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Once upon a time, America trembled on the brink of becoming a true middle-class paradise, with public policy poised on tiptoe to plunge into a progressive tide that would enable poorer and working-class people to have true upward mobility to the middle class. It was so close... we could almost touch it.
We'd unionized most of our major industries. We'd cut poverty for the elderly by more than half and ensured a reasonably comfortable retirement for American workers. Minimum wage was creeping up to where a person working for minimum wage could *almost* afford to support themselves in the lower echelons of the middle class. Many, many more-- including most unionized workers-- could afford to support a family household on one income.
We'd made serious strides toward assuring that consumers received both safety and value for their dollars, we'd ensured that banks and financial institutions couldn't play the kind of shell games that led to catastrophic collapse earlier in the century, we'd set up programs to insure bank accounts and home mortgages. We were making real strides toward affordable higher education.
We'd set up legal barriers to discrimination against minorities and women and were just starting to put some teeth into their enforcement.
We'd begun to work on the health care puzzle, starting with the elderly and the very poor, and we were taking steps to bring economic opportunity closer to those mired in poverty through Head Start, the Job Corps, CETA, and other farsighted programs.
We were *getting there.*
All the more so, because a combination of recent experience for the older generations, and regulatory practice made credit policies consistent with both opportunity AND risk avoidance. You had to have saved a reasonable downpayment to buy a home. You had to prove to the credit card company that you had both the financial capacity and a history of responsible bill payment before they'd issue you a card.
It was more restrictive, and it was harder for those getting started to get credit, to become homeowners, etc. (though we were working-- through Fair Credit laws and VHA financing and other methods-- to alleviate some of the difficulty.) But because even a minimum-wage job paid enough to almost live on, and a unionized job paid enough to let you save AND support a family, large numbers of people COULD take the big steps, and the numbers were rising every year.
We were so close... so close...
But there was one segment of society that wasn't seeing the steady, exhilarating improvements, year by year. They just couldn't seem to leap upward with the vigor they thought they were owed. The uppermost ten percent, already more than comfortable, couldn't quite break into the world of the ultrasupermegawealthy at the rates they'd been able to achieve back in the palmy days of the robber barons, before child labor laws and product safety regulations and unions had spoiled their party.
There weren't enough of them to reverse the tide on their own, but fortunately they still had a disproportionately large share of the nation's wealth tucked in their offshore accounts and they could start buying help. They chose a winning strategy: Convince the middle class that middle class wasn't enough. That they COULD become RICH!!! But alas, if they did-- and wealth was right around the corner, you could see on teevee and in the glossy magazines exactly what it looked like-- the greedy, incompetent, wasteful gubmint would grab their swag and stomp on their heads and keep them from enjoying the yachts and vacation homes they were really owed because they were good hardworking Christians.
This didn't work that well, at first. But the greedheads were helped along by a couple of circumstances concatenating at a strategic time: A stupid, costly, wasteful war that could suck the cash from the programs that were just starting to pay off and render them ineffective; and a huge new bill coming in for a necessary upgrade to the nation's public education system, which now was required to serve ALL children equally. By declining to pay that bill, and sucking war profits through the Southeast Asian straw, the greedheads ground the progress toward a middle class paradise to a halt, and began to reverse the tide.
Suddenly, it wasn't enough. Whatever you had, it wasn't enough. If you didn't have the BIG house, the NEW car, the TRENDIEST vacation, you just weren't doing as well as you "should" be doing-- and it was all the gubmint's fault, for "taking away your money" and doing all those programs for all those other people you didn't know and probably didn't deserve it anyway. More and more people began to believe it-- that investing in other people's economic opportunity, in the health and well-being of other peoples' children, in the future security of other people-- was all a waste and a scam and a plot on the part of the lazy, greedy, undeserving slobs below them to take away their money.
Finally, the tip turned: Enough regulations were repealed, ignored, re-interpreted, often in the name of "free trade" and "prosperity" to enable corporations to drain jobs away from "overpaid" Americans. And they even managed to convince the same people who were drinking the greedheads' other kool-aid that it was the WORKERS' fault! Those greedy, undeserving, corrupt unions were keeping the jobs for themselves and making it so expensive for the poor, struggling businesses that they just couldn't afford to employ Americans any more.
The progress took nearly seventy years, from the time of the early struggles in trust-busting and unionizing. Unravelling it took less than half of that-- less than thirty years from the time Ronald Reagan took office to provide cover for the greedheads' careful deconstruction of economic equity and opportunity.
The mortgage crisis is only the latest result.
Unfortunately, the infrastructure of support for the middle classes has been so thoroughly destroyed that no band-aid solution will provide a real or lasting solution to that problem. To solve the mortgage crisis and restore the home ownership dream, we will have to rebuild that infrastructure from the most basic level. Until we finally get to the point where large numbers of Americans can afford to do it the right way: Can afford to save for a downpayment. Can accumulate financial stability, a good credit rating, a history of financial responsibility. Can go to a carefully-regulated lender who will provide them with credit products that meet their needs, protect their credit AND the lender's investment.
There are no easy answers. We bought the poisoned fruit, we ate it, the greedheads are laughing all the way to the bank at our dreams of getting rich and not having the gubmint take away our money and give it to the undeserving brown layabouts and criminals, and now we have the tummy-ache. Tums ain't gonna do it.
But we've done it before. We CAN do it again. It starts with changing how we think about communities, neighbors, economies, and the role of government. It starts with understanding the true nature of security and where it comes from. It starts with education. And none of that is beyond us, if we're willing to make the effort.
militantly,
Bright
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