It happened gradually. So gradually, we barely noticed. We were the proverbial frog placed into a pot of lukewarm water, not noticing the rise in temperature until our blood was boiling. All it took was the wrong people being put into power, running on a platform of fear and freedom conning a scared public into believing they were a legitimate way out of the economic morass in which we found ourselves.
The first thing they did was eliminate the minimum wage. This was hailed by elites in both of the political parties existing then as a huge improvement that would bring prosperity and production back to our country. It was promised that with the removal of artificial controls on wages that wages would actually increase due to the so-called invisible hand of the free market economy.
At first, this had some positive marginal effects. Some low wage jobs actually did see increases. But after a while, wages started decreasing. What used to pay $10 an hour started paying wages of $5 an hour. Then, the pay became less and less. Eventually, most of us found ourselves working for $2 or $3 a day. But, the jobs did come back. We were manufacturing again, making textiles, furniture, cars, all sorts of items that used to be made in Mexico or China or Indonesia. And profits soared as corporations could now get the benefits of American work ethic and efficiency on the third-world wages they used to pay the Mexicans or the Chinese or the Indonesians.
The next thing they did was eliminate the EPA. Announcing that global warming was a myth created by radical environmentalists to ransack the holdings of American corporations, the elimination of the main environmental regulator was again seen as a huge step forward for the free market and the nation as this would further allow us to add jobs and increase our domestic financial output. Looking back, it would have been better just to nuke ourselves.
As temperatures continued to rise, more and more of the polar ice caps melted raising sea levels. Record snowfall melts swelled rivers to never before seen levels. Most of the Midwest is now the world's largest inland lake, effectively separating the eastern and western halves of the country. Most of Florida is gone. Sacramento is now an Oceanfront paradise, as most of the West coast is under water.
Next they eliminated the Department of Education. This was hailed as huge victory for freedom. No longer would local school boards be subjected to the whims of a government bureaucracy handing down orders willy-nilly to its subordinates. Of course, with most of the former middle class earning less than $2,000 a year, there was little for most school districts to do to raise money. Resources ended up being slashed, and then when there was little choice left, the localities started lowering the age which required compulsory education until some eliminated the requirement altogether.
This was fortunate for many of the new manufacturing giants, however, as the federal government next did away with the job-killing child labor laws. With the newly freed young fresh bodies no longer required to attend schools against their will, children as young as 10 were signed up for jobs in the new textile mills, working 10-12 hour days, six days a week. Their families, with no money on which to survive, had little choice but to not only allow, but require their children to do so.
All of this led to America becoming an economic juggernaut, of course. The nation's exports increased exponentially. The owners of the factories and especially their bankers raked in billions of dollars a year in profits. The nation had its first Trillionaires. The stock market reached heights no one could ever have imagined. Of course, very few but the most wealthy in the nation benefited from this, not that this mattered since they controlled every politician through their purse strings.
As for me, the road down was a steep but unsurprising one. My profession -- lawyers -- was the most despised of the new leaders. A whole new set of rules were implemented making it harder and harder for the masses to reach the scales of justice. First they capped civil awards -- initially at $250,000, then at $100,000 eventually capping the award for an individual in any civil suit, to $25,000. Of course, this only applied to claims for personal injury, not to actions on behalf of corporations for breach of contract or for money owed on loans or foreclosures. Class action suits were outlawed. In a stunning limit on free markets, the same leaders outlawed the use of contingency fee contracts. Lawyers had to work for a fee agreed to and paid ahead of time. Awards of attorney's fees were no longer allowed by the Courts as part of damages or costs.
Needless to say, this put most plaintiff's attorneys and small town lawyers out of business.
I was a prosecutor, so it seemed my job was safe, as the jails were filling with more and more violent offenders, willing to risk everything to get whatever they could at the barrel end of a gun. The leaders stacked the courts with judges willing to overturn well established laws that were seen to clog up the gears of justice. Miranda warnings were tossed away. The right to counsel was deemed unnecessary and the appointing of private attorneys and public defenders offices declared a restraint of trade. Most of the cases I handled now were against individuals unrepresented by counsel and unfamiliar with the workings of the court system. Where I used to look forward to going up against a talented, smart, tough defense attorney and would spend hours pouring over my files and researching the law on all of the potential legal questions that could be raised, now my job bored me. There was no challenge sending away an uneducated, poor teenager to decades behind bars in ever alarming prison conditions.
As time went on and trials became fewer and fewer as court was merely a formality as we ushered hundreds upon hundreds of unrepresented defendants through the courts in record time, the need for prosecutors became less and less. Seeing us as nothing other than glorified office clerks filing paperwork, our funding was cut further and further and our ranks and salaries dwindled along with everyone else's. Inevitably, one day the news came that it was my last and I packed my few office belongings in a small box and left the courthouse which had once represented all that was good with our justice system without giving it a second glance.
The only legal jobs left were with large firms representing the behemoth corporations that were revelling in the new booming economy. These firms were growing and paying huge salaries to their young eager legal eagles who would come up with ever more elaborate ways to guard their clients against the teeming masses that might otherwise try to claw back some of the fortune that their overlords were amassing. However, these jobs inevitably stuck to a strict system of rewarding the families and friends of their clients and political supporters. Little time was given to resumes from former small town prosecutors who obviously had not played the leaders' game or else they would have chosen another career track long ago.
Before long, I, like most of my neighbors was behind in my bills. Unable to pay my bills, I quickly fell behind in my finances. The bank foreclosed on my home, a mere formality. Of course, with so many of us out there no longer able to pay mortgages, the banks were unable to find many buyers for the homes. Many of us, myself included, simply stayed in our homes, challenging the banks to do something about it. Eventually, faced with an overabundance of "empty" homes with no possibility of selling them, the banks started simply razing the homes leaving empty land where once stood the American dream.
One day inevitably my family and I were met at our front door with a bulldozer. We were given five minutes to grab what we could and vacate before the giant smoke belching machine began knocking down that which we had worked for years to maintain. Within an hour it was all gone.
Fortunately, we were able to salvage some camping equipment and found some empty land on which to pitch a tent and at least have some protection against the elements. Both my wife and I found jobs in one of the mills for a couple dollars a day. The biggest perk of these jobs was that they served a relatively good meal during our half hour break of a meat sandwich and some sort of potato along with a beverage, usually caffeinated. This wasn't done out of any kind of charity or beneficence, but merely so that we would have enough sustenance to maintain our energy to complete our shift. But we took what we could get.
Winters had become harsher and harsher as the climate had become ever more out of balance over the years. So we knew that we couldn't survive in the tent. As many others had, we did what we could to dig shelters in the sides of hills, shoring them up with what scraps of wood and what scrap metal escaped the hands of looters to protect ourselves from the elements. It was just enough to keep us from dying of exposure.
Eventually someone had the idea to occupy abandoned basements that had been left after the banks' bulldozers had done their business. It was then that I found myself occupying the basement of a house I used to own. We shared it with two other families. We were able to mock up a makeshift roof which mostly kept out the rain. Since we were underground, it more or less kept itself cool during the hot months and lukewarm during the cold months. It beat a dugout in the side of a hill any day.
We started referring to ourselves as the Cellar Dwellers and the name became an ironic badge of honor for millions of us who had quickly slid down the tracks of the downwardly spiraling American reality.
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