Once upon a time I believed.
I believed in the infallibility of free markets. That, if left to its own devices, the markets would always sort themselves out and this would be in the ultimate best interest of everybody—rich, middle class, and poor alike.
I believed that these magical markets were so robust that they were incorruptible. That anyone who ever tried to game them for their own narrow self interest would certainly end up falling on hard times.
This was practically an item of faith with me, growing up as I did during the height of the “cold war”.
Then one day, something happened. I got a job.
OK. You can stop laughing now.
I soon discovered my relative rank in this system. That even if I worked extra hard and came up with ways of improving things for my employer, I was really not appreciated. Any such new idea or method was quickly co-opted by my boss with him taking all or most of the credit.
I soon discovered that work was endless drudgery which I had little chance of escaping.
I was near the bottom of a caste system which was based on three things: initial wealth (including family connections), personal appearance, and educational credentials.
There is a forth part of this caste system which I easily aced. And that is race. I'm white.
Being white, I over a very long time discovered, allowed me to live in a free country. I could go about my business with absolute minimal harassment by the police. Such harassment dropped quickly down to nothing as aged out of my youth. It took years for me to discover that non-white people, especially black, live in a whole different country, even though they live just a few miles away. In their country just about everyone is poor. In their country, people who try to get ahead – get a job-- are often robbed by their peers. In their country gangs rule the streets. In their country, they are often assumed to be criminals merely because they are black. In their country, police can harass, brutalize, rob, and even kill them with little fear of recourse.
Being white, I escaped most of that.
Though I never thought they had it coming, I always thought that racism was a sickness of the soul. That it had nothing to do with the economic system. It was just a left over from our bad history of what I call “black slavery” (I learned, in my 20's that classical slavery was a whole different animal).
Having read about the history of “black slavery” (which I studied while in high school, along with the history of the holocaust), I became very uncomfortable around black people. I felt like maybe I had it coming.
But as I grew older, my lack of educational credentials or of any skilled trade (definitely my bad-- BTW) started to tell. I drifted further and further from my middle class parents and the rest of the family, as my world continually looked less and less like theirs. Though I always stayed on good speaking terms, a gulf seemed to grow between me and them.
On several occasions, I had to move back in with my parents, due to some financial miscalculation on my part. Once it was because of my involvement in union activity. Another time, it was because I thought the grass was greener at the other end of the country (it wasn't—and the ghosts of my union activities followed me even there, I later found out).
It wasn't until the very end of my twenties that I moved out for good. I finally worked my way up from being a temp to a full time employee at an independent stamping plant. I moved into a somewhat dilapidated mobile home park, where I lived most of my adult life.
This mobile home park had old, ram shackled trailers, dirt roads, and an alcoholic manager, who always kept a baseball bat by his desk. It was a white ghetto. It was full of people from the Appalachian south, who often got into violent feuds against one another. I learned to mind my own business—a rule which I followed almost too perfectly—until one day, when I heard a knock on my door.
It was a middle aged woman who lived in the same park. Her son had just been arrested for burglary, and she noticed I had a car. She asked if I would drive her to the jail, so she could visit her son. I agreed. I came to know here and her family. She was Puerto Rican, and she and her husband both worked. I visited their trailer. It was the dead of winter. It had plastic sheeting over the openings where the windows used to be, and was heated by an electric oven, which, needless to say, was always on.
Her son served his time and was released. They moved out of the trailer park and out of my life. I gave her my manual typewriter, which I never was able to master, as a going away present.
On one summer day, for no reason I could discern, the local police drove through the park with at least three squad cars, with the song “Bad Boys” blaring out of their loud speakers.
When Bill Clinton was elected, I naively thought the Reagan era was finally coming to an end. But when he signed off on NAFTA ( the North American Free Trade Agreement), with Al Gore a most ebullient cheer leader, I realized that the Democratic Party had changed. It no longer was about looking out for the common man, but about throwing a few crumbs his way, while constantly wailing about how bad the Republicans are. What we then and now have are two Republican parties. One has move so far to the right, it's literally in wacko land. The other, which used to be somewhat to the left, has moved so far to the right, that the other one had to move to wacko land, just to get daylight between the two.
NAFTA, along with an over abundance of other supplier companies, did in the company I worked for. It shut its doors in the fall of '95. Just about all of the skills I learned there were suddenly obsolete.
I worked in two other fields, since then, before becoming a security guard. This field, as low pay as it is, will last long enough, I hope, for me to get Social Security. Meanwhile technology, mostly owned and controlled by the billionaire class, makes even more of our jobs obsolete. What's going to happen to all these people who lose their livelihoods? Are a bunch of new jobs going to magically appear, brought about by the free market fairies? Or are we to become like Latin America, with swarms of beggars and subject to armed insurrections?
Through this long experience, I've come to see markets a very easy to manipulate, especially when there are only less than a dozen people running them.
This whole thing now seems to be a monstrous fraud, where those higher up the ladder must be sure to give those lower down a good kick in the face, lest they lose their position. I see racism as a very useful means of social control, to not only keep those on the bottom constantly at each others throats, but as a means to keep everyone distracted as well. I think this has a lot to do with the so-called “culture wars”. In the mean time, those in the so-called “middle class”, and especially us not in it, have received a royal hosing—by both parties.
Bernie Sanders seems to be the only one who understands this.
I will vote for Hillary, but only if I have to.
Until then, I'm a Bernie Sanders man.