The Golden Shower

I was sitting in Shaloob’s the other day, waiting for my chicken wrap, when Wolf Blitzer appeared on the flat-screen above the bar. My opinion of Wolf Blitzer has always been low, on a par with bill collectors and telemarketers, but in this segment about the American economy Wolf outdid himself.

Swear to God Wolf started jabbering about how Wall Street and the financial sector are the keys to our recovery and future prosperity. Any sane American citizen living outside of Manhattan and the DC Beltway would have thought that Blitzer had finally plunged over the edge and into the abyss; he sounded like a paid shill for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the American Society of Overpaid CEO’s (there’s no such organization, I just made it up, but you get the idea.)

If the American people have realized anything since last fall when the financial system went south and Bernie Madoff admitted that his empire was an empty shell, it’s that Wall Street’s comings and goings, ups and downs, peaks and valleys, surges and declines, have nothing to do with the economic prosperity of the average American family. Nothing, nada. During the Bush years, when no corporate CEO, hedge fund operator, bond trader or real estate shyster was left behind, working Americans lost ground, acres of ground. Wages flat-lined. The cost of medical insurance skyrocketed. College tuition soared into the stratosphere. The only way working people could maintain the illusion that the American Dream was within their grasp was to borrow like fiends and hope to hit the Lottery.

It took far too long, but Joe and Jane Public are finally waking up to the cold, unpleasant reality that the great American casino called Wall Street, aided and abetted by lobbyists and far too many Members of Congress imbued with the instincts of pimps and street hustlers, is a game rigged in favor of the few at the expense of the many. The people know now that they don’t stand a chance in the game and that the heart of the American Dream is barely beating. You can hear the people’s rumblings, the slow recognition that they have been sold out and ripped off, duped and played for fools.

When the CEO’s of the Big 3 auto companies jetted into Washington DC looking for a taxpayer handout, their chief strategy for achieving a recovery was to strong arm the UAW into making wage and benefit concessions. Forget the fact that the UAW has been ceding ground at the bargaining table for years now, trading concessions for jobs – the CEO’s automatically demanded more sacrifice from workers. Several Senators from southern, right-to-work states leapt on this Blame-the-UAW bandwagon, Limbaugh and Hannity pumped life into the myth, and before long the average UAW member was making $70 an hour. How could GM, Ford or Chrysler compete against the world with that albatross around their ankles?

Contrast the UAW with AIG, corporate basket case and recipient of billions of taxpayer dollars, whose top brass nonetheless argued strenuously that AIG was “contractually” obligated to pay bonuses to its top executives, even those that played a direct role in the reckless practices that sunk AIG in the first place. The fact that AIG was a ward of the taxpayers held no sway whatsoever. Unlike the UAW contract, which simply had to be renegotiated if not abrogated altogether, AIG couldn’t break its solemn obligation to its executive class, dozens of whom no longer work for AIG.

Have the people been duped? You bet. For decades. By the likes of Ronnie Reagan and Milton Freidman and Alan Greenspan and Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay and Jim Cramer and Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers and Lou Dobbs and Steve Forbes and John McCain and every other prosperous, comfortable white guy who argued that the key to prosperity was to elevate investors at the expense of workers and let the riches trickle down.

Like a golden shower.