All of us who are one gentle tap away from economic disaster have common cause with all the "Occupy" demonstrators

Tom Toles

by Ken

It's a shame John Edwards was such a dreadful spokesperson for the notion of "The Two Americas," because back when he raised it would have been an excellent time -- arguably just in time -- to finally begin a conversation about it. Now it's too late. Even without an official proclamation, it's more or less official U.S. doctrine that we're split, economically, into Two Americas.

The Elite Classes are so busy bitching and moaning about not being richer that they don't notice, or more likely just don't care, that the rest of us are sinking. The rest of us, those in the Left-Behind Classes, are left either grasping and clawing for bottom-rung openings in the Class of Our Betters, or else just holding on for dear life, or in more and more cases letting go and . . . well, hoping and praying that help will come from somewhere.

You know how you sometimes read something you've just written and realize it doesn't come out saying, or maybe just sounding, quite the way you meant? It happened to me the other day when I wrote about the OccupyWallStreet protest ("Do the OccupyWallStreet folks really have to formulate a bullet-pointed position paper that like position papers generally would be ignored?") in what I like to think was a properly supportive manner, but in a manner that I realized when I read it came out sounding decidedly "above it all," as if I'm comfortably removed from the panoply of economic distresses that are bringing people from such varied walks of life together, not just in New York City but in all the cities where demonstrations have arisen.

I had a momentary impulse to laugh when I realized what I'd written, and I might have gone ahead and laughed -- if there was anything humorous about it.

Because for a bunch of years now (six? seven?) I've been working for a company that has been, say, in the hallway that leads to death's door. Oh, there were some periods when we were right in front of that door, which was flung wide open.

There was a time, going back a couple of years, when we were going through them every few months. Eventually we achieved a certain modest stability, but not until the company was in fact reorganized under new ownership, and we'd lost what we came to think of as everyone we could possibly lose and still continue to function. It was a terrible blow, or series of repeated blows, both morale-wise and practically speaking, in terms of managing to continue to function.

Even while we've enjoyed that queasy stability, it has always been In the back of my mind that the company could simply deep-six our whole division, which once upon a time was a big moneymaker but isn't ever going to be again. So I have to consider myself fortunate that that's not what happened today. Because it means I still have a job, with both a steady paycheck and adequate health insurance.

What happened was that the company figured out ways of eliminating several departments by a combination of farming some functions out to third-party providers and others to divisions of the company in other parts of the country which have never been involved in our operation.

On a Monday. Who sees it coming on a Monday?

Late in the day we had a meeting, at which our top person in New York, a really nice man, paid tribute to the people who weren't in the room, stressing that they were good people who had been loyal to and worked hard for our brand. Of course they weren't in the room to hear it, but it was nice to hear it said. Probably it wouldn't have made them feel better to hear it. I expect their thoughts were mostly occupied with the "what now?," with how they're going to hold onto their homes and support their families.

(I don't know that it's either here or there -- though I guess I think it must be, or I wouldn't mention it -- but some of the people we lost today were some of our bestest people as people. The company is automatically and immediately significantly poorer without them.)

It would be hard to imagine anyone less involved in the business side of his company's operation than I am. In fact, I've generally found it most advantageous to keep eyes front, focused entirely on my job, barely within sight of the loop I'm squarely out of. Minding my own beeswax, that's me.

But I know I can't portray my superiors as villains. For one thing, our immediate business is publishing, which is a terrible business to be in these days. Our New York boss pointed out that we have in fact fared better than many of our competitors. Hey, as I pointed out, I still have a job. (At least for now.) How much more onerous a job it will be, I'm not entirely clear; I haven't absorbed all the details. There'll be time tomorrow, and the day after. I understand that for the sake of that paycheck and that health insurance, I don't have any practical alternative to making it work.

The health insurance, I realize increasingly, is a really big deal. For most of my working life I've hardly used it, mostly for occasional emergencies. Until maybe a year and a quarter ago I didn't even have a doctor. There comes a time, though. Now I have a doctor -- or more like a team of them. With the prospect of not just ongoing medical expenses but very likely some really big ones. Without the adequate insurance, well, I can't even begin to imagine.

Which is not to belittle the paycheck. During the several hours today when I forced myself to focus on the reality that this could be it, I tried to imagine what it would be like to have that come to a screeching halt. Not long ago, as it happens, i did a reckoning for the first time of how much I'm paying out each month for the debt I racked up to keep my mother going through her final years. Maybe I stagger easily, but the number staggered me.

I know it's the last thing my mother would have wanted for me, but there it is. (I know she would be extremely pleased that I'm finally dealing with that accumulation of medical issues. It drove her crazy all those years when I didn't.) Maybe somebody more worldly wise could have found a better way to handle my mother's final years, but I have only such world-wisdom as I have, and even now I don't see much that I could have done differently. At least -- and I'm not sure you can put a price tag on this -- I don't have to live with knowing there might have been something that could have been done for her that wasn't.

Just now there's the added amusement of a new set of dental bills developing which eclipse any I've had before -- and I"ve had some big ones. All of which looked to be enormously adventurous with the paycheck coming in; imagining all of that without . . . well, I didn't do well in today's imagining exercises.

To get back to today's meeting, though, what our New York boss didn't feel it necessary to say at the meting is that the problem isn't just that our business is publishing. For several years now we've understood that the one thing that could make a big difference for us is if "the economy comes around." By now we have to face the fact that the economy isn't ever going to come around. Not the part of the economy that we and our readers (and our advertisers) live in.

If people had disposable income (I was going to say "more" disposable income, but I think it may be more accurate this way), instead of less or no income, and unpayable mortgages or rent and all the other basics-of-life expenses, and all the anxiety and terror that come with not being able to pay them, our business could be a whole lot better. But since our customer base is in the Wrong America, well, those of us who still have jobs have to count ourselves lucky.


POSTSCRIPT: Ian Welsh's take, "From a historical point of view" -- "OccupyWallStreet is necessary and insufficient"

Here's just the start:

I’ll just note that Occupy Wall Street is necessary and insufficient. That is, the revolt of the students and the young intellectuals is necessary. It must occur. It is insufficient. It’s nice that the unions are swooping in and out, but they are not committed to the idea in blood, and the working class and minorities are not showing in significant numbers (take a look at the pictures. White, white, white.)

Likewise, as Stirling Newberry notes, now that Occupy Wall Street has demands, they are very mild. They aren’t even as radical as FDR. The view of what is wrong with the world isn’t wrong “Wall Street!”, but whenever specifics are mentioned, they are insufficient to fix America’s problems, or even the problems of the class of people who started the movement.

At this point in time only radical solutions will work. That means radical: everything must go. Every institution in American society has failed. Every single one. They must all be shut down and the purposes they were meant to serve must be assigned to new institutions. . . .

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