Do Chicago protests mean end of American Dream? Let’s hope so.

Image by andriux-uk via Flickr

The American Dream: Work hard and you’ll succeed!  It has always had a darker, more nightmarish side: if you don’t succeed, it’s because you didn’t work hard.  The rich deserve their wealth; the rest of us are lazy.  Perhaps the American Dream made sense before the 1980s, when wealth in the US was increasing for all 5 income levels, but the dream turned into dementia as Reaganomics took hold.

The deregulation of banking alongside an economic policy of giving money to the rich and simultaneously slashing the social safety net and destroying labor meant that the rich got richer and everyone else (80%)  became poorer.  According to a study by the American Political Science Association, by 1990, the US had the most unequal income distribution of any industrialized country.

And yet Americans kept on dreaming.  As our chances of getting ahead or even just staying afloat became about the same as winning in Las Vegas, Americans thought “if I just take out credit for this college degree or to buy this home, if I just believe in the future, then I’ll finally get ahead.”  And who was there to give us loans at ridiculously high interest rates with almost no federal regulation?  The American Bankers Association.

And as we got poorer and the debt piled up, what did we Americans do?  We believed in the American Dream even more.  According to a report compiled for the Center for American Progress by American University economist Tom Hertz, the last thirty years have seen increasing downward mobility for more Americans, more income volatility for the middle class, and, by 2003-04, no increase in income even for people who worked longer hours.  Oddly enough, we began to believe in the Dream even more.

In 1980, fewer than 60% of Americans thought that a person can “start out poor, work hard, and get ahead.”  By 2005, over 80% of the population thought the American Dream was possible.  In other words, the American Dream had turned into American Dementia.

And who were the monsters that fed on our dementia?  Who became rich while we participated in our collective insanity?  The bankers.  And now that we’re finally, slowly coming out of this dementia and there is an effort to regulate bankers squeezing blood from Americans through exploding interest rates and cash for paychecks, the bankers are opposing it.  The American Bankers Association is actively working against President Obama’s efforts to establish a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.  They don’t want more federal “bureaucracy.”  Actually, they don’t want any federal bureaucracy.  They want to continue feasting off of Americans, continue squeezing money from us with fees and penalties and interest rates and other nightmarish forms of extracting wealth.

The efforts in Congress to create oversight continue despite hundreds of millions of dollars by both the bankers and the Chamber of Commerce to stop it.  Although it’s possible no real reform will pass, at least there’s finally talk of reform.

And on the ground, among people who do not receive lobbying money, there seems to be a groundswell of populist anger against the bankers.  In Chicago this week, tens, maybe even hundreds, of thousands of protesters have gathered to protest the American Bankers Association meeting.

Yesterday

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and nearly a dozen protesters called Sunday for banks that received billions in bailout money to help consumers who have fallen victim to bad loan practices and are losing their homes to foreclosure.

Durbin and protesters accuse the ABA of lobbying against banking reform despite the organization’s members receiving billions in federal bailout dollars.

Durbin calls for bailed-out banks to help on foreclosures — chicagotribune.com.

Of course, Senator Durbin also warned us that real reform might not pass through Congress since frankly the bankers “own this place.”  But real reform will have to pass as more and more Americans realize that the American Dream has been stolen from us.  Populist protests in Chicago might just be the alarm that wakes us up.