In the fall of 1987, as the country was slipping headlong into what would become a drawn out economic slump, I was working two jobs that together only earned me $11,000 a year. Even in 80s money, this was not a living wage. I had been told my whole life that if I got that bachelor's degree, I would have it made. Instead, I was working my butt off just to pay my Mom some meager board and keep my '71 Ford LTD on the road and out of the mechanic's garage. As I drove to and from work in my jalopy with only an AM radio, I noticed that the Top 40 stations were steadily being taken over by conservative talk radio stations. With no other options, I had to listen to a lot of it.
They laid out a curious narrative. Since they couldn't blame their hero, Ronald Reagan, for the economy that never really got off the ground during his presidency, there had to be other scapegoats. There were the Germans and Japanese who dared to make better cars and steel at competitive prices. There were the Mexicans who had the audacity to take jobs in the factories that U.S. corporations built there while shuttering factories here. And, when all else fails, they could always blame the people on welfare (code for African-Americans). The lesson for today: your problems, Mr. and Mrs. White America, were not created by you or our fine Republican government; it's everybody else's fault.
I was a White American who was struggling, but somehow these excuses rang hollow. They rang hollow because the news reports that ran prior to the right-wing gab fests told me about Michael Milken and his junk bond scandal. They told me about how the Savings and Loan assholes took on too much risk with other people's money and were now costing the American taxpayers over 100 billion dollars. There were reasons I was having a hard time finding a decent job, but the culprits were just as white as I was. I laughed at these hypertensive babblers. It was a schtick. It was a snake oil salve placed on a wound no one knew how to heal. I assumed only the most gullible were buying this garbage.
In 1990, I got a job working for a mutual fund company. It was a full-time, permanent position with great benefits. Unfortunately, the hourly wage was not much better than what I had been making before. As an English major, I had to go through extensive training to learn the world of investing and all the tricky byways associated with it. Tax law, securities regulations, retirement planning, portfolio management, and so on. I had to get certifications from the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD). I could have been a stockbroker with all the training and certifying, but instead I was answering shareholder letters about their portfolios and the related issues. It was hard work requiring quite a bit of knowledge and skill. I wonder how confident the investors would have felt, however, if they knew that the guy answering their letters made about the same as a night manager at Denny's. The only way I could make anything like a comfortable wage was to work copious amounts of overtime, not that I had any choice. The overtime was mandatory.
Some co-workers said that it was the new sweat shop. That was a little extreme, but it was a far cry from the days when a guy in an auto plant could raise a family of four just by attaching the same bolt over and over for eight hours a day. This was the new reality that the Reagan Revolution had brought. While the top guys in the ivory tower downtown collected millions in bonuses, guys like me who were keeping the shareholders happy and placated were getting a check the equivalent of one and one half times my two-week salary...AS MY ENTIRE ANNUAL BONUS. Actually that's not completely true. They took out withholding at the highest possible rate, so the check was a lot smaller.
There seemed some sense of hope by 1992, however. Bill Clinton set about disproving trickle down economics by raising taxes on the top wage earners without hurting the economy. In fact, the economy grew at a rate far greater than anything experienced during the Reagan/Bush years. The markets were on a roll and my stingy employer even recognized that they had to pay us better under the threat of stiffer competition. My life got a whole lot better, I had a new car, a house, and a comfortable nest egg. The promise I had been given as a child was starting to come true.
Naturally, the Republicans hated all this Democratic success and had to vote in a bunch a guys to mess everything up. Newt Gingrich and his band of rowdies were unlike the staid conservatives I was used to. There was an edge to their rhetoric. A nastiness in their tone that mimicked the radio talk show hosts I had listened to. While I was toiling away at life, I hadn't noticed that the Republican party had changed. All the extremists whom the party had given lip service to in order to stay elected were now running for offices themselves. The party was shifting further right, but not just that. They were out to draw lines in the sand. This was no longer government of the people, by the people, and for the people. They wanted government of, by, and for a certain group of people and everyone else was going to pay.
The mood was disturbing, especially when the Republicans in Congress shut down the government in 1995. Still, the economy was strong. Clinton was tightening up the budgets. We were at peace. The country felt happy. I kept telling myself it was all going to work out.
In 2000, I had a better new car, a better house in a better neighborhood, and I was about to get married. Confidence oozed out of every pore for this grand new millennium. And then came the presidential election.
To be continued...
Showing posts with label 1980s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1980s. Show all posts
Friday, March 3, 2017
Friday, February 24, 2017
A Brief History of the World (That I Lived Through) Part One
There's no doubt that our country is deeply divided. It's hard to put a finger on when it started to happen or how, but there are some pretty clear indicators that the cracks started to form in the 1980s. I remember in the late '80s listening to a liberal pundit talking on the news about the legacy of the Ronald Reagan presidency. He said that Reagan had made us comfortable with our prejudices. At the time, I thought it was a pretty mean thing to say, but in hindsight, I think the guy was spot on.
In the 70s. I grew up in a blue-collar town filled with Southern transplants who had moved north to work in the factories that filled our community. I can't deny that there was quite a bit of racism in my community, but it was kept largely out of sight. I'd hear the "n word" dropped fairly casually and the occasional grumbling about people on welfare driving Cadillacs, but there was a general mood in the country, following the events of the '60s, that it just wasn't proper to be openly racist. We even had some African-Americans and other minorities living in the neighborhood, and no one was threatening them or treating them with any hostility.
Most everyone was a registered Democrat because most of the fathers were union men and the Democrats looked out for workers' rights. It was the party of Social Security and Medicare and of generally helping out the little guy. Nevertheless, as the Carter administration chugged along, there was a growing sense that the working class were taking a back seat to minorities, immigrants, and gays. The party was becoming too intellectual, too elitist. All the while, the Industrial Age was sputtering to a halt as automation and competition from other countries was undercutting the strength of the mighty steel and auto industries.
My father was not a blue collar guy. He worked as a cryptanalyst for National Security Agency (NSA). I felt like a bit of an odd ball in school because, while other kids could say that their dads were pipe fitters or they made suspensions for Chevrolets, I never really could explain what my dad did (he couldn't tell me either). I also couldn't understand why other families had boats and motorcycles and took fancy vacations while we struggled just to get by. Only later did I realize that, while my dad was quite smart and had an extremely important job, he was paid far less than my neighbor's dad who spent his whole day bolting bumpers onto station wagons. That was the world we lived in then. Someone from the back woods of West Virginia with barely a high school education could come to Maryland, get a union job, and make more money than a college-educated man who was decoding messages intercepted from the Viet Cong and the Soviets.
But it all started to unravel around 1979. Younger workers were getting laid off. Older workers were being asked to do more for less. Even older workers were given buyouts to retire with a fraction of the benefits that were once promised. The American Dream was disintegrating and Jimmy Carter was droning on about a "malaise," as if all this was somehow our fault.
Then came Ronald Reagan. He was cheerful and confident and telling us that the only thing we needed to do to "make America great again" was to unleash the shackles government had put on corporate America and prosperity would rain down on us once again. That sounded really good to the people in my community. These life-long Democrats voted for the Republican with the big ideas about trickle-down economics. It sounded good at the time. It was simple and straightforward. No fussy intellectual mumbo-jumbo like the Democrats were babbling about.
In 1982, I was turning 18 like most of my senior high school class. We were trotted down to the cafeteria to register for the upcoming election. Many of my classmates registered as Republicans. They were probably the first Republicans in their families, and it was all because of Reagan. Never mind that the unemployment rate had jumped to over 10%, up from the 7.5% it was when Reagan first became president. Never mind that the huge tax break he gave the wealthy never turned into actual jobs. They were not paying attention to the man behind the curtain, but rather were mesmerized by the gleaming face on the TV screen.
During my college years, there was a heating up of the economy, but it was largely based on wild speculation. Businesses were expanding for no other reason than because tax breaks and deregulation had made it possible to do so. I was working as a clerk in a Sherwin-Williams store at the time, and I saw how they were opening new stores all over Maryland at a feverish pace. I talked to one of our sales reps about that, wondering why on Earth they were doing it when we already faced steep competition from Duron, Martin's, and the newfangled warehouse hardware stores popping up everywhere. He talked about how they were being "aggressive" and other business babble, but there was nothing in what he said that indicated a sound business plan for growth. It was simply a case of exuberant optimism.
During my senior year of college, Timbuk 3 had a big hit with the song "The Future's so Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)." I loved the irony of it, but at the same time, I was hoping that all this enthusiasm for a booming economy might actually make it come true. I was about to get my first "real job," and I needed a strong economy to grease my career skids. I graduated in 1987. It was the year that brought the junk bond scandal, the Savings & Loan debacle, and "Black Monday" when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost almost 23 % of its value in one day. Instead of wearing shades, I was breaking out a flashlight to see where my future had gone.
To be continued...
In the 70s. I grew up in a blue-collar town filled with Southern transplants who had moved north to work in the factories that filled our community. I can't deny that there was quite a bit of racism in my community, but it was kept largely out of sight. I'd hear the "n word" dropped fairly casually and the occasional grumbling about people on welfare driving Cadillacs, but there was a general mood in the country, following the events of the '60s, that it just wasn't proper to be openly racist. We even had some African-Americans and other minorities living in the neighborhood, and no one was threatening them or treating them with any hostility.
Most everyone was a registered Democrat because most of the fathers were union men and the Democrats looked out for workers' rights. It was the party of Social Security and Medicare and of generally helping out the little guy. Nevertheless, as the Carter administration chugged along, there was a growing sense that the working class were taking a back seat to minorities, immigrants, and gays. The party was becoming too intellectual, too elitist. All the while, the Industrial Age was sputtering to a halt as automation and competition from other countries was undercutting the strength of the mighty steel and auto industries.
My father was not a blue collar guy. He worked as a cryptanalyst for National Security Agency (NSA). I felt like a bit of an odd ball in school because, while other kids could say that their dads were pipe fitters or they made suspensions for Chevrolets, I never really could explain what my dad did (he couldn't tell me either). I also couldn't understand why other families had boats and motorcycles and took fancy vacations while we struggled just to get by. Only later did I realize that, while my dad was quite smart and had an extremely important job, he was paid far less than my neighbor's dad who spent his whole day bolting bumpers onto station wagons. That was the world we lived in then. Someone from the back woods of West Virginia with barely a high school education could come to Maryland, get a union job, and make more money than a college-educated man who was decoding messages intercepted from the Viet Cong and the Soviets.
But it all started to unravel around 1979. Younger workers were getting laid off. Older workers were being asked to do more for less. Even older workers were given buyouts to retire with a fraction of the benefits that were once promised. The American Dream was disintegrating and Jimmy Carter was droning on about a "malaise," as if all this was somehow our fault.
Then came Ronald Reagan. He was cheerful and confident and telling us that the only thing we needed to do to "make America great again" was to unleash the shackles government had put on corporate America and prosperity would rain down on us once again. That sounded really good to the people in my community. These life-long Democrats voted for the Republican with the big ideas about trickle-down economics. It sounded good at the time. It was simple and straightforward. No fussy intellectual mumbo-jumbo like the Democrats were babbling about.
In 1982, I was turning 18 like most of my senior high school class. We were trotted down to the cafeteria to register for the upcoming election. Many of my classmates registered as Republicans. They were probably the first Republicans in their families, and it was all because of Reagan. Never mind that the unemployment rate had jumped to over 10%, up from the 7.5% it was when Reagan first became president. Never mind that the huge tax break he gave the wealthy never turned into actual jobs. They were not paying attention to the man behind the curtain, but rather were mesmerized by the gleaming face on the TV screen.
During my college years, there was a heating up of the economy, but it was largely based on wild speculation. Businesses were expanding for no other reason than because tax breaks and deregulation had made it possible to do so. I was working as a clerk in a Sherwin-Williams store at the time, and I saw how they were opening new stores all over Maryland at a feverish pace. I talked to one of our sales reps about that, wondering why on Earth they were doing it when we already faced steep competition from Duron, Martin's, and the newfangled warehouse hardware stores popping up everywhere. He talked about how they were being "aggressive" and other business babble, but there was nothing in what he said that indicated a sound business plan for growth. It was simply a case of exuberant optimism.
During my senior year of college, Timbuk 3 had a big hit with the song "The Future's so Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)." I loved the irony of it, but at the same time, I was hoping that all this enthusiasm for a booming economy might actually make it come true. I was about to get my first "real job," and I needed a strong economy to grease my career skids. I graduated in 1987. It was the year that brought the junk bond scandal, the Savings & Loan debacle, and "Black Monday" when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost almost 23 % of its value in one day. Instead of wearing shades, I was breaking out a flashlight to see where my future had gone.
To be continued...
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