I have no money in the stock market. I've never had the opportunity, be it through reason or consequence, to have enough to invest in that way. Most people I know do not. The price of stocks, in the abstract market sense, does affect us. But on a personal level, we just don't care. We don't care about capital gains, we've never had any. We don't care about stocks, we've never had any. We care that we will walk into work tomorrow, and our employers will be open for business. We care about rent payments and mortgage payments. We care about an ever increasing cost of living. We care about having a little something on the side for an entertainment or two for a moment of respite from what has been an intensely unsettling six to eight years. Stocks have little real impact on us a group. And that group has grown into a mob. And we vote.
There will always be disagreement over the exact methodology of our governance. Now, though, there is need for correction of years of neglect. And within that need is a sense that we are owed an accounting. Not in the prosecutorial sense, but in the economic sense. To those who have spent the term of this administration looting the accounts of the middle class, it is time for a reckoning. You've had your fun. You have your money. But it's time we took our fair share.
If that sentiment sounds familiar, there's a reason. It was the original genesis of the labor movements of the late 1880's through the 1950's, that the capitalists have gotten rich, but they have to share. In the fifty years since, the payback those movements received was reinvested in the following generations. To create a more fortunate, but still overburdened working class: the post-industrial middle class. In terms of education and employment opportunity, no one has had it better in history. But as the population within that group hit critical mass, a complacency developed. A blind eye to excess and oversight was developed. To a public who spent the 90's reaping the fruits of thirty years of economic development, eight years of a Clinton presidency brought prosperity but also such a decline in discourse that the majority of the public finally tuned out the actions of the government. So deep was our apathy that without constitutional precedent the Supreme Court decided the Presidency of the United States and yet even now many intelligent people among us couldn't name some of the key players in that landmark moment.
The Republican party for decades had played to our apathy and basest instincts by projecting itself as the party of "real" Americans. Well, we are real Americans. Raised in American families, educated in American colleges, often with US government loans. We didn't all get backpacks and passports, many of us just went to work. As our families had always done. To put the American dream to work for us. We felt that our part of the bargain was kept. Through it all though, a majority of us had faith that whatever disagreements we had between right and left, someone was watching out for our best interest. That our tax burden was valued, that the sacrifice of our friends who had chosen service in the form of the military was valued, that we as a people were seen as the building block of the American economy that we were. It seemed impossible that the success of a nation could even remotely be squandered. Yet our sacrifice was turned into subservience, our wealth into debt, and our strength into uncertainty.
The current financial crisis, along with varied other excesses of the Bush Era, has finally woken us up en mass to our plight. We can't be bought right now with promises of trickle down prosperity and vague dreams of stock market wealth. What we need is cash and liquidity, two things that are in short supply these days. Which is why when the key Republican talking points on the economy relate to stocks, it falls on deaf ears. To us the stock market is now just a public scoreboard, for a game we already know the outcome of.
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