Watching the Republican senators announce their newest jobs plan on Thursday left me with only one reasonable certainty: that we are likely headed into another Great Depression. There is no stomach for anything else. The banks are again teetering, thanks to Europe. Jobs are not going to appear anytime soon. Consumer confidence is abysmal. But on point after familiar point, each senator came up and said exactly what they had said a dozen times before: that the only allowable answer is to even more deeply exacerbate the advantages of rich over poor, and corporate over labor. Cut taxes on the rich (they had all just voted against cutting taxes on the middle class). Cut taxes on corporations. Cut regulations, because, as several of the senators earnestly recounted to the audience of assembled reporters, their conversations with business owners had led them to believe that fear of regulation is what's really holding back all these companies from just going out and creating some jobs.
A tax break for companies to move their funds from offshore to onshore. More tax breaks for drilling. Oh, and austerity. Enforced, rigorous austerity.
There is not a thing there that is focused on creating jobs, as opposed to "helping job creators." Every sliver of it is dedicated to the rich and the corporate. Every last speck. It is the ultimate in trickle-down plans, the notion that the entire problem with the economy is that it is being held hostage by business leaders who will only release it in exchange for a new round of regulation-cutting or a new passel of tax avoidance schemes. It is either an unserious plan, in which case we are all doomed, or it is deeply serious, in which case the rest of us are little better than slaves.
There is a very short post by E.D. Kain, an author, on Forbes of all places. It is entitled The 'We are the 50%' Tumbler is Heartbreaking, referring to the anti-Occupy movement proposed by conservative Erick Erickson, and the title sums all. In post after post of the "53%," we see tales of people barely squeaking by on two jobs, or people unemployed but still defiant, or many, many young people who as of the moment do not pay taxes or actually belong to that 53% they claim membership in, but are absolutely convinced that they will, because fortune favors them. Kain says about one picture:
After this young woman’s father was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, he was told by the doctor to take it easy since he’s a manual laborer. Yet he went back to work full-time, working 12 hours a day, six days a week. She writes, “The cancer still grows. That is the American dream.”
Tell me this isn’t heartbreaking. Not just the story, but the sentiment.
The notion that this is the American dream, that men diagnosed with a horrible cancer should work 72 hours a week to support their families, is deeply tragic. There ought to be better visions of society than this.
The
53% is I think intended to be an expression of independence and the can-do spirit or something, but the net effect is nearly cruel to posters and visitors alike. This is the American Dream, so stripped down as to be barely recognizable. This is, for a very large segment of the population, the most they dare hope for: being able to find a second job to supplement the first, or obediently and proudly working 72 hour weeks while cancer slowly grows inside you, killing you.
It is bitter, and nearly mean. It it a vision so devoid of hope as to be almost a dark satire of past Americas. It makes you want to take some of the posters by the shoulders and shake them, saying really? Really, this is all you are allowed to expect? And you are so sure that this is the only future available to you or your children that you are willing to go out of your way to mock anyone who dares hope for more?
During the last debate, Rick Santorum muttered about how we needed more two-parent households in America, so that the family has the advantage of two incomes. No stay-at-home parents in future generations (and precious few schools either, apparently)—two jobs will be the minimum. Or four jobs, if two will not do. And we cannot expect heath insurance from our employers, in those four jobs, and we demand government not offer any as well, and if we get cancer while working at one of our jobs, then we keep working, and we die, and our children praise us later for our steadfastness.
Critics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, be they George Will or the New Republic or anywhere else, coalesce their objections around the supposed unreasonableness or utopianism of the protestors. They want the impossible, we are assured. They want the ridiculous. They want socialism, where socialism is defined as anything even a grain more accommodating of the middle or poorer classes than the status quo, regardless of how far the status quo has moved in the last few decades or will continue to move in the future. Again, every critique revolves around mocking anyone who would dare hope for something better, as if even contemplating such a thing was a delusion any serious American knows to discard. The list of things that are now given as obvious and infallible has grown to staggering proportions:
Losses by large banks must be paid for by taxpayers. Nobody else can expect a thing.
No matter how low taxes on the wealthy or on corporations are, compared to historical levels, they must go lower, and to suggest anything else is unserious at best, class warfare at worst.
(David Shankbone)
Nine-plus percent unemployment is fine. The government should play no role in reducing it, except in granting more money to large businesses in the hopes that they might reduce it.
Health care is not a right.
Earning a fair wage is not a right.
Eating is not a right.
Living is not a right.
This applies not just to individual workers, but to their children as well: No matter how much unemployment there may yet be, we look with great hostility now on programs meant to help the poor or the long-term unemployed. They are the only things we can come to political agreements to cut, when preaching about austerity; there is always the presumption there that the poor are undeserving, while the wealthy can gather any needed number of senators to sing their praises and vouch for their character.
Fear not, however: As the CEO of Bank of America recently pointed out, making a profit is a "right." So there is good news there: not life, not liberty, and certainly not the pursuit of happiness, but we can cross all those things out and scratch profit in there instead, and that will be just fine, and the rest will work itself out.
I do not think expecting more of the rich than of the poor is socialism. I do not think that taxing food nationwide at nine percent would count as liberty but taxing the rich at Reagan-era levels counts as tyranny. I do not think that subsidizing oil companies' pay to drill oil from public lands counts as freedom, while subsidizing solar energy firms counts as interfering with the marketplace. I do not think that money earned by moving money from one investment vehicle to another is intrinsically superior to money earned via manual labor.
I do not believe that corporations spending vast sums of money in efforts to handpick those that will write the laws they are to abide by is what the founders intended, but groups of common workers engaging themselves in politics represents a scandal.
And I am goddamn tired of hearing how my own convictions that the hungry should be fed, the sick should be cared for, and the powerless should hold at least a little bit of power is morally inferior to a religious caste that believes none of those things should be done, if performing them might insult the honor of the blessed golden calf of the free market.
All of these paint me as very nearly delusional, according to those that purport to lead this country and the cadre of Americans that follow them. Not believing these things brands me, as an individual, as naive; a hundred or a thousand people not believing these things at once is, in the words of the majority leader in the House of Representatives, a mob.
A recent article was premised on the question posed by a bank CEO to the reporter: Are the protestors dangerous? He meant it as a question of personal safety, but both he and the reporter skirted the more fundamental issue. Yes, the anger against the financial sector is dangerous to them. It represents not a turning point, but may well be a tipping point. Recent populist movements on both left and right have been premised on an inherent anger in being treated unfairly, a sense that the elites of the country were getting away with something (though what that something might be is, of course, diagnosed differently on each side).
One of the few things both sides are assured of, however, is that bailing out the banks turned out rottenly. It resulted in the exact same outcome of every other year: further consolidation, hegemony and power among the narrowest band of mega-firms; outrageous profits for all involved, regardless of the underlying shape of the economy; a financial sector that recovered nicely enough, but brought nothing else with it. The "recovery" was just as jobless as the recession; wages that had been stagnating for decades made not even a small surge forward again; government continued to treat the sector with such respect that it continued to staff policy positions with individuals from some of the very firms in question.
Regardless of what happens in Europe, or how much a large bank here may teeter, there is no stomach for further coddling. There is a very real danger of another round of collapsed banks: This time around, politicians that argue for propping them up will find themselves battered and deep-fried by their consituents. If there is one thing that the Occupy movement has made quite clear, it is that people are aware of the excesses of the financial sector, are angry about them, and are angry enough about them at this point to make a great deal of noise.
Even if allowing the banks to fail devastates the wider economy, the public will, at this point, still demand that they fail. There is no appetite for much else. Public ownership of the banks? Perhaps. A massive hit to government books from FDIC claims on the accounts of multiple huge failed institutions? Tolerable. But in answer to the bank CEO's question on the dangerousness of the Occupy movement: yes. Yes, it is dangerous. Because if there is another hit to the economy, the public will be out for figurative blood, when it comes to the banks, and they will get their way.
All of this wraps back to my larger point. At the beginning I mentioned a conviction that we could very well be headed into a full Depression, one bad enough to deserve a capital letter at the beginning of the word, one that is given its own name in future history books. I think it possible—no, probable, sadly—because of the enormous disconnect between political rhetoric and public opinion, at this point. Congress recently garnered its worst approval ratings ever. There is demonstrable public appetite, in similar polls, for jobs over deficit-busting and for raising high-end taxes over cutting benefits. None of this makes a damn bit of difference, however, because the Republican side of government is in absolute opposition to all of it. They have embraced a nihilistic vision of government, in which the only allowed action is to reduce or cripple it, and the only allowable fiscal policy is to give still more money to the very people the public demonstrators are so angry at.
The disconnect is complete. There is no possibility of government taking fiscal action to stave off continued joblessness: A desperately weak economy is considered the new normal. The disconnect between the welfare of large corporations, whose profits continue unimpeded, and the wider American economy continues to grow. There is a very good chance, on the election of the next president (and do not count me among the better fans of this president, who has staffed his policy offices with many figures of the same mold as those who devastated the economy in the last ten years and have apparently learned precious little since) that we will enter into a government dedicated towards the exacerbation of that great divide between the wealthy and everyone else, and especially of corporate power over public power. None of this will do a damn thing, if the financial sector cannot somehow miraculously right itself, but it would certainly enhance both the anger on the streets and the probability of a continued dim economy.
That is the problem, regardless of who may be in charge. Government in its current state is incapable of taking action to improve the economy, and the wider public will be absolutely intolerant of future actions to prop up the economy by taking actions to support financial sector. It will not happen; among left, right and center even proposing such a thing would be met with voter outrage that made recent vicious squabbles over healthcare look like a warm hug. The disconnect between those two groups, between government and people, renders future bailouts impossible and future stimulus to everyone else extremely unlikely. It is a cold war between the classes: no shooting, but an iron fence between the two sides that prevents either side from accomplishing anything but the very dismal status quo.
That, then, is where we currently find ourselves. No immediate possibility of improving the current tenuous economy, a great deal of opportunities to further damage it, a situation among banks that is not substantively much better than where they found themselves at the beginning of this crisis, and a seething public anger that would prevent government from repeating past efforts to prop up those banks and institutions, if the worst were to happen again.
Those are the makings of an economic calamity. They are also fodder for a true class war.
