Economic Realities Are Killing Our Era of Fantasy
Politics

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted July 19, 2008.

Election season will be packed with horserace media
distractions, but our economic situation is becoming a matter of life and
death.
For if, as now seems likely, this fall's election is ultimately turned into
a Swan-esque reality show where America is asked to decide if it can tolerate
Michelle Obama's face longer than John McCain's diapers, it will be at the
expense of an urgent dialogue about a serious nationwide emergency that any
sane country would have started having some time ago. And unless you run a TV
network or live in Washington,
you probably already know what that emergency is.
A few weeks back, I got a call from someone in the office of Vermont Senator
Bernie Sanders. Sanders wanted to tell me about an effort his office had
recently made to solicit information about his constituents? economic problems.
He sent out a notice on his e-mail list asking Vermont residents to "tell me what was
going on in their lives economically." He expected a few dozen letters at
best -- but got, instead, more than 700 in the first week alone. Some, like the
excerpt posted above, sounded like typical tales of life for struggling
single-parent families below the poverty line. More unnerving, however, were
the stories Sanders received from people who held one or two or even three
jobs, from families in which both spouses held at least one regular job -- in
other words, from people one would normally describe as middle-class. For
example, this letter came from the owner of his own commercial cleaning
service:
My 90-year-old father in Connecticut
has recently become ill and asked me to visit him. I want to drop everything I am
doing and go visit him, however, I am finding it hard to save enough money to
add to the extra gas I'll need to get there. I make more than I did a year ago
and I don't have enough to pay my property taxes this quarter for the first
time in many years. They are due tomorrow.
This single mother buys clothes from thrift stores and unsuccessfully tried
to sell her house to pay for her son's schooling:
I don't go to church many Sundays, because the gasoline is too expensive to
drive there. Every thought of an activity is dependent on the cost.
Sanders got letters from working people who have been reduced to eating
"cereal and toast" for dinner, from a 71-year-old man who has been
forced to go back to work to pay for heating oil and property taxes, from a
worker in an oncology department of a hospital who reports that clinically ill
patients are foregoing cancer treatments because the cost of gas makes it too
expensive to reach the hospital. The recurring theme is that employment, even
dual employment, is no longer any kind of barrier against poverty. Not economic
discomfort, mind you, but actual poverty. Meaning, having less than you need to
eat and live in heated shelter -- forgetting entirely about health care and
dentistry, which has long ceased to be considered an automatic component of
American middle-class life. The key factors in almost all of the Sanders
letters are exploding gas and heating oil costs, reduced salaries and benefits,
and sharply increased property taxes (a phenomenon I hear about all across the
country at campaign trail stops, something that seems to me to be directly tied
to the Bush tax cuts and the consequent reduced federal aid to states). And it
all adds up to one thing.
"The middle class is disappearing," says Sanders. "In real
ways we're becoming more like a third-world country."
Here's the thing: nobody needs me or Bernie Sanders to tell them that it
sucks out there and that times are tougher economically in this country than
perhaps they've been for quite a long time. We've all seen the stats -- median
income has declined by almost $2,500 over the past seven years, we have a zero
personal savings rate in America
for the first time since the Great Depression, and 5 million people have
slipped below the poverty level since the beginning of the decade. And stats
aside, most everyone out there knows what the deal is. If you're reading this
and you had to drive to work today or pay a credit card bill in the last few
weeks you know better than I do for sure how fucked up things have gotten. I
hear talk from people out on the campaign trail about mortgages and
bankruptcies and bill collectors that are enough to make your ass clench with
100 percent pure panic.
None of this is a secret. Here, however, is something that is a secret: that
this is a class issue that is being intentionally downplayed by a
political/media consensus bent on selling the public a version of reality where
class resentments, or class distinctions even, do not exist. Our "national
debate" is always a thing where we do not talk about things like haves and
have-nots, rich and poor, employers versus employees. But we increasingly live
in a society where all the political action is happening on one side of the
line separating all those groups, to the detriment of the people on the other
side.

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