignty, employment and recovery. The “Green Detox” approach offers to do just this by renewing working and middle class labor mobility, green-habilitating toxic real estate, and extending worker equity on a pay-for-itself basis. This is how and why community activists and entrepreneurs can envision applying “Green Detox” solutions to cities and towns across America.

Creative “Green Detox” Real Estate Economic Redevelopment

Renewing Labor Mobility:

There will be no real labor mobility in America until homeowners holding underwater mortgages are bailed out similar to how the bankers were saved from themselves through TARP. Most of the present programs are not sufficient and are wasting time. Right now, workers cannot afford to sell to move to where the jobs are.

Turning Lemons into Lemonade:

1. In the emerging smart “Inter-Grid” market, vacant, underutilized, non-performing real estate assets no longer need to wait for tenants, renters, or owners in order to be productive. Instead, they can be greened-up and produce revenue through a comprehensive local alternative energy and energy efficiency combination that sends power to the grid in return for a monetary payment.
2. This payment can then be used to pay for the studies, labor, technologies, materials, and benchmarking used to “detox” these non-performing real estate assets with profits minus repayments going towards a fund that permits building-by-building replication
3. Commercial and Residential Tenants will have more reasons to participate in carbon-free, green energy enhanced, detoxed real estate communities, whether residential or commercial, thus completing the final leg of this self-fulfilling virtuous cycle.
4. The toxic assets themselves are taken upstream through the green value chain and worth more at resale while lowering society’s carbon footprint.
5. Some part of projected investor profit returns on resale – also refunds the greening cost at time of sale.
6. All of this can be accomplished by local union-coop hybrids so that wages and profits are recycled in situ.

Rejecting Triple Indemnity:

We can’t allow the U.S. public to foot the same bill three times, once during the initial real estate subprime and Wall Street-induced property values implosion, second during the sell-off of foreclosed assets where most homeowners who lost their equity and possible their homes won’t get to participate in the upside, and third during the buy-back process with pennies on the dollar by vulture capitalists after an artificially created market plunge by a greed-infested, out of control financial sector.

Instead, “Green Detox” represents a “Fairness Multiple Bottomline” approach:

• fair to homeowners who played by the rules
• fair to taxpayers who bailed out the bankers
• fair to local green job workers
• fair to the U.S. Government and citizen-taxpayer shareholders in Fannie/Freddie
• fair to society’s need for a lower carbon footprint.

The Green Detox Solution:

• helps to solve the problem of how to place a value on mortgage-related assets that have not been traded for months by upgrading the assets (making them greener)
• helps to solve the problem of how to bridge the divide between what the banks want to sell the assets for and what investors are willing to pay for them by making these assets more valuable

The Union-Coop Worker Equity Model:

• Cooperatives represent the largest, untapped, bipartisan, “made in America” ownership community.
• The United Steelworkers Union (USW) launched the union-coop concept with Mondragon in October, 2009, and last August (2011) voted during their Constitutional Convention to make it part of their constitution.
• The success of the Mondragon cooperatives comes from putting people first by prioritizing employment before profits and giving back to one’s community and society. The social transformation principle means that a key part of the Mondragon cooperative mission is to support and invest in hosting communities by creating jobs, funding development projects, supporting education, and providing social opportunity. Host communities, in turn, support the cooperatives, creating virtuous cycles where self-interest becomes shared enlightened and mutual interest.
• The Green Detox union-coop model represents a “Made it Local” hybrid: a union coop is a unionized worker-owned cooperative in which worker-owners all own an equal share of the business and have an equal vote in overseeing the business.
• As historically proven, worker-owned cooperative businesses can be highly competitive with businesses using a more traditional corporate structure. Where ownership means more than just a value of a share, worker-owners tend to be more self-motivated, more productive, and more creative in ways to help their business thrive and grow.

This is a solution for the “other 99%” so that they can also participate in the ownership ethos of the American Dream.

Read “The Green Detox” Document (10-page PDF).

Instead of an ennobling professional odyssey leading to a destiny sliver of American exceptionalism, America’s human leftovers are reduced to occupying city centers in tents to reboot participative democracy. Deafened by jobless sounds of silence, political turntables scratch overtly labeled, pre-recorded empty slogan platters, spinning them backwards so that intransigent dissonance is the only music playing. In mean streets and counties in America, privatized prisons represent the largest local employer while in transactional cities where clients are referred to as suckers, historic civic trust has been subprime-mortgaged and investor-tranched into trenches where jobless victims are buried alive. Everywhere you go nobody trusts stockbrokers or investment bankers anymore or understands how banks can pay fine after fine for an endless stream of crimes against humanity without ever admitting guilt or truly changing their practices until they are caught with their hands once again in our collective tills, the recent Federal District court ruling against the egregious SEC-Citibank give-away notwithstanding. Everyone is waiting to see which partisan corner will produce that defining populist anger surge we’ve all been waiting for that will clear the decks of economically traitorous and greedy brine and reset the national moral compass.

Today in the America we have crafted, more profit streams go to fewer and fewer people, most of them repeat customers. While America’s richest 20 percent own more than 80 percent of America’s wealth and its poorest 20 percent strain to own barely one-tenth of one percent, our cacophonic congressional debate still clashes over how much is enough for the “top 0.1 percent – the richest one-thousandth of the population” (Paul Krugman, NY Times 11-25-2011). Choosing to represent either vast majority ownership of advancing poverty or miniscule minority ownership of extreme wealth, our politicians and their endlessly ineffective sloganeered charges of class warfare confuse how to make opportunities equal with sideshows over why life is unfair. This kind of  question finds no credible answer in a country dedicated to stacking the deck and declaring tomato paste a vegetable because it can. Predatory capitalism’s obsession with quarterly results for the few backed up by public bail-outs by the many coupled with corporate profits anonymously going to buy political votes aided by highly partisan Supreme Court rulings that reek of bought and paid for compacts with oligarchy devils in our midst, sound the death knell for competent, competitive and conscientious democracy.

Out in the cold, literally and figuratively, not only frozen but frozen out, America’s top-rated reality TV gong show should be, “Who Wants to be Manipulated?” In each grippingly dismal episode, the great American white whale country we live in gets harpooned by another partisan take down strategy manipulation masquerading as a symbolic fight for freedom, or a sweet sounding campaign promise which never delivers, or another publicly traded corporate stock buy-back for boardrooms and c-suites taking place at the expense of increased working class employment, or privileged elected officials blowing-up sacred institutions for short-term political gain and then walking away from the nation’s policy battlefield without burying the bodies of those trusting proles who could not make their survival ends meet. Each new saga in the All-American grab for the “do as I say but not as I do – heads I win, tails you lose” jack-in-the-box consolation prize that is fast becoming our national anthem to inequality from sea to shining sea elevates economic class selfishness over civic generosity and divides our country into privileged hunter-gatherers and sucker prey.

The big board metrics prove we would rather spend our treasury on fattening the indoor 1 percent than in sustaining the outside 99 percent. We spend days, often weeks, even years debating the politics of minimum wage but affect moral amnesia or legislatively shrug off golden parachutes awarded to executives or corporate boards who murdered and sabotaged their companies, industries and hosting communities. Beyond what any lobbyist can fix, we have arrived at a societal tipping point precipice where our country will be able to heal itself and we will prevail as an exceptional people only when we radically change.

We can start by equating shareholder capital with stakeholder capital. Every special interest slice carving out a choice piece of blubber from the belly of the body politic pulls the scab away from our collective ability to recover and heal. Each recidivist ideological faction wants to “starve the beast” belonging to the other zoo; twenty-first century big game buffalo hunters using political party and “Super Pac” weapons of mass destruction to fire and maim indiscriminately for token focus group pelts and talking head tongues until mass carnage is all we see.  Today, every beast on the compromise horizon is dead and our legacy cultural frontier has become the dreams of our fathers we will never know how to dream. In the face of indiscriminate starvation in the land of plenty with more than 27 million structurally unemployed bricks in our broken national wall desperately seeking jobs that reflect some form of sustaining family honor, our hunting class either runs out of or runs out on targets they teed up that are now part and parcel of the waste land we have wrought.

Maybe it’s because current self-interested system incentives are stronger than any buried impulse to do better, a living rehash of the old joke about the scorpion knowing that killing the frog carrying it across the lake will cause them both to drown but finding that its nature to sting is stronger than its interest in surviving. How can we resuscitate the great, multi-color hope of the mortally-wounded American dream whale lying morally inert, harpooned into gridlock and polluted into paralysis on the national trading floor asylum where principles and values are foreclosed by elected sector guardians while private sector leaders outsource the inmates? Bankrolled by others beyond borders to the point where captains of industry and members of Congress argue publicly whether we are even able to make things anymore in our own country, we’ve become a nation of bottom-line connected fattened oligarchies voting in Republican and Democrat elites with the dispossessed, disenfranchised, and destitute down in the no-safety-net pits still up for grabs but reduced to nothing more than indices in the grinding applause meter dialed into the national manipulation bonanza game show.

What plays real in our pot-holed streets and lives is that unrepentant, too clever by half, selfish elites masquerading as free market patriots have sold out any sense of civic honor in return for the nation’s rich booty. White collar, revolving door crime has become justified, legalized and institutionalized to the extent that getting away with economic murder by importing, exporting, fielding and exploding financial weapons of mass destruction on one’s own people has become who we are and what we do. We live in an America where our privatized jails are overwhelmingly full of people of color who commit crimes mostly against individuals in their neighborhoods while our board rooms, country clubs, and executive suites are overwhelming full of white people who commit crimes so that entire neighborhoods are obliterated and who when caught plea the “Nuremburg excuse” of just following orders. In the name of a prosperity gospel that blesses bundled political fundraising bribes to inoculate self-serving and self-dealing Pharisees and Philistines, “we, the people” pray in vain for an ever hastening tribunal of perp-walks and claw-backs. Forget facile charges of class envy or reverse racism, it’s just the way the railroad tracks split every hood any of us live in.

Hope for rebooted American exceptionalism demands that we reoccupy our historical civic conscience, our common cultural soul, and translate our collective need for forgiveness into a newly empowered declaration of independence from the predatory capitalist dreams of Davos wannabes. Today, most of our own people, 99 percent of our citizens, huddle over the venting grates in our own “too big to have failed” streets, trying to stay warm and motivated in this approaching winter of our national discontent. They deserve much more from all of us than being consigned to second tier, hand to mouth existence, to substandard lifestyles in the collateral damage bins that too many of the top 1 percent install outside gated communities of the mind and heart.

Let the cry go forth to occupy everything until we get our original frontier mojo back, until we discover that our destinies are made manifest through the pursuit of happiness by others to the point where the differences between us pale in comparison to the opportunities knocking down doors in everybody’s neighborhood. Let’s stop harpooning the whale just because we can make the trade.

Back in 2008, the American people voted for hope and change intermingled with passion and belief in spite of stubbornly rising and apparently structural unemployment and after almost eight years of uninterrupted wars, one more justified at the time (Afghanistan) and one overwhelming rejected at the ballot box (Iraq). In 2008, the two, broadly accepted bipartisan political themes that resonated on Main Street (in addition to an unrequited thirst for meaningful job creation) were first energy independence so that never again would an American life in uniform be sacrificed on foreign soil for a barrel of imported oil, and second a psychic need to pull together the perp-walks and claw-backs that the nation’s bailed-out, obscenely bonus-awarding financial sector so richly deserved. Beyond any facile arm-chair hindsight talking points exercise, this is still a basic distillation of what Main Street is waiting for three years later.

Contrary to wishful thinking, the rise of Occupy Wall Street protests across the nation should not be viewed as a panacea for any political party or movement but rather as a stark indictment of unmet expectations. The principal domestic and overseas, great event policy storylines of the last three years (the polarizing healthcare debate, the Massey coal mine and  Gulf oil platform and deepwater well explosions, rising China’s cyber-security and global resource accumulation threat, climate change and tsunamis threatening coastal nuclear plants, the Arab Spring, Greece and other sovereign debt in the euro zone) while undeniably life and death important in many cases, “can’t get no satisfaction” at today’s ballot box.

We are stuck in this paralyzed vortex between the American Dreams of our fathers and mothers and the everyday ugliness of the new de minimus wage standards and personal debt precluding anything but second class citizen status binding us to diminished expectations. Meanwhile, the virtual world unfolding in our personal handheld devices extends our imaginative wings unfettered and unrealistically free. Occupy Wall Street frames this as the two Americas reality show divided into 1% who have way too much and 99% who don’t have enough. Burned over and over again by Wall Street’s high-flying but incessantly failing Icarus model while desperately seeking Main Street’s heroic Paul Bunyan, we half-step between mixed metaphors of government as friend or foe or private sector promises to liberate through decreasing regulations, looking for credible reasons to believe.

As pressure seeks a vacuum, the Tea Party surge into this policy void starting in the healthcare summer of 2009 protested against a rising tide of government debt and overreach that was similar in passion, if not style, to Occupy Wall Street’s current rage against extreme, oligarchy-producing, endemically unjust income inequality. These two separate but equal political reactions represent the differing tactics and styles of the historical cultures and legacies they come from. Fulfilling Newton’s third law of motion that every action uncorks the reaction it deserves, both the Tea Party and Occupy movements are statements after a disturbing fact boiled down to a simple contrasting metaphor: that freedom and its social fulfillment possibility in today’s America are found more in the digital devices we employ than in the ways we can live our lives. We can participate in others without being participated in ourselves.

The Time-Matthews piece offers shared sacrifice and compelling vision as two antidotes to lead us out of the “gotcha”, zero-sum morass our politics exhibit where narrow and selfish self-interests define and prioritize today’s policy maneuverings in favor of tomorrow’s electoral gain. Alarmingly, that view is already insufficient, unrealistic, and out of date. This country’s largest and fastest growing political party is non-affiliated, freely-associating, virtual movement-oriented, technology-empowered, voter-swarms. What we want and who we will vote for can be boiled down to who delivers the two essential, multi-partisan freedoms we asked for in 2008: the freedom from overseas petrochemical-producing financial tyranny and body-count terrorism, and freedom to live in “Wall-Street and U.S. Chamber of Commerce Free” communities where our debts are not derived from taxes raised to reward those requiring public bail-outs and where our jobs and futures are not outsourced by global shareholders so that somebody other than domestic stakeholders benefit.

Achieving both domestic energy independence and “made in America” production will allow us to earn the freedom to live within our means which means coming up with tomorrow’s centripetal “seeking and valuing the center” geopolitical trade and financial models to offset today’s outsourced centrifugal “fleeing and disenfranchising the center” practices. In practical terms, we don’t want to borrow money from China to buy goods produced in China and elsewhere that could and should be produced at home and we don’t want to reward countries that strive to undermine and attack us by investing in their infrastructures and products.

During the prelude to the 2008 campaign, T. Boone Pickens spent sixty-eight million dollars of his own funds to show us that what America outsources annually on importing overseas petrochemical energy equates to the entire TARP bank bail-out bill of $700 billion, but year after year. Leading up to 2012, the “smart power, participation age” practices the Time cover story describes cry out to be practiced at home and not just abroad.

Abroad, America needs to perfect geopolitical judo rather than conventional boxing using military force deployments, calling forth instead the higher angels of our national and natural cultural advantages to pull and tug in soft power conflicts with command and control economies. Domestically gone forever are the days when America had the luxury of kicking back to plug into false and misleading digital realities while opting out of tuning up and getting fit.  Now life is more real than art instead of the reverse. Now, we have to survive in a world where Rambo loses Vietnam, where all the jobs that were lost will never come fully back, where the Constitution and Bible cannot simply merge into one prosperity gospel pocket edition that ignores America’s new complex majority-minority multi-ethnic demographics, and where China’s inherent domestic contradictions will not conveniently implode to allow us to retrieve our “we are number one” American exceptionalism mojo. Instead, we have no way back without a new way forward starting with wrenching changes that no longer discard, disenfranchise, under-optimize, and under-inspire the vast majority of our own people.

Perhaps next year’s American Spring will reflect enough bipartisan domestic focus to channel Occupy Wall Street’s ongoing winter of discontent so that the equal opportunity principles we yearn for are adopted and not co-opted by political climate change and gridlock. More than just living in a time of cold and uncomfortable truths, we need to fight for the freedom to re-set the national landscape starting with bailing out underwater mortgages to jump start labor mobility and do unto the homeowners who already did unto the bankers. We need to light-up today’s workforce into “Perpetual American Motion” by transforming our faltering national physical and digital infrastructure into tomorrow’s bump-free innovation-trampoline platform if not for ourselves than at least for the children of our indebted and under-employed millennial generation. We need to rethink the original American ownership vision that motivated so many of our fore-parents to come here in the first place so that the American tomorrow includes individual and community sovereignty over workplace, home and land, natural resources, job creation, and yes, capital.

Every one and all of these causes are worth bellying up to the 2012 bar fight and swinging hard. May we elect someone who makes them real.

ESIB Version October 2011