A little less than 8 months ago, one of my best friends proudly called me with some great news. He announced to me that he had just been accepted into a Graduate position at (the Australian branch of) Goldman Sachs for 2009.
The circumstances of his employment were quite tumultuous - to cut a long story short, he wasn't sure if he'd get into Goldmans, so he originally signed up with Merrill Lynch, and ended up having to break contract with them when Goldmans gave him the job. I joked at the time that "he'll never be able to work at Merrill Lynch ever again in his life".
Well... I was right - Merrill Lynch won't ever hire him, or anyone, ever again. Now he's scared that Goldman Sachs are going to cancel his job too. Both of us are finishing our University Degrees in 4 weeks. What happened to our future?
Ladies and Gentlemen, after 30 years of free markets and deregulation - here we are. Welcome to 2008.
Yesterday it dawned on me: someone stole his future. Somebody stole mine, too. Somehow, somewhere, a Sub-Prime loan in Chicago wrecked a speculator on wall street, leading to a bank failure in Britain, leading to a collapsing credit market worldwide, leading to - potentially - a collapse in the jobs market in Sydney. Now we have to deal with the prospect of finding a job and eking out a living in a world that's suddenly gone nuts. And we're the lucky ones, because we have a tertiary education. I luckily have no debts. What about people with mortgages and credit card debts? What about the poor? What about renters? What about the homeless? What about people being foreclosed on? What's going to happen to them?
In some respects me and my friend are different - he's conservative, I'm a member of the Australian Labor Party (our version of the democrats). He wants to go into investment banking, I don't want to work for profit. But we did have something in common - we are a few weeks away from finishing our respective University degrees. He's doing a commerce/law degree, I'm majoring in Politics.
(In fact, right now I'm writing an essay on the Bush Administration's use of Torture for a course called "US Hegemony in International Law". I never imagined that the US would lose it's Hegemonic status between the time I started the course and the time I finished it.)
But despite our differences, now the economic security of both of us - progressive and conservative, is under threat, because free market nutcases like John McCain, Phil Gramm, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush and Milton Friedman enacted policies that took us here. It's only now that all of us can realise that we really are all in this together. Thatcher was definitely wrong - there is such a thing as society. How do we know that? Society - both left and right - now has to deal with the economic vandalism of a few reckless individuals.
For my entire life, I have lived through prosperous economic times, and I have known nothing else. To have that certainty about the future ripped away like this, just when you're about to start your life, is quite disconcerting. I talked to my dad about it tonight. He has never seen a crisis this bad - he simply said "but my father has." Three of my grandparents are still alive. They're probably the only ones in my family who know what it's like. I wonder what they're thinking. They suffered through a depression and World War Two to get the financial security that my parents enjoyed. And now it might not going to be passed on.
Although I have always been a proud progressive social democrat, it's only been in the past couple of weeks that I have really come to understand why our movements are so important. When markets fail like this, there's only one thing you can count on - and that's our democracies. When right wing ideologues set up markets into speculation and failure, when CEO's run away with golden handshakes, when gains are privatised and losses have to be socialised, when people are foreclosed on, when people have no health care, there's only one thing you can count on to save your bony ass, and that's the Government.
America, for the sake of all our futures, put Barack Obama in the white house. The futures of people everywhere hinge on what you choose. Please don't kill our hope.