Hard Times, the Sequel: George Packer on the disappearance of the American Dream

[marmar]

from In These Times:


Hard Times, the Sequel
George Packer on the disappearance of the American Dream.

BY CATHERINE TUMBER


The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, George Packer’s absorbing account of the 35-year shakedown of the U.S. economy by “organized money,” follows the life stories of three everymen struggling against mounting odds to make ends meet, economically and existentially. The Unwinding’s narrative begins in 1978—soon after 5,000 steelworkers lost their jobs to the abrupt closure of Youngstown Sheet and Tube—and demonstrates that in the subsequent collapse of the “Roosevelt Republic,” the money elites may have killed off the American democratic experiment for good.

“He was angry on behalf of the American people,” Packer says of Jeff Connaughton, one of his three lead characters, “not the poor, to be honest, who were always with us, but the people in the middle who had …worked hard and played by the rules and saw half their 401(k)s disappear in their late fifties just when they thought they’d saved for retirement and now were fucked.” Connaughton’s story frames the larger narrative of institutional disintegration and comes closest, one suspects, to reflecting Packer’s own moderate political bent. After a modest but solidly middle-class upbringing in Alabama, Jeff majored in business at the state U and, as a sophomore, was inspired to enter a life of public service by a characteristically charming, outsider-y debate performance by 36-year-old Senator Joe Biden in 1979. From that point on, he was determined to follow Biden all the way to the White House, which young Jeff regarded “the summit of American life.”

Upon graduation in the early ’80s, he earned an MBA—suddenly de rigueur for ambitious young white men at the time—and spent three years as a Wall Street bond trader, since “a job with a company that actually made things meant you were being left behind,” before landing his dream job as a rising staffer on Biden’s 1988 doomed presidential campaign, and then as a Biden fundraiser. Humiliated by his hero’s contempt for the increasingly necessary evil of political money-chasing, and convinced that he could “get things done” working in the presumed meritocracy of the private sector, he went to law school, worked as a Clinton White House staff attorney, and joined a high-profile lobbying firm. From that perch, he came to understand that “the Blob,” consisting of power couples and other unholy alliances forged along the “Wall Street-Washington axis,” pre-ordained regulatory outcomes with no accountability or rules of honor, and most certainly without merit. Eventually, he looks on helplessly as the Blob systematically guts any serious effort at financial reform after the 2008 collapse. Fed up and “radicalized,” Connaughton reverts to a quiet life in his native South, where his thwarted yearning for public service results in a book: The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins.

The other two lead characters don’t have the resources to fare nearly so well. We are now “alone on a landscape without solid structures,” Packer writes, and the personal consequences of structural erosion over time have been brutal. Tammy Thomas, daughter of a heroin addict who abandoned her children, began life behind the eight-ball in a decaying black neighborhood in Youngstown and showed every sign of going down the same path when she got pregnant at 15. Instead, motherhood inspires her to fight like hell, and we follow her through the years as she stays one perilous step ahead of the rolling cyclone of industrial disinvestment, mass unemployment and street violence that forces her to move several times, losing home equity with each relocation. After getting her daughter through college on the decent but declining wages she makes as a unionized auto-parts worker, she accepts the GM buyout 13 years before retirement and invests a big chunk of money with a trusted relative in what turns out to be a real-estate Ponzi scheme. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15480/hard_times_the_sequel/

[QC]

1. I sure wish we would see some of that googledimensional chess

aimed at this issue.

The future of democracy in this country depends on it.

[QC]

2. kick