There comes a point in every life when you first suspect something you always knew to be true may not be. For me, this moment was long in coming. Like the faintest whisper in a dark room, I have felt for some time my core American values that have defined my life were hollow and untrue. Yet it has only been in the last year or so that I fully realized why.
To understand my journey, I must reveal a bit of my story. I was raised by an amazing woman who invested her time and resources into her two sons. Growing up in the Bronx (NY), she worked two jobs to send us to 12 years of the best Catholic education available in New York. We both graduated from the prestigious Cardinal Spellman High School (Justice Sotomayor graduated from Spellman in 1972). After high school, I served four years active duty in the US Army. President Reagan was my Commander in Chief and General Colin Powell was my V Corp commander while I served as a member of NATO in Germany.
After my enlistment, I attended college in Texas and graduate school in Connecticut, before serving a one-year stint as a Lead Disaster Assistance Loan Officer in FEMA for the Northridge Earthquake disaster. For the last 22 years, I have worked as a financial services professional, primarily as a small business banker.
During most of my youth, I was a registered democrat, changing in 1998 to a registered republican, only to change again to a registered independent by 2004. I have participated in one political campaign as a Surrogate Speaker for Matt Salmon (R) when he ran for Arizona Governor in 2002 (we lost to Janet Napolitano). I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and for the first time in my life, I voted for the Green party candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, for President in 2016. For most of my life, I have been a true patriot who believed in serving a cause bigger than myself. The virtues of independence, individual liberty, limited government, and the pursuit of happiness have defined my life.
Yet in retrospect, I see the signs of my discontent starting in 1971 with the famous Powell memorandum, a call to arms for Corporate America to contribute a material portion of their earnings to the cause of transforming the government, academic scholarship, and the media to the advancement of corporate interests. By 1987, the glorification of corporate interest found popular expression in the motion picture “Wall Street”, where Gordon Gekko proudly proclaimed “Greed is good.”
Then in 1992, we elected a smooth-talking man of the people from Hope, Arkansas, who presented a new pro-business, socially liberal democrat. During Bill Clinton’s tenure, he led the Congress to ratify NAFTA, signed federal welfare reform, the 1994 crime bill, and as a parting present repealed Glass-Steagall and deregulated complex financial instruments. All these measures proved to be devastating for poor, working, and middle class Americans, and enormously beneficial for corporate interests.
In November 2000, we elected an encore named George W. Bush, who fully monetized the military industrial complex. President Bush codified the predicate for permanent war with the concepts of “pre-emptive war” and the “war on terror”. Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 coupled with the Medicare Part D bonanza for the Pharmaceutical industry, produced an economy where business was booming through 2006. Wall Street’s mortgage back security con, made legal by Bill Clinton in 1999, blew up the global residential real estate market by 2008. And to the rescue came Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Congressional democrats who joined Bush in bailing out the corporate interests, while millions of Americans lost their homes, jobs, and retirement savings.
Eight years of Obama, two with total democratic control, and all we have to show for it is this stupid tee shirt saying “Yes we can!”. Little did I know the back of the shirt says “I always draw the short straw no matter what major political party I support.” As I said, “this moment of truth was long in coming.” Now where from here?
The American electorate has woken up. In 2016, republican primary voters rejected establishment republicans and general election voters rejected the ultimate democratic establishment politician. Our national tragedy was not offering the American electorate a credible non-establishment option. Democratic Party shenanigans, exposed by WikiLeaks, the Russians, and others, prevented Senator Sanders from being the credible non-establishment option. Instead, we are now led by an owner of the establishment politicians the electorate had soundly rejected. Corporate interests are now the government. Hereafter, there will be no one else to blame for the accelerating siphoning of wealth from middle and working class Americans to the uber wealthy.
The only question remaining is whether the deeply disgruntled, ethnically, regionally, faithfully, and racially divided American electorate will see past the divide and conquer strategy of corporate interest and finally identify the cause of our American nightmare.
None of us prosper by our efforts alone. Money, no matter how much you accumulate, won’t support your life if our natural resources are depleted through waste and gluttony. The time to rethink the virtue of the invisible hand is now. Reconsider your defining values. And in doing so, take your first step toward the future.