Twenty years ago in November 1989 I had been six months a new graduate from Washington University, moved to San Francisco (on a coin toss, New York City being tails), and landed my first professional job at an international publishing company as a production editor.
Then the Wall came tumbling down and much shifted under my feet, but George Herbert Walker Bush was president, a stammering act one of the Reagan Administration. So while air flowed between the two sides of Berlin and the Bolshevik dream came to a sad end, the US was burdened not only with more of the same, but also a wretched triumphalism as if our sheer will and some green God's grace, we had crushed the red menace.
I owned a TV in 1989, which I watched if I wasn't listening to npr or Pacifica radio. I vividly remember watching one of those sober round table chat shows on public television where one of the white-haired economist cautioned US declaring victory over a Cold War we didn't see ending. He warned that the same things that brought down the USSR and the Warsaw Pact would bring down the US.
Then came the great sucking sounds: Bye bye Peace Dividend! Bye bye union jobs and military bases! Bye bye industrial base and the rationale for subsidizing the middle class as a bulwark against communist ideology. The middle class was never sustainable anyway, something many of them did not know - so they prattle about the poor having children they can not afford as if the state weren't subsidizing theirs - public hospitals, public schools, social services.
The middle class could only be sustained with socialism in policy but never in name.
Then: Bye bye international publishing company!
My graduating class of 1989 was the last that could earn a degree in anything [that publishing company didn't care] and get a decent, white-collar job. While there is still a momentum for the young to go to college or be damned, nothing awaits them except disappointment and debt. Our rulers do nothing about this scandal, and since we are the Masters of the World - the mafia crime-boss of the planet - with no USSR to compete against the poor have been left to their own devices.
Our walls are still firmly up, and Sen. Joe Lieberman one of its most prominent, ruthless, unsavory masons.
I lamented in a previous column how my present employer, the US Dept of Homeland Security, is a growth industry of managers and deputies with high salaries to police - I mean "protect"- us, while teachers are being fired and class sizes are increasing while student services are going the way of Cuba's ethical ration system: history!
That white-haired economist only said more soberly what Fidel Castro was to say in the same months of those earth-moving times, when another eminent historian informed us that history had ended. The leader of Cuba's socialist revolution asked what the US was being so triumphant about, given the sorry state of capitalism not only within the US but every place it had stepped its bloody footprint. Name one place, Fidel challenged, where capitalism had done well.
Twenty years later to the day, we must remember Fidel's admonishment as the US not only exceeds 10% unemployment nationally but also whole regions double that. What have we to celebrate about?
We must also remember that economist, whose words and tone I shall never forget.
The Godfathers of neoliberalism have sufficiently tamed and frightened the poor who are very worried. So our masters give us slogans and give the wealthy billions.
There is no option but a public option and that means a worker's party and socialism.
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