Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

by Errington C. Thompson, MD

In early April a special prosecutor in central Florida will be looking into the Trayvon Martin case. For those of you who’ve been living in a cave or deep in the Amazon jungle, let me bring you up to speed.

Trayvon Martin was a teenager who was staying at his father’s girlfriend’s house in a gated community in Sanford, Florida. During halftime of an NBA basketball game, he walked to the convenience store and bought some skittles and an Arizona iced tea.

Walking back home, he encountered George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watchmen. There was an altercation, begun, according to 911 tapes, by Zimmerman, who was specifically instructed not to follow or pursue the teen but to allow police, who were on their way, to arrive. A few minutes later, Trayvon Martin was shot to death by George Zimmerman.

Trayvon, a gangly, 17-year old teenager, was unarmed. Zimmerman, an armed 28-year-old, claimed self-defense. The police glanced at this crime (“investigated” would be too charitable a description of their review) and came to the conclusion that no charges would be filed.

License to kill

A Florida “Stand Your Ground” law, which has been pushed by the gun lobby (NRA) and the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), is at the center of this controversy. That law, and others like it in other states, allows anyone to claim “self-defense” whenever he feels “threatened” by someone else – not just at home or in his car, but on the street, around the neighborhood, virtually anywhere. What it is, at heart, is a vigilante’s license-to-kill law.

In response to the shooter’s getting off scot-free, the progressive group Color of Change started an online petition demanding justice. This was followed by another on-line petition by MoveOn.org, and others by other groups; very soon there were more than a million people who had signed on, calling on the Sanford Police Department, the Florida attorney general, and the U.S. Justice Department to undertake a thorough investigation of this crime. But we cannot let up the pressure or allow a whitewash by any of these institutions. WE must stand OUR ground.

Waiting . . . and waiting . . . and waiting

Over the last five weeks, this case has become much more than what happened in Sanford. In my opinion, the Trayvon Martin case has begun to reflect the frustration of the black/minority community. The historic education equality case, Brown v. Board of Education, was decided in 1954, which jump-started a series of accomplishments in civil rights for African Americans that culminated with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which promised to ensure parity and true equality for American blacks.

Yet, when you look at the numbers, we are still waiting – half a century after the Civil Rights Act, a century after Jim Crow, and a century and a half after the Civil War. The unemployment rate in the black community since the 1970s has almost never fallen below 8 percent; the rate in the white community has only rarely approached that number.

Today, median wealth (this is everything that you own, including your house) sits at $97,000 among white households; in black households it’s around $2,200. Incarceration rates of young black men (ages 20 to 34) was right around 10 percent in 1980; now it’s above 35 percent. Meanwhile, incarceration rates for young white men have gone from around 3 percent in 1980 to approximately 8 percent now.

Do not get me started on the violence in the black community. The violence that plagues our communities would not be tolerated in white communities, though it’s blithely accepted by white Americans as long as it stays among blacks. If white America was seeing the type of violence that black communities have dealt with for decades, there would be sit-ins and protests and calls for immediate action.

The only positive aspect of the Trayvon Martin case is that it has brought white-on-black violence into the public eye, along with the lack of repercussions for the white perpetrator, and the lack of justice for the black victim. I promise you that this case will not simply go away. I also promise you that no matter what the outcome, tons of Americans aren’t going to be happy with the verdict. But we can’t simply write off 15% of the population. We have to fix this. We have to stand our ground.

Financial violence, too

I like to change gears just for second. Do you recall that famous scene from the movie, Animal House, where Kevin Bacon is taking part in a fraternity ritual in which he, the fraternity pledge, is getting paddled by the sadistic upperclassman? After each swat, he yells, “Thank you sir, may I have another?” Because of our twisted value system, it seems to me that we, the American public, are continually being paddled – whipped into submission – by Wall Street and our financial system.

Under the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which overturned a century of precedent, huge SuperPACs (political action committees) can take almost unlimited donations and spend them anonymously to influence elections. In response, the banking industry has decided that they needed to form a super PAC – because they feel they don’t already have enough influence in politics.

The 20-year plan

From before Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981 until Bill Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law repealing the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, these bankers and their corporate allies spent 20 years lobbying, urging, and bribing Congress to deregulate basically every financial regulation there was.

As soon as the regulations were lifted, they started committing fraud on such a massive scale that it led to our – and the world’s – economic collapse in 2008.

The fraud included the loan originators, who falsified loan applications on a massive scale, as well as rating agencies, which rated garbage mortgages as AAA securities, in spite of the fact that everyone knew they were garbage. It included Wall Street banksters who peddled these garbage securities off on you and me by telling us, sometimes in legal documents, that they were good investments. Fraud. Fraud. Fraud!!!

Then, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, a few well-connected officials in the Treasury and Justice departments (many of them former Wall Street banksters themselves) decided that, “for the good of the country,” we shouldn’t prosecute these criminals. Instead, in order to save our economy, we threw trillions of dollars to bail out these criminals. Yet they’re still not happy.

Unmitigated arrogance

If there is ever an industry that needs to sit down and shut up it would be the banking industry. Over the last 30 years, they have done more to be destabilize our economy than probably any other industry. Yet, they still want more. So the banking industry has formed its own superPAC. Roger Beverage, the president and CEO of the Oklahoma Bankers Association said, “Congress is not afraid of bankers. They don’t think they will kick them out of office. We are trying to change that perception.”

I’m tired of banks and corporations and private family fortunes like the Kochs and Waltons secretly buying our democracy at ten cents on the dollar while leaving us with 90 cents in debt and nothing to show for it. I’m tired of voting for representatives who turn around and vote against my best interests. I’m tired of bending over and paying high banking fees to use ATMs, for bounced checks, for not having perfect credit, and for a whole host of other maladies. I’m tired of being paddled into submission. It is time for us, the average American, to stand up and say, “No, I won’t take it anymore.”

Corporations are not people. We need to reverse the Citizens United ruling with a constitutional amendment. We need to restore the balance of power. We need to put a few of these high-profile bankers behind bars. We need to turn the clock back to a time when our banking system worked for us not just the bankers. We need a banking system that stable and reasonable and NOT a high-stakes casino that risks our money while protecting and increasing theirs.

We need to Stand OUR Ground.