They Know Best

           

                                                                     
I believe in the interests of full disclosure that I confess that I am not an economist. In fact I have never taken a course, high school or college, in economics. The truth is I have such little regard for the discipline of economics that I would be more likely inclined to seek fiscal management advice from a tarot card reader or Stephen Hawkings than Stanley Morgan and Goldman-Sachs. The reason for my palpable disdain is the arrogant certitude that many equity brokers demonstrate when making pronouncements about why I should keep investing money in my 403-B after having donated so much of it to the bonuses and severance packages of Wall St. criminals and other saprophytic fiscal wizards. The other, more compelling reason is the breathtaking ignorance economists have of natural capital, basic concepts of ecology and the essential indisputable and inextricable interconnectedness of all life on this planet.



The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, said recently that ultimately the only way a true economic recovery is going to take place will be when Americans start spending again. Does Bernanke know just how incredibly pathetic this sounds? It is reminiscent of former President Bush when he told the nation after the 9-11 tragedy that the best way that Americans can thwart the terrorists and assuage our collective grief was to go out and stimulate the economy by buying stuff. Not anything essential, mind you, just freakin' stuff. Now coming from Bush this was no surprise because there is a solid consensus that the “Decider” was and continues to be a moron. Bernanke however is esteemed by some as having considerable knowledge of how economies function since he is an economist and Chairman of the Federal Reserve. But how can we forget the sychophant extradonaire and Ayn Rand desciple Alan Greenspan who was so "distressed" when he found a "flaw" in the laissez-faire Neanderthal economic model or "conceptual framework" that was the underpinning of his deregulation ideology.


None of this is surprising since America doesn’t make very much any more. It seems labor is just too expensive here. That is what free trade is all about. Stuff that is too expensive to make in America is manufactured in countries like China, Vietnam, and Mexico. Then this stuff, most of which we could do pretty well without, is shipped to this country where we can by it at Walmart relatively cheaply. Or so it would seem. But alas there is always a catch. The result of the so called free trade initiatives has been to gut America’s manufacturing base and transform our economy into one that relies on consumption and services. At the same time, private sector unions have been systematically dismembered, median wages have remained stagnant or fallen, and the nation’s wealth has become so concentrated, that the richest 1% of Americans possess more wealth than the bottom 90% of wage earners. Not since the “Great”depression and the gilded age of the late nineteenth century has the disparity in wealth between rich and poor become so obscenely dichotomized. Record numbers of Americans are unemployed or underemployed. Many poor Americans are working long hours or two or more jobs just to stay afloat financially. And for decades, the hourly wage trajectory has been downward for most working class people. People lucky enough to find another job after being layed off for months or years are typically earning a wage that is a fraction of what they earned before being "downsized."


Now as I recall, one of the more specious reasons for promulgating free trade agreements like NAFTA was that they would benefit all of the people involved. Naturally this was a well marketed prevarication. The rich have gotten richer, and the prospects for poor people have become tangibly more dismal. It seems like a reasonable question to ask why so many illegal immigrants are risking limb and life to come to a country with an unemployment rate of 12% unless things are so horrifically bad from wherever they came. Yesterday a mass grave of 73 immigrants from Central and South America was found just south of the US Mexican border. My point is these are desprate people who apparently have not benefitted from free trade and corporate benevolence. “ Corporate benevolence” is an example of an oxymoron.


For Americans the “carrot” was that we were to become the insatiable consumers of the stuff that is now manufactured overseas instead of all of those abandoned factories that litter the urban landscape in every American city. The loss of our manufacturing sector has produced the ubiquitous urban blight that has devastated once vibrant cities and is metasticizing into middle class suburbs. That means the fallout from globalization is now affecting formerly affluent white people instead of just poor Blacks, Latinos, and illegal immigrants.This is referred to as the “shit hitting the fan”. By the way, it was the great Ronald Reagan who opened the flood gates to illegal immigration. Not because he wanted poor people to have a better life, but because he and the neoliberal disciples of Milton Friedman advising him knew that by flooding the labor force with cheap desperate human capital, wages would continue to plummet and the siege on trade unionism would intensify. Reagan transformed America into a giant plantation. And in a delicious ode to irony, the people who most ebulliently celebrated Reagan’s presidential reign of terror and corporate onanism are the same ones who were most victimized by it. Go figure.


To ameliorate increasing deficits, and a diminishing quality of life, Congress in a bipartisan slap in the face of working Americans, dismantled the progressive income tax , gave the richest Americans tax cuts because it is they, so the mantra goes, who create the jobs needed to keep America working. Unfortunately, most of those jobs were sent overseas.


The real “catch” however is that the neoliberal brain trust made a ridiculously flawed assumption: if real wages are in a state of freefall, and the wealth of the nation continues to become as concentrated as a Kalahari nomad’s first morning void, how would Americans continue to buy stuff? Now that is a conundrum. Conundrum is a very hard mineral that is ranked just below diamond on Moh’s scale of hardness. One option would be to increase their debt burden. This scenario was played out for several years as financial institutions used their creativity, corprophilic ethical standards, and government deregulation to create the sub-prime mortgage bubble that brought the global economy to its knees. The other possibility left open to those who had been wallowing in deep recession for years was to purchase even less. With America crippled by debt, the amount of cheap foreign made junk that we could purchase by was greatly diminished. The golden goose of free trade was on life support, or publicly funded bailouts. The crash would have happened sooner or later. It was inevitable, not because of mendacious economic doctrine, thought it most certainly was that, but the far more rigorous and intractable laws of thermodynamics. Wealth cannot be continuously extracted and concentrated into the hands of criminal cartels ( banks, greedy rich people) without inevitably bad consequences. The sub-prime bubble was a mere catalyst for the global economic Armageddon that the idiot savants of Wall St. apparently did not see coming.



Normally, bubbles are encouraged by speculators because they keep the stock market rising and create the perception of a robust economy. This is why so many money changers and their political hit men are gentially engorged at the prospect of privatizing social security.The ultimate bubble that would place a lot more names on Forbes’ annual list of billionaires, which to some is a far more important index of economic vitality than the GDP. But more importantly, as bubbles burst, tax dollars used to bailout the crime lords and victims of unregulated prodigality increase the debt which serves to further starve the beast of entitlements; something the loony right has been trying to do since FDR’s all too successful experiment with socialism. Now the likes of Paul Ryan and other shit stains like him tell us we can't afford Social Security and Medicare.


So if the best that Benny Bernanke can suggest to resurrect our economy is to get the American tightwads to spend and consume crap like one of Newt Gingrich’s mistresses on methamphetamines, then a reasonable question to ask is whether or not our economy worth saving? With even a limited knowledge of science, one can see that that capitalism is a system that cannot recognize limits to growth. If we continue to be swayed by the shibboleths of capitalism, we are sentencing ourselves and our children, as well as millions of other species to extinction. After all, this is a fairly simple concept. We live on a small planet with an exponentially growing population. Within the next 20 to 30 years we will be pushing 9 billion people. The sustainable carrying capacity of Gaia has been estimated to be about 1.5 billion people. At that number we might still have thriving oceans and a New England cod and haddock fishery.

It is safe to assume that all nine billion will want to become the voracious consumers of junk that we are, but is this possible on a modest, finite piece of real estate with finite resources. Most sane people would say no. Even those with a Phd in economics from the University of Chicago. With our present population of 6.8 billion people, it is clear that every major ecosystem comprising our collective life support system is in serious decline if not imminent peril. I think it is safe to say that our species is on an accelerating suicidal trajectory. I think it is also safe to say that Bernanke is full of shit. I might add the Congress, the dysfunctional duoploy that we proclaim proudly is a vibrant democracy, Obama, Romney, Scalia, and scores of other policy makers are also full of shit.


So if we can’t purchase our way out of our present quagmire, what can be done? Are there any answers or should we just party hardy, as Christians would have us do, and wait for the Rapture, if applicable. The godless, such as myself, will be left with one hell of a mess to clean up. There are answers, but we will never hear them discussed by the putrescent corporate -Washington oligarchy.