Too Small to Save

When I was growing up we were taught to believe that there was nothing we couldn’t accomplish here in the good ole U. S. of A. That belief was not just some form of hyperbole, it was the truth. Opportunity was available to all, no mater what class you came from. There are generations of people who grew up in lower and middle class families that went to City College, usually working their way through it, who ended up going to law school, medical school, business school and various other professional schools. From these strivers came out judges, professors, top flight doctors, engineers, journalists, businessmen, political leaders and even a Joint Chiefs Chairman. The merchant class made up most of the rest and employed most of the workforce. Jobs were available and the feeling that the next generation will succeed just as well if not more was palpable.

America had a social compact with its citizens imbedded in the founding of this union that guaranteed the freedom to improve quality of life through hard work and resilience. Through blood and protests these freedoms over time extended to those who for many years were not given that equality. Our country was in constant motion evolving to form a more perfect union. Our democracy was a meritocracy and stories of rags to riches were abundant. There was no height that could not be reached. Our leaders seemed to have a handle on how to deal with the problems we faced and more importantly found a way to implement what needed to be done with compromise. Descent, though sometimes acrid, seemed genteel compared to now, to the victors went the spoils or so it seemed.

I remember a time not long ago, when a job also got you health insurance and a pension plan. Loyalty to the firm was usually met with reciprocal loyalty. Patient investment bought you a nice nest egg. Assets were actually backed by something and esoteric financial creations made by overleveraging value did not exist. When companies failed, they failed. When individuals met misfortune, society had a consensus to help prop them up. Cliché alert; life was simpler back then.

Things are certainly different now. Depression in college students is at an all time high. Graduates from all levels of colleges, Ivy League included, have difficulty finding work. When work is found, the wages are too low. Many jobs come with no company participation in health insurance, those that do contribute very little. There is no such thing as a pension anymore unless you work for government and your union negotiated a good one for you. Even those are being done away with. Forget loyalty, if you’re lucky to get a job, you are as expendable as the 21 year old behind you who will gladly take your place for half your salary. Two in five working families have less than $25,000 in savings, including retirement accounts, to fall back on in the event of a job loss. With unemployment lasting on average longer than 6 months, that’s not nearly enough for a typical family with rent, a mortgage, car payments, utilities and food.

Our political leaders care more about filibustering and vetoing each others solutions then actually fixing anything. When they put something forward, say extending the payroll tax cut, an oil pipeline opposed by many is tacked on to the bill guaranteeing a continuation of gridlock. Staying in power trades at a higher premium than mooring us back on course. In order to stay in power, obedience is given to money, not votes. Through money comes access and control of the narrative.

Control of the narrative is the key to advancing any agenda and money is the key to controlling the narrative. I recently read that point zero two percent of all U.S. citizens make political contributions. That means several thousand have more influence over the narrative than hundreds of millions. We are having a hard time extricating ourselves from this system. Congress is so addicted to money, they even voted down a bill that would restrict them from trading on inside information. As the stories begin to come out about how many TRILLIONS we gave the banking system to survive, is there anyone that doubts the influence their money had on those decisions?

Unfortunately, the upcoming elections won’t change very much. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in a recent column in The Huffington Post, we face a “passionless presidential race.” Those who voted for change under Obama in 08’ remember the TRILLIONS he too injected into the banking system and the little he did for struggling homeowners. To those advocating for a more traditionally progressive approach to the financial crisis, Obama might as well be George W. Bush. On the Republican side, of the two likely nominees, one made hundreds of millions buying companies, over leveraging them and then laying off thousands to pay off the debt. The other guy, a career Washington insider, never met a special interest whose pocket he couldn’t pick and who thinks poor school children should clean toilets to learn a work ethic. Oh yeah, he was thrown out of his last political position for dropping the ball on everything, including shutting down the government for political gain. God help us if any of the second tier Republicans jump to the fore. We can only pray that whoever wins morphs into a reformer, don’t bet on it.  

With that in mind, we have at least 4 more years of gridlock and the continuous stranglehold of moneyed interests over our leaders. We need to take the narrative away from them and build a movement that combines right and left, democrat and republican that demands an overhaul of our system. Otherwise, when the time comes and for most of us it will come, we will be too small to save.