The danger this country faces today is no less threatening than that created by the Attack on Pearl Harbor or the Nazi's swift conquest of Europe. It is a danger that pre-existed the 9/11 terrorist attack and gave rise to our national fear of a second, similarly horrifying event such as a maniacal Jihadist carrying an anthrax bomb into a Manhattan subway station. The danger in this instance comes from America's monied aristocracy, people who are as passionate their desire for money and power as Islamist terrorists are to bring down Western society.
They are wealthy businessmen, investment giants, bankers and corporate moguls whom I regard as Upper Class sociopaths. The worst of them are Wall Street bankers who cooked up the greatest fraud in history and promoted it worldwide. In the U.S. it surfaced as the "housing mortgage" crisis that turned neighborhoods, teeming with families, into three-bedroom ghost towns throughout the country. The scheme was so far flung, it rocked the national and global economies and plunged us all into a deep Recession, which may yet become a Depression.
The irony is that the giant investment firms that emerged from this self-made mess were considered "Too Big To Fail," meaning that if they went down, the country would go with them. There was no choice for President Obama but to feed the wolves in order to save the flock. That's why the government was compelled to put billions of dollars in bailout money into the dirty hands of Wall Street bankers. The money was intended to be put to immediate use by lending it to failing businesses. If we could save the businesses, so the thinking went, we'd also save millions of jobs.
Once the money arrived the bankers lost their interest in making loans, at least they didn't want to do that right away. They noticed, however, that the government's bailout contracts had no small print prohibiting it, so they seized the moment and paid themselves millions of dollars in bonuses! Then, instead of moving quickly to using the money to pull thousands of businesses back from the edge, they sat on it. There is no memorable explanation for their delay.
As time stretched out, the money accrued enormous amounts of interest. When billions of dollars are involved, even piddling interest rates yield millions of dollars. Hence, the banks had gone into a four-corner offense or stall, like basketball teams do when trying to run out a game clock. The money grew interest as fast as a newly sodded lawn grows grass. When they finally swung into action, the first thing the bankers did was skim the millions of dollars in interest off the top and declare it profit!
The story has the feel of a bad imitation of Hollywood's 1987 hit movie "Wall Street". But this was a true-life blockbuster with much more evil and many more victims in it than the movie had. It remains incomprehensible and nightmarish: Rich and influential bankers smoking cigars and having drinks while thousands of businesses and millions of jobs were being swept away.
The events of the past eighteen months have outraged people and focused their anger on business, financial and corporate leaders. However, the Middle Class, the ones who absorb the brunt of these economic beat downs, never seem to make this connection:
wealth=class=business=politics=power
They fail to see periodic financial chaos as part of an on-going depletion of theMiddle Class by the alliance of Big Money and the Republican party.The failure to this relationship is disturbing.
What has been eroding the number of the Middlde Class families is nothing less than economic and political warfare waged by the minority of the rich and powerful against the majority: people who believe that playing by the rules and working hard, might not get them rich, but at least they could provide food, clothing, shelter, education and health care for their families. That was the promise America held for every citizen, it was the foundation of the social contract between working people and capitalists called The American Dream.
With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Republicans unleashed a highly successful political and legislative campaign that, beginning with the firing of all striking PATCO air traffic controllers, broke the labor unions. The intervening eight-year Clinton administration did nothing to slow anti-union efforts in Congress. By the mid-1990's the labor movement was in shambles. In fairness, however, it must be said that the unions themselves had a hand in their demise. Between 1960 and 1975 the corruption of various labor leaders and their persistent, overreaching demands on employers turned public opinion staunchly against them and even alienated their members.
Despite anti-labor sentiment, by 2008 the value of the output of an average worker, adjusted for inflation, was almost 50% higher than in 1973. Workers, however, have not shared in the economic gains they helped create. If gains in productivity were were evenly shared across the workforce, workers income would be roughly 35% higher than in 1973. Instead, there has been an upward redistribution of wealth where today the top 1% of Americans have incomes five to seven times greater than they did in 1973. During this period, the rising cost of living led huge numbers of women to enter the workforce, creating a nation of two-income households. Even so, median household income, adjusted for inflation, has grown only 16% since 1973. The wages of men ages 35 to 44, adjusted for inflation, are a shocking 12% lower than they were in 1973! (Paul Krugman, The Conscience of A Liberal [W.W. Norton & Company, 2009], 234-241)
No one could have foreseen that the sweeping victory of the Republicans in 2000 would lead to the needless and financially disasterous Mideast war. With the exception of economists, sociologists and other academicians, hardly anyone has noted the insidious war conducted by the Republican/Big Business alliance against the Middle Class since the 1980's. The Bush administration kept the lid on labor while its policies and huge tax cuts for the rich pushed the number of Middle Class families out of the middle bracket and into the lower one. Proof of this lies in the administration's uncanny ability to preserve the financial interests of the rich while "guiding" the greatest industrialized economy in the history of the world into disarray and collapse.
Americans are unknowledgeable of the extent to which a mere 1% of the population controls their lives. The "One Percenters" are the superlatively rich, most influential and therefore, most powerful people in the country. Combine them with the next richest group and you have 10% of the people living very high while controlling the other 90% who provide the labor that creates wealth. The privileged are unseen hands that manipulate the strings that give life to Democrats and Republicans alike, from the Senate and House of Representatives, to State Governors and Legislators, right on down to the Mayors of our largest, most dynamic cities.
They do it through hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign donations, television and internet commercials, web sites, billboards, posters, flyers, brochures and other election paraphernalia. They finance the lobbyists and public relations specialists who woo lawmakers by wining and dining them at fine restaurants, jetting them out of the country on golfing junkets and exotic vacations, tantalizing them with lucrative jobs for family members, providing intelligence on their political opponents and escorting them to world class men's clubs and boozy flesh pots. This list is by no means exhaustive.
Millions of families are out on the street and their homes in foreclosure because of subprime mortgages they were sucked into by unscrupulous bankers. Millions more are out of work because major industries (think of automobile) inexcusably failed to evolve and adapt to compete with overseas competition. Millions of people have lost their pensions, 401k's, investment funds and retirement savings. It happened because Wall Street pirates, freed from government regulation by Republicans, sold their worthless subprime mortgages and other junk financial products to innocent institutional investors who bought them with 401k, pension and other retirement funds from millions of people.
The victims of a nation run for the benefit of a very few have lost most, if not everything they worked for. Some are too old to rebound. Others are too burned out or too ill to work their way back. Many people, capable of working, worry about what kind of jobs they will find if the economy turns around. Careers have been irretrievably damaged and educations interrupted indefinitely. There are many people out there, formerly productive, happy people who now live in an alcoholic daze or drugged stupor. They are not coming back. They are lost.
So much has been lost. So damn much.
