GREED IS NOT GOOD HOW SELFISHNESS IS DESTROYING THE AMERICAN DREAM The point is, ladies and gentlemen,

, that Greed, for the lack of a better word, is Good. Greed is right. Greed, works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms, Greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and Greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. So said the fictional Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street. Milton Friedman, who won the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economics said Is there some society that doesnt run on greed? The world runs on individuals pursuing their individual interests. The record of history is absolutely crystal clear. There is no alternative way to improving the lot of ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities unleashed by the free enterprise system. [http://www.believeallthings.com/2858/milton-friedman-greed] And this is one of the three core principles of the Illinois Tea Party: A free market is the economic consequence of personal liberty. The founders believed that personal and economic freedom were indivisible, as do we. Our current government's interference distorts the free market and inhibits the pursuit of individual and economic liberty. Therefore, we support a return to the free market principles on which this nation was founded and oppose government intervention into the operations of private business. [http://www.illinoistea.org/missionstatement.html] So we have come to a place in our history where the sentiment expressed in the black comedy of Oliver Stones movie has become the dominant driving force behind American economic and cultural norms. Lets review the record. The Savings and Loan Scandal of the mid 1990s coast taxpayers about $500 billion. Then we have the financial frauds of Enron and Worldcom. Cooked books and billions lost. People thrown out of work and pensions stolen. Then we had the mortgage securities swindle where Standard & Poors rated junk bonds Triple A and investment firms lied to their customers and Lehman Brothers literally burned their own house down through greed and fraud taking the 100 year old accounting firm Arthur Andersen sown with it. Along the way we had Bernie Maddof whose Ponzi Scheme stole over eight billion dollars despite his business being in the cross hairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission eight times! AIG Insurance and Countrywide Insurance committed massive fraud on the American consumer. We bailed one firm out and prosecuted the other. The sale and re-sale of highly volatile and ultimately worthless financial products lead to a global financial melt down and we the American taxpayers had to bail out Greed is good Wall Street to the tune of 14 trillion dollars. Meanwhile British Petroleum and their subcontractor Halliburton killed 11 oil well workers when their rig in the Gulf of Mexico blew up and sent oil spreading into the gulf waters causing an oil slick bigger than the state of Rhode Island. Will we ever know the true cost of economic, human and environmental loss from that disaster a disaster that was entirely preventable? No my friends Im here to remind us that greed is most definitely NOT good.

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The sort of greed enshrined by Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Gordon Geeko is a suicidal or more accurately a fratricidal appetite that, if unchecked, destroys the greedy and all who surround them. Hedge fund managers make billions. The super rich build tree houses for play that cost far more than the average home in America. This while a record number of Americans are loosing their homes to foreclosure.The children of the rich use private jets to go to summer camp. And the most wealthy in America grow even more obscenely wealthy. The top 20 percent have. They actually have 84 percent of the wealth of this country. And they think they have much less. And more disturbingly, people don't understand how little wealth the bottom of the distribution have. The bottom 40 percent of the U.S. have about 0.3 percent of the wealth, basically zero. And people think they have much more than that. A 2009 study in the British Medical Journal looked at how many people died due to income inequalities around the world. Their results showed that 884,000 Americans die annually because of income inequalites that is, those deaths were needless and preventable! [http://inequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/health-inequality-charts.pdf] Greed is poisoning America and will bring us down and the planet with it. We are fighting three wars and projecting our greed around the planet while, at the same time, we are pushing into new frontiers of greed here at home. Apparently, its not enough that large corporations can commit massive fraud and be rescued from their crime and continue to reap obscene profit. Its not enough that these same companies ship their jobs oversees and pay little or no U.S. taxes. Its not enough that American companies are treated as if they were people but cant be killed or jailed. No matter how evil they act. Its not enough that these companies are now afforded the right to spend as much money as they want to directly influence the already pathetic American electoral system. Now these companies want to own and operate public assets and public services for their own private profit. They want to make a killing with little or no risk. Im talking about the push to privatize public assets. In Chicago weve seen breath-taking examples of this new form of greed. The Skyway Bridge that connects us to northern Indiana was leased to a foreign concern for 99 years. We got $1.83 billion. The Spanish-Australian owners stand to reap between $5 and $15 billion in profits. The notorious parking meter scam brought us $1.15 billion for a 75 year lease and MorganStanley and their investors, which include the oil sheikdom of Abu Dhabi, will take in almost $12 billion. Every year Tax Increment Finance Districts rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes and send them off to secret accounts that are difficult to monitor. Over the past eight years the city has given $845 million of our property taxes to private developers and other companies with no ability for the citizens to review or complain. MillerCoors, Quaker Oats, United Airlines, Grossinger Auto and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange have all been showered with millions of dollars. The Merch had over $2.9 billion in revenues and they still wanted more. We even gave millions to the Willis Insurance Company that bought the Sears Tower and that company also had revenues of over two billion dollars last year. Why should these very successful companies get our hard earned property tax dollars when public health clinics are being closed, when public schools are being closed, when class size in our public schools is up to 37 and 40 students, when our public transit system is under constant threat of doomsday budgets? Unchecked greed. Now companies are lining up to snatch up our schools, road ways, bridges, tunnels, rail ways and water systems! In late June I went to a very ironically named conference Its Not Privatization Implementing Partnerships in Illinois. Organized by the National Coalition for Public-Private Partnerships, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and the Metropolitan Planning Council, this event showed us the game plan of the privatizers and gave us a sneak preview of their messages. First they will tell us that we are broke and that there is no appetite for raising taxes. This means that we can never have another Hoover Dam or national highway system or NASA. Second the privatizers will tell us that government is stupid and incompetent and that the only source of innovation and effectiveness is the private sector. If unchallenged, these assumptions lead to the tautology that the only source of good and new service for the tax payer is the private sector.

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Now I have been very critical of local government in Chicago and Cook County and Illinois over the past 20 years. I ran for county wide office last year on the Green Party ticket and spent a lot time documenting and declaring the corrupt practices of local government. But I remain a believer in local government and collective action. So my first message to this congregation is that distrust of an incompetent local government is no excuse to hand over our precious and irreplaceable public assets to private companies. No we must take back our local government and kick out the goons, thugs, hacks and children of the people who were there before them. We must push back and reclaim a spirit that is closer to the revolutionary spirit of cooperation and collaboration that created America and which has awakened from time to time to get us through our most difficult periods of self-inflicted crisis. We have to demand and to practice generosity from ourselves and from our government. We need to be motivated by the spirit of the gift and not the desire to satiate ourselves at all costs. When we give to others we also give to ourselves because I think it is hard wired into our natures to cooperate and to share. We should look at what we all share and not what we can grab for ourselves. We need to reclaim the commons. The Byzantine emperor Justinian declared in the sixth-century that by natural law air, running water, the sea and seashore were common to all. Roman law created the concept of res publicae the things which were not, by virtue of their inherent nature capable of, or suitable for, individual ownership and were hence, reserved for the use of the public at large with the restriction of state regulation [Treading an uncommon path: in the quest for equity and sustainability http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/7289/1290.pdf?sequence=1] That tradition of common goods comes down to us via the Magna Carta from 1215, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties from 1641 and the United States Constitution and its Bill of Rights of 1787. It starts with the famous phrase We the people not Me the person! So what is the commons in 2011 America? It is the same as it was in Justinians day. The air, the water, public space, the natural kingdom, natural resources. It includes our culture, our DNA and our shared knowledge. It also includes some things unknown in ancient times such as our air waves that carry television, radio and cell phone signals. It includes the intangible but very real world of the Internet. These things can not and must not fall into private hands. In America we also have a tradition of public services common services that we believe should be made available to all with no cost. These basics include public education, public libraries, public transportation, public utilities, public health, public housing, public parks and public safety. I would say these features are essential to the American idea to what it means to be America. There is a notion that, in America, regardless of your pedigree, that you have an equal shot at advancement because you have access to these public assets and services. But unfortunately that promise is fading and is in danger of becoming as outmoded as some discarded fad of old like Cabbage Patch dolls or Furbees. The Brookings Institution and the Pew Charitable Trusts have launched The Economic Mobility project to track just how outmoded that idea has become. They report that America has less economic mobility the ability for kids to do better than their parents than many industrialized nations. France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark are all more lands of real opportunity than is contemporary America. Stolid and class-bound England offers only slightly less economic mobility than the U.S. So greed is definitely not good. And selfishness is not only destructive to the economy and the environment but is a deadly corrosive to the American Dream. So we need to re-think, re-assert and re-dedicate our selves to the commons. We need to lift up and celebrate our shared stuff and our commitment to help one another. So lets sign on to a Declaration of Interdependence where we pledge to fight privatization, where we vow to protect, defend and to extend the commons, and where we assert that greed is NOT good and that giving is better than receiving.

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And to borrow the finish from our cherished Declaration of Independence let us all affirm: And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor. www.publicassets.us tom@tresser.com 773-770-5714

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