Dear America,
Over the past twelve hours, I've gone from dispirited to heartened just from watching television. Last night, I watched a documentary called, "Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream." It was about the residents of 740 Park Avenue in New York City, who include or have included an heir to the Chrysler fortune, David Koch of the infamous Koch brothers, the hedge fund managers Saul Steinberg and Stephen Schwarzman, John Thain, the former, disgraced CEO of Merrill Lynch (he is famous for spending a million dollars to renovate his office as the corporation was suffering losses totaling $15 billion, concomitantly giving out performance bonuses to his henchmen who had helped him preside over the 2007-08 collapse of our economy as the corporation failed to the extent that a subsidized takeover by Goldman Sachs was necessary) and several other notably reprehensible people. It is the lap of luxury...literally...though morality and virtue seem nowhere to be found at 740. Among the specific topics discussed was the political unassailability of the 15% tax rate paid by hedge fund managers on their income, based on the fact that they take what amounts to interest on the funds they manage in lieu of salary or fees, a sop for the super rich protected by Chuck Schumer, the number two Democrat in the Senate. Of course, wage stagnation was mentioned along with the facts that CEO's today make more than 200 times what their average workers do, and that 40% of food stamp recipients go to work every day, but they cannot make enough money to feed their families while simultaneously keeping a roof over their heads. The gravamen of the piece was that the rich few control more and more of our national wealth through politics that result in those of us who worked to make them rich having no real chance to prosper because of their Reaganesque, supply-side pontifications and the sway they hold in Washington. They oppose the increases in the minimum wage that are being proposed on those bases, even though millions of people need those food stamps because they don't earn a living wage.
Then this morning, I saw a piece on CBS's Sunday Morning about the fact that in a small American Indian community in the Southwest, the population has no access to potable water except when it is brought in by trucks or carted back in containers from a well located at an Indian mission miles away. It's not that they couldn't have water locally; there is a proposed project to bring it to them. But the cost would by about $700,000 and neither the state nor the federal government will pay it, so they are trying to raise the money themselves with contributions. The contrast of people without water to drink and bathe in against people who have so much that they can never spend it but want more and more at the expense of the rest of us was...as I said, dispiriting. What kind of a nation have we become. What kind of people are we when so many of us can consider voting for a nouveau-riche blatherskite like Donald Trump on the theory that, because he purports to be a successful businessman who thinks more benefits for business are the key to helping the rest of us, he can make this a better country. But then I watched Face the Nation And saw former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley being interviewed.
It started like all the other interviews of political hopefuls in the party races for the presidential nomination. He eschewed sucker punching the opposition and went directly into self-puffery, much of which was of no substance or merit at all. He talked about the state he governed having the highest median income of all the states, failing to mention that tens of thousands of federal employees live in the Maryland suburbs of the District of Columbia, which brings the median up dramatically, but says very little about life in Baltimore or Hagerstown. He touted his "executive experience" as a qualification, and maybe it is, but they all have experience of one kind or another that they say is uniquely qualifying, and maybe they are right too. And he talked about the fact that the working people of this country haven't seen wage growth relative to the value of the dollar they earn in over thirty years...in other words, since the advent of supply-side economics during the Reagan administration. He quoted some statistics that favored his point of view, but they all do that. But then he said something that made me feel that Bernie Sanders isn't the only alternative to Hillary Clinton. He said that he favored re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall Act, which I have been advocating since the financial crisis and the first letters I wrote on this blog. Glass-Steagall was a reaction to the last time the financial industry wrecked the nation and then the world...a cataclysm that he, Bernie Sanders and many others predict is going to recur pretty soon given the soaring stock market, the obscene accretion of wealth among the 1% and the evanescence of the middle class and its standard of living.
Let me be clear. I'm still a Sanders man. But there will be only one Democratic nominee for president, and if it's Bernie, I'll vote for him. If it's Clinton, I'll vote for her...reluctantly. But it could be O'Malley. He may be the best combination of egalitarianism and political viability available, and until this morning I wasn't aware that we had one. Boy am I relieved.
Your friend,
Mike
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