Day before Christmas

I'm back in Philly after a long week-end in Pittsburgh, celebrating an early Christmas with my husband's family.

I'm usually finished with my Christmas shopping by this point, but this year I'm a bit behind. My surgery in late October, while relatively minor, ended up taking me a while to fully recover. I also had a death in the family a few weeks ago, so had family come to Philly and then we traveled to Scranton for the memorial service. A cousin, who was 39 years old, died of a rare form of cancer. Very sad.

With this and that, I needed to go out on Christmas Eve. Normally, I would avoid that at all costs. I ended up going shopping near the King of Prussia Mall and then I ended my excursion in Chestnut Hill. I was surprised to discover that the traffic wasn't too bad and the stores weren't crowded. Good for me, bad for the economy.

This brought home the words of Bob Herbert in Nightmare Before Christmas, who observed:

Christmastime is bonus time on Wall Street, and the Gucci set has been blessed with another record harvest.

Forget the turbulence in the financial markets and the subprime debacle. Forget the dark clouds of a possible recession. Bloomberg News tells us that the top securities firms are handing out nearly $38 billion in seasonal bonuses, the highest total ever.

But there’s a reason to temper the celebration, if only out of respect for an old friend who’s not doing too well. Even as the Wall Streeters are high-fiving and ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar, the American dream is on life-support.

I had a conversation the other day with Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union. He mentioned a poll of working families that had shown that their belief in that mythical dream that has sustained so many generations for so long is fading faster than sunlight on a December afternoon.

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“These are parents who cannot see where the jobs of the future are that will allow their kids to have a better life than they had,” said Mr. Stern. “And they’re not wrong. That’s the problem.”

Record bonuses on Wall Street at a time when ordinary working Americans are filled with anxiety about their economic future are signs that the trickle-down phenomenon that was supposed to have benefited everyone never happened.

The rich, boosted by the not-so-invisible hand of the corporate ideologues in government, have done astonishingly well in recent decades, while the rest of the population has tended to tread water economically, or drown.

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What seems to be happening now is that working Americans, and that includes the middle class, have exhausted much of their capacity to tread water. Wives and mothers are already working. Mortgages have been refinanced and tremendous amounts of home equity drained. And families have taken on debt loads — for cars, for college tuition, for medical treatment — that would buckle the knees of the strongest pack animals.

* * * *

Instead of celebrating bonuses this Christmas season, too many American workers are looking with dread toward 2008, worried about their rising levels of debt, or whether they will be able to hang on to a job with few or no benefits or how to tell their kids that they won’t be able to help with the cost of college.

It’s not the stuff of which dreams are made.

Nor is it tidings of good cheer for the holidays -- or the New Year.