Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [87]
The Clinton administration, led by Lawrence Summers, signed into law the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which ripped down the firewalls that had been established by the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. Designed to prevent the kind of meltdown we are now experiencing, Glass-Steagall established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It set in place banking reforms to stop speculators from hijacking the financial system. With Glass-Steagall demolished, and the passage of NAFTA, the Democrats, led by Clinton, tumbled gleefully into bed with corporations and Wall Street speculators. They used institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a welfare gravy train. And many of the architects of this deregulation, economists such as Summers, remain in charge of the nation’s economic policy.
“When times are prosperous, we do not mind a modest increase in ‘welfare,’” wrote Robert N. Bellah:
When times are not so prosperous, we think at least our successful career will save us and our families from failure and despair. We are attracted, against our skepticism, to the idea that poverty will be alleviated by the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. . . . Some of us often feel, and most of us sometimes feel, that we are only someone if we have made it: can look down on those who have not. The American dream is often a very private dream of being a star, the uniquely successful and admirable one, the one who stands out from the crowd of ordinary folk, who don’t know how. And since we have believed in that dream for a long time and worked very hard to make it come true, it is hard for us to give it up, even though it contradicts another dream that we have—that of living in a society that would really be worth living in.”3
The cost of our empire of illusion is not being paid by the corporate titans. It is being paid on the streets of our inner cities, in former manufacturing towns, and in depressed rural enclaves. This cost transcends declining numbers and statistics and speaks the language of human misery and pain. Human beings are not commodities. They are not goods. They grieve and suffer and feel despair. They raise children and struggle to maintain communities. The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of statistics, lines on a graph that chart stocks, or the absurd, utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.
Elba Figueroa, forty-seven, lives in Trenton, New Jersey. She worked as a nurse’s aide until she got Parkinson’s disease. She lost her job. She lost her health care. She receives $703 a month in government assistance. Her rent alone runs $750 a month. And so she borrows money from friends and neighbors to stay in her apartment. She laboriously negotiates her wheelchair up and down steps and along the sidewalks of Trenton to get to soup kitchens and food pantries to eat.
“Food prices have gone up,” Figueroa says, waiting to get inside the food pantry run by the Crisis Ministry of Princeton and Trenton. “I don’t have any money. I run out of things to eat. I worked until I physically could not work anymore. Now I live like this.”
The pantry occupies a dilapidated, three-story art deco