Since 1973, the termination of America’s exceptional success at fostering economic democracy at the end of World War II, American workers have been on a downhill slide, greased and tilted by both political parties. In the halcyon (economic) period when the Treaty was operative, wages were linked to corporate profits. Workers had money in the bank fueling demand. Banks had money to lend to industry to fulfill that demand. Even African-American neighborhoods which are today ravaged, were once thriving middle-class communities with commercial establishments and services like all others, with prosperity flowing from war industry salaries.
In 1973 the powers-that-be (hereafter referred to as ‘the prep-school boys’) shifted from a national policy favoring full employment to ‘fighting inflation.’ The first policy change was to freeze worker’s wages. The unintended consequences of that class-competitive decision quenched demand as workers postponed buying new cars, washers, and winter coats. Never to be dissuaded that they are not the best-and-brightest, the prep-school boys began passing around credit cards like business cards proffered at a Japanese convention. In the mid-70s, I’d find three and four offers of easy credit a day in my mail— and I was broke and unemployed.
That easy credit obscured the fact that workers were losing ground, and that lost ground has never been recovered despite the fact that industrial productivity has continually increased since that time. While wages remain frozen in real dollars today, CEO salaries have risen from what was once a multiple of 50-70 times the wage of a mid-level worker in the 50s and 60s, to 400-700 times that amount today. (and one wonders where class antagonism gets its energy?) In actual buying power, workers are making what they made in 1973.
When Democrat Jimmy Carter’s Fed Chief, Paul Volcker, signaled Wall Street and the foreign banks that America was serious about fighting inflation, he raised interest rates five points in a single day. The consequence was the bankruptcy of millions of American small farmers within a decade. They had listened to the counsel of the Ag Agencies and Farm Bureau, disregarded the sage conservative advice of their forebears and gone into debt to buy heavy equiptment, assured that they would be protected by their rising land values. They were instructed to use that big equiptment to plant “fence-row to fence-row” and suddenly they were broke. For every five farms that went under, a local business vanished—the hardware store, implement store, grocery store, etc. Communities lost their Scout and FFA leaders, high-school principles.
Farmers are not like most other folks . If urban people lose an apartment they find another. For farmers, who have been guardians of their ancestor’s land, struggle and sacrifices, the loss is catastrophic and traumatic. The entire farm belt became a disaster area, a dead zone crippled by depression. The leading cause of death on the family farm became suicide.
The people who came forward to help the bewildered and desperate farmers, were the militias — the guys with little red copies of the Constitution in their shirt pockets; the guys who only trust silver money, and threatened death to people who swore oaths to the Federal Government. You know who they were—Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City were of their number. [My pal Joel Dyer, who spent seven years with these folks (not even undercover) and wrote a book about them called Harvest of Rage was the Governments expert witness at the Oklahoma bombing trial. He reminds us that six people were involved in the destruction of the Murrah building and only two were caught.] These groups comforted the farmer’s; held bake sales and showed up at the auctions of their farms and and implements to try and buy them with sacks of silver money. The instructed the farmers---“It’s not your fault. It’s (pick one)—the Rockefellers, the Jews, the Queen of England, Bush and the Black helicopters. And in this crucible Donald Trump conscripts were forged.
Ten years later, the prep-school boys loosened the regulations on Banks and the Savings and Loan scandal wiped out over 250 billion dollars of personal savings and pensions. Scores of bitterly disappointed Trump converts here again, too confused to realize that it was laws passed by the people they sent to Washington that indemnified the banks and only a couple of losers went to prison.
In 1980 Ronald Reagan capped an inglorious career as a B-actor, and FBI snitch against labor organizers for the Screen Actor’s Guild by being elected President of the United States. He summarily fired 11,000 air-traffic controllers for striking (and removed Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the White House roof) which signaled open-season on the unions. The corporate sector scurried to make the best of it. The National Labor Relations Board was crippled (by the men we sent to Washington) and union memberships (the agent of middle-class wealth) began its rapid fall to today’s minimal utility. More Trump Converts.
Let’s not overlook the Trade Deals proffered and supported by both parties which sent millions of jobs scuttling in search of pushover, exploitable labor, and let’s not forget that little more than a decade after the Savings and Loan Scandal Phil Gramm and his cohorts loosened the banking regs again. (Golly, who could have predicted that the same bank crashes would occur again?!) With President Clinton’s support and his signing the repeal of Glass-Stiegel ( which had prevented banks from speculating with investors money since the Great Depression) the skids were greased for the economic collapse of our economy in 2008, and the horror of 6,000,000 families a month having their possessions put out on the street by sherifs, in front of their neighbors and on television. This was a better indoctrination to prepare them for Donald Trump than lobotomies.
Because people were so desperate, because their faith in Establishment institutions had been so frayed and betrayed; because the chuckling, chipper newscasters with good hair and ebullient personalities seemed to be enjoying the hell out of themselves no matter what happened to the Nation, voters made a desperate Hail Mary play and voted for the biggest swindler and con man to ever grace the American political stage, a man who made Newt Gingrich look like a wanna-be.
Donald Trump skillfully appropriated Bernie Sander’s rhetoric and slid into the White House on a slick trail of spit, expectorated by the betrayed, exhausted, and infuriated voters who had basically given up on our Corporatocracy and were ripe for any explanation of their troubles, whether it came from America’s 24-hour a day right-wing fire-breathers at Fox News, or from some mouth-breather at the corner diner.
And now, because Trump has crapped all over America’s pride and self-respect, humiliated and sacked it’s institutions, (just in time for the Corona virus); because he has plundered the economic future of our children to give a Trillion dollars to his friends and cohorts; the Democratic Party (the co-enablers of the destruction of the working class, the abandoner of rural folks, unions, workers) is now able to run on an anybody-but-Trump message. What a blessing for them! They don’t have to analyze their policy failures, or their reliance on corporate and wealthy donors, the privatization of our elections.
The American people are so exhausted by three years of the Dumpster at the helm, that they may be too tired and/or nervous to consider Medicare for All or the kind of radical restructuring of taxes and military budget cuts necessary to pay for decent healthcare, childcare, teachers, functional schooling, the retraining of our workers sidelined by Globalism and the rebuilding of our infrastructure which is below par for a number of Third World countries. (Currently we spend less on retraining our sidelined workers than any industrialized country in Western Europe or the Netherlands.)
So cranky Bernie comes along, like one of my old Jewish Communist Uncles smearing cream-cheese on the bagels and waxing lyrical about Trotsky. No, Bernie is NOT a Communist. He’s not even a Socialist. Wake up people! He has never once called for the take-over of any industry or the centralized planning of the economy. He is, in any European country, a completely legitimatye SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT, a left-of-center Democrat, not a Socialist.
Because the political spectrum in the United States has been shrunk between the Center and the Right, the Center now substitutes for the Left. Most Americans have never had the opportunity to hear or read real leftists like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn or Michael Parenti . Consequently what passes for normal in every European country scares the beJesus out of our uneducated ,whip-lashed , distracted, electorate. Bernie has been conscripted to stand in for the old Stalinist Devil, and the nightly comedy is watching the same sober, chipper pundits falling over themselves to describe him as the scourge of our chances of removing Donald Trump from office.
ALL major media is currently owned by Three Mega-corporations representing one Center-Right perspective. They are rushing to put their thumbs on the scale to block Bernie. Democratic electors are even saying it out loud. The pundits quail at the prospect of this cranky old Jew in charge of anything! Imagine what will happen to Democratic hopes, if Establishment Dem super-electors block Bernie and his voters at a brokered convention. His pissed off and betrayed-for-the-second-time minions will stay home as they did after discovering Hilary and the DNC had put their thumb on the scales in 2016,and it’ll be “Welcome bak, Donald!
So, I voted for Elizabeth Warren. I did this because I’m a confirmed progressive; Because it’s time to break the strangle-hold of old white men (the Prep-school boys) and give a brilliant woman a shot after two centuries of men running the Nation into the ground and sending millions of its kids and unemployed to prison, their deaths in endless wars, or hospitals recovering from them.
I voted for Elizabeth Warren because she has formulated sensible plans. Because she designed and built the first agency to protect consumers AND GOT IT DONE. To quote a friend’s letter:
Elizabeth Warren is the candidate most likely to achieve a center-left popular front, move the center-of-gravity of the Democratic Party in that direction, beat Trump, and begin to move the federal government onto a policy trajectory with at least some chance of stemming our current head-long rush toward civilizational suicide. Bernie and his supporters should be helping with that. We simply don't have time to build anything like a "socialist revolution." That may be a possibility a generation or two from now, if we can manage to survive the near-term and long-lasting catastrophes of radical climate destabilization and environmental degradation.
Don’t get me wrong. I respect and admire Bernie, his consistency, principles, and his ideals. I am grateful that he has pushed the entire Democratic party Left to the degree that every Democratic candidate actually ran to the Left of President Obama. However, I don’t think he has the personality to achieve the coalitions required to rebuild the country. While I understand and share his anger and outrage, I don’t think that anger useful in healing the wounds, the fractures and divisions caused by the Dumpster Presidency. I fear that his supporters are unwilling to take into consideration all those souls between the Alleghenies and the Sierras who will determine the outcome of this election and who may be more socially conservative than they are. The threats to other candidates from the Sanders campaign (even if some were dirty tricks played by oppo) and their unwillingness to compromise reminds me of errors me and my friends made when we were young and failed to support Humphrey and Mondale and got Nixon and Reagan instead.
The time to sulk is over. The time to make the perfect the enemy of the good is over. I’ll gladly vote for Joe Biden if he’s the nominee, but I’ll do it clear-eyed, fully understanding that unless substantial changes are made in our tax-structure, reducing our military budget, taxing hedge-fund transactions and investing in our people we will be back here again, facing another demagogue, and the next time all hope to deter climate change and rebuild the America which was once the envy of the world, will have passed for good. A few months ago 20,000 armed men gathered in Virginia holding signs announcing that if laws were passed restricting their assault weapons that they would be armed combatants against the government. Think about that for just one moment. If that threat remains unanswered we are hostages. Donald Trump won’t do it. The Repugnants won’t do it. Bernie didn’t. Elizabeth Warren, just might.