Not that long ago, up 'til maybe 40 years ago or so, and for a long time, there was a culture that lived in the Pacific Northwest. They still live there, it's not the same. I'll tell you why.
They were a healthy lot for the most part, outdoorsmen and their women, rugged individualists. Like Paul Bunyan. They worked hard, they played hard. They got paid for sweating in the outdoors, all very healthy.
They cut down trees and put them on, hell I don't know what they put 'em on at first, horses or mules I guess, carriages and carts-eventually they started putting them on trucks. Technology came upon them like the blinking tragic gophers of a Neil Young song.
Technology seemed good. It allowed them to cut more than ever before. To get to the point, it helped them so much that they cut themselves out of business.
More recently
than that, the embodiment and epitome of a subculture that has wielded more influence than its weight for a long time, located mainly in New York City but with cells scattered throughout the land.
They work hard, some play hard. Some are healthy, some are not. They get paid for worrying indoors, creating wealth they like to call it. That's partly true, too. Creating wealth.
Of course it's un-American to create much wealth without benefiting from it, so it became very important to them to amass as much wealth for themselves as possible, even if they created more for themselves than anyone else. For some that became something of a perverse goal. I just…blah, blah, you can imagine, many of us have weak stomachs for that sort of thing.
The line between creating wealth, and merely transferring it, became blurred. The government was brought in to help transfer. Tax breaks for the ultra-rich and their business enterprises at the expense of education and necessities for others. You can go on like that and try and make a bigger deal out of it, but it's hard to make a bigger deal than that.
And so it came to pass that they became so good at their work that there wasn't as much wealth to transfer to themselves as there had been. The craving had long since become an addiction, and so they created imaginary wealth for the others, that they might continue in the game of transferring it to themselves.
When they did, they were surprised that it didn't add up to much.
This is the financial crisis that we're in: They've clear-cut Wall Street.
Saving the forest or some trees?
How bad is it, really? That's hard to say, for everyone it seems. I don't think it's nearly as bad as we're being led to believe, and I believe that you can tell where the fire in the forest is by looking at which way the animals are running. I submit to you that:
I submit that when things aren't even bad enough that you have to concede recession, it's unlikely that you're in the "biggest threat to the banking industry since World War I." (as a British CEO alleged very publicly last night)
Of course the logging industry was recently faced down by its greatest threat of all time. Most people didn't bother noticing, much, and it's true that the effect on them was minimal.
The immediate threat is unquestionably more oriented towards the culpable banking industry than anyone else. Just because it's a big threat to them, however, doesn't mean that it should be that big of a deal to us. I can only, again, raise the question: How many banks do we really need? How many logging companies do we really need?
Let all the banks that need to go out of business. Re-train them, like we did loggers. They're very bright, hard-working people. Let's put them to work doing something less grotesque than this redistribution of wealth business that they've been at. I bet some of them would make good teachers. What's wrong with $700 billion worth of education, instead?
I submit that if we were really faced with a threat of the magnitude that the corporate world would like us to believe (hand outstretched and open all the while, other hand fingers crossed behind their back), anyone connected enough with the government to pull $85 billion out of the trough would not cash the check and head out to the masseuse or golf course.
In character, they would put the cash in saddlebags and ride for the border.
Which is why it's good that…
Barring something enormous and unforeseen, Obama is about to be elected. Largely with the blessing of corporate America, as a matter of fact. Obama is a lot of things to a lot of people, but he's not particularly partisan and for better or worse he's no ideologue. He's bright, he's competent and he's organized.
Corporate America has decided that they'd rather go forward with that than a less intelligent, less competent guy, even if McCain is more naturally sympathetic to the culture of greed and excess that they're going to be fighting so hard to save. McCain was, after all, one of Ronald Reagan's most enthusiastic supporters in the senate as deregulation went from anathema to government obsession. And one of the first to be indicted for illegal gains from that excited work. In Reagan's defense he hasn't been near the controls for nearly 20 years, but that's no excuse for McCain.
But in McCain's defense it must also be said that he's regularly exhibited signs of independence against corporations (campaign finance reform, etc.), but that all seemed to get lost in the effort to gain the Republican nomination. Ever since the volte-face that led to his embrace of Bush's "more cash for the rich" policies it's difficult to imagine a more rabid champion of greed wed to financial irresponsibility. This past year he's been almost a different person, and if he would not have so emphatically buried his populist streak today's polls might be different.
So look for President Obama to implement…not a New Deal so much as a Re-boot. Big businesses will finally share a right with their investors: the right to go out of business. The foundations of the Reagan/Thatcher global recovery will be given credit for a "dramatic recovery" by conservatives, and not entirely without reason: international economics is incredible, unthinkable decades ago, look at all the new material wealth out there.
The irony is that for all the science and math and genius that corporatists put into their economic structures, the Achilles heel turned out to be the one identified immediately by laymen and social workers: it ain't fair.
politics schmolitics, I want to go home