1 Boring Old Man

I remember the 1952 election campaign. I was in a new elementary school and we had mock elections – 5th grade. We’d just moved from a very small house to the suburbs, and my father had taken a "real" job. It was like the World War was finally over in a real way, and things were picking up at our house, actually in most Americans’ houses. General Eisenhower had put away his uniform and donned a suit to lead us into the new prosperous age – never mind the Cold War or the Korean War. We had our own car, went to movies, and there was a television we could watch on clear nights when the waves from Atlanta could reach the Tennessee line. Our parents had seen the world plunge into a Depression when they were the same age I was in 1952, and they moved from the Depression into the War years. It was the 1950’s, and things were finally looking up.

I don’t remember FDR. He died when I was three, and the history my mind was recording at the time was the smell of chloroform when I had my tonsils out. But I don’t think kids know that now is part of history. FDR was back there with Ulysses, Vercingetorix, and Andrew Jackson. I guess I knew about the New Deal, but I thought of it like it was a part of the Constitution – a reform of the greed and corruption that had lead us to brink of ruin. I didn’t think of it as something that could go away.

But it was only about thirty years later that we elected Ronald Reagan President, and he started making changes. That was a long time ago now, but even then, I had no real awareness that what Reagan was doing was systematically deconstructing the changes FDR had put in place after the Great Depression to keep it from happening again. He slashed the Income Taxes, mostly the taxes on the rich. He spent a fortune mobilizing our military, even though it was peacetime [or at least the kind of peacetime the Cold War allowed]. The part I was completely clueless about was his beginning the process of deregulation of our Banks and Markets. In the thirty years since he was elected, we got the Old Deal back – made worse by the fact that Reagan and the Bushes that followed him did something new. They ran the national debt into the stratosphere. President Clinton did try to check our overspending and the explosion of the military budget, but unfortunately, he had fallen in love with deregulation too, signing Bills that accounted for some of our worst woes [as in Phil Gramm’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act].

I suppose that if I were a Conservative Republican rich guy, I might have seen the thirty years after Eisenhower was elected as a war to get my place back – the one I thought FDR had taken away from people like me. I don’t really know about that because I’m none of those things – a Conservative, a Republican, or a rich guy. And I feel kind of guilty that in these thirty years since Reagan’s election, I haven’t been sufficiently aware that there was another war going on – one to destroy FDR’s changes in our economic policies – to "loosen things up." I did know that these same people have been at war with things that mattered to me – Civil Rights, the Mental Health Act, social progress – stuff like that. But I was mostly oblivious to the financial things other than the Income Tax cuts.

I sometimes think I’m unfair to Reagan. After all, some of what he was doing needed to be done – he just so way overdid it. Multiplying the damage, the Bushes kept pushing the Reagan "revolution" with none of Reagan’s panache. Bush I even cut Reagan’s cuts. And Clinton didn’t stop it; he just slowed it down. The deregulation seemed to happen quietly in the background, a lot of it shepherded by Phil and Wendy Gramm, sustained by Alan Greenspan – although I’m not sure he knew it. In response to all these changes, something happened we should have all seen – the growth of a finance-ocracy, a class of people connected to large Banks and Financial Institutions that made fortune after fortune "playing with" our economy – financial bubbles, Hedge Funds, CDO’s, Credit Default Swaps – things the rest of us neither understood [nor benefited from]. It has become a ruling class unlike anything that was around in the twenties. They developed a bonus system that incentivized exotic financial practices that hurt us all. They profiteered like the historic Robber Barons along the Danube, the Wreckers of the English Coast, or the Pirates in the Caribbean. Such analogies sound forced, but they are unfortunately all too real. Since 1980, we’ve seen the growth of two groups – the homeless and finance-ocrats…

Of all the obstacles we face, none is more intransigent than the finance-ocracy of Wall Street and their wealthy clientele. As that 5th grader, had I been told the story that our country would be held hostage by Executives being paid billions of dollars in bonuses yearly to sack our economy, I would have thought you were describing some new Errol Flynn Swashbuckler, or maybe a movie made by one of those lefty Hollywood types trying to foment a Communist uprising [General Eisenhower would take care of it.] But looking back as an old guy, we’ve been in an undeclared Class War for thirty years and the government has been involved in it in a big way. I lived the first half of my life under the protections of FDR’s recovery program, and then spent thirty years watching it disappear. Those of us in my class and below [which is almost everybody] are losing the war. Worse than losing as individuals, the country itself is losing because of it. It’s not conserving anything, it’s destroying us.