They'll always get richer

We all have 700 billion reasons to be mad this week.


The federal government is bailing out Wall Street firms who gambled in the financial markets, reaped huge profits over the last 10 years and are now feeling the pain. They created a mess which will take an estimated $700 billion to fix and it will cost each of us about $10,000 to make it a reality. That's right, every taxpayer, according to one member of the U.S. Senate, will have to fork over in taxes a hefty sum to ensure that Wall Street doesn't collapse.


This would not be a problem if we raked in the type of dough that some financial services gurus have been bringing home for the past decade. But for us regular working types, that probably hasn't been the case.

Our country is run by the wealthy and it's understandable that policy protects those with fat bank accounts. Unfortunate, but understandable.

Wednesday. President George Bush went on national television to rally support for the bailout, which, if history is the precursor to wisdom, tells us that this is a horrible idea. Remember his pleas for support of the war in Iraq? If Bush wants us to support it, we probably shouldn't. That's not a partisan statement -- I'm independent -- but a comment about his track record.

I recall him saying earlier this year that our problems can be traced back to the fact that we built too many houses. Somewhere along the line he must have had an epiphany.

Fortunately, on Thursday support for the bailout seemed to run up against a roadblock. Maybe now we can start looking at a way to make those whose greed steered them, and ultimately millions of Americans, down the wrong path, learn from their mistakes.

I say we come up with a formula to allow the private sector to sort this all out. Make those mighty Wall Street firms who are struggling get loans from stronger, smaller investors. We could incentivize the smaller firms to lend money with ownership stakes and reasonable interest rates that would benefit them in the end and bring more wealth to more people. This would be significant progress over helping those who have long enjoyed considerable wealth from continuing to enjoy golden parachutes when things go awry and lives of luxury when they don't.

Where's our slice?

I don't know whether you had an opportunity to catch this bit of news, although I suspect you didn't. I have the benefit of working with local data guru Kurt Metzger at United Way who turned me on to a release about dollars raining down from Washington to help distressed communities and looked forward to reading about it because -- obviously -- Detroit falls into that category.


What surprised me is that the U.S. Treasury approved the appropriation of more than $54 million to organizations across the country dedicated to helping folks in communities that are economically challenged, and not a cent went to an organization in Detroit.


The only Detroit-area agency that got any money from Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund was the Wayne County Community Action Agency in Wyandotte, which was awarded over $87,000. A second Michigan agency, in Flint, also was included in the group of 89 organizations awarded funds.


I'm surprised because if you work as an elected official in Congress and there's a federal agency willing to dole out money to help communities, you're typically interested in figuring out how large a chunk of the dough you can direct toward your constituency. Given our community's dire straits, you'd think that our elected representatives on Capital Hill would have at least carved out a slice for Detroit and adjacent communities suffering similarly, right?


Instead we got nada coming back to Detroit. That is beyond disappointing to me because we're a few years into the regime of the most powerful group of leaders in the United States Senate and House of Representatives that we will see in my lifetime. In short, southeast Michigan has juice on Capital Hill right now in Levin, Conyers, Kilpatrick, Stabenow et al, but I'm a little disappointed at how that power has failed to prove fruitful for our region.


Maybe the problems confronting Detroit's mayor and city council have limited the ability of our federal legislators to bring back dollars for community revitalization. I don't know. One thing I'm sure of, however, is that we should expect more. The problems Detroit is facing is a direct result of not expecting more of out leadership on the local level. Now I'm wondering whether the problems aren't being compounded by not demanding more our leaders at the federal level. I think we deserve a larger piece of the pie.