Abandon Mythology

At some point yesterday, while watching the town hall style discussion the president held with members of congress, business leaders and various other high mucky-mucks attending the Financial Responsibility Summit, I realized I’ve still not fully adjusted to having a president who speaks in sentences instead of sound-bites. I picked up some bad listening habits suffering through the past 8 years of obfuscatory prattle and general dumbfuckery coming from the mouth of our nation’s highest elected official.

Bad listening habits, as in, I pretty much stopped listening to dubya altogether and relied on usually much less cringeworthy written transcripts to divine the preznit’s latest talking point. It didn’t require much effort either, since the message rarely changed. If dubya was still preznit, he’d still be going around saying “The economy is strong” and studiously ignoring all evidence to the contrary. 

But we have a thinker in the oval office once again. And a communicator. You have to pay attention when this guy talks, because more often than not, he’s actually saying something.  It’s almost like he wants the American people to know and understand what he is doing. Weird, innit?

I don’t know why I keep trying to get a handle on our current economic crisis, but I just can’t let it go. I want so badly to understand the madness; my mind has been in constant search of a metaphor. My latest involves a vague memory from when I was a kid, of a contest involving a big plastic bubble with lots of paper money (probably mostly one-dollar bills) blowing around inside. I can’t remember exactly what the contest rules were; I think it was simply whoever guessed closest to the amount of money in the bubble won the cash. No matter. It’s not the contest I’ve been thinking about, it’s that bubble full of whirling money. It keeps coming to mind when I think about that other bubble, our recently deceased housing bubble.

I’ve been picturing that big plastic bubble with the money churning around inside as our entire economy. The churning money is the banking industry, but what is the blower that keeps it all in motion? What’s driving our economy now? What’s been providing the growth?

Once upon a time, it was our manufacturing base, but we’ve stopped making so much stuff it often seems the only thing America makes well any more is war. No, our economy doesn’t run on stuff we make now. It runs on services.

The housing bubble is the story of how financial services became our most profitable “industry”. The primary driver keeping the money churning in the bubble gradually became the churning itself. Of course, profits for all that churning were taken right out of the bubble. The more profits the industry pulled out of thin air, the faster they accelerated our economy toward an empty whirlwind. And then, poof, the sound of 401Ks imploding. 

As I mentioned in my last post, I feel the fundamental flaw in our system is that it’s based on an ideology, an illusion, that infinite growth is not only  possible, but in fact a goal. Whether or not our economic system can be nursed back to a semblance of health now, common sense and dwindling resources dictate that it must eventually fail. Irrespective of what our government is currently doing to prop up the system, big changes must come, so it seems only logical to start making some of those changes now, while the beast is down, so to speak. Before those changes are forced upon us.

But I’ve seen no sign that anyone in this new administration (including Michelle’s husband) is in a hurry to start making changes of the magnitude required to revamp our entire economic system. So far they just seem eminently more competent than dubya and darth and their gang of thieves at doing pretty much the same thing.

I guess I should just be happy adults are in charge again, but I’m still hopeful someone will start talking about those big changes that would create a whole new game, alter the way we measure ourselves against others, the way we keep score. Of course those are the kind of changes the masters of the current game will fight hard and dirty to avoid.  

Pretty much ever since I learned how to read, I’ve been able to educate myself (at least to my own satisfaction) on any subject that I wanted to. Until recently, the only exception has been religion. I have just never been able to understand the need to believe things that are so patently false.

But I have now seemingly found another subject upon which I am ineducable. I’ve been spending (wasting) a lot of time reading economists, trying to more fully understand our economy and how it works, trying to grasp the big picture. But there’s something so elusive about it, like trying to pick up a greased BB, that I’ve just not been able to tie it all together. The entire field of study seems to be based on theory without math; supposition without solution. It’s very frustrating.

It occurs to me that economics has much more than just my inability to understand it in common with religion. Both fields have their experts, their high priests, who are highly revered (and lavishly rewarded) for a non-existent ability to predict the future. Experts that cultivate an atmosphere of magic, making it acceptable to turn away from doubt and just believe in a seemingly irrational concept, the invisible cloud-daddy or the equally intangible idea of infinite growth in a world of finite resources.

The more gibberish and circular logic I read, the more pessimistic I become. I’m now inclined to believe that our economic system has, in reality, already failed and all the bailout money is just keeping the exercise wheel spinning after the hamster died. We don’t know what else to do. Over at his place, Wage Laborer is thinking along the same lines, likening the economy to a heart attack patient:  

Here’s the USA economy, dead. The whole system of exploiting the Earth and its people in order to provide money for the rich is collapsing. It would have died years ago, but they kept it going with artifical life support – credit, pumping dollars into the invalid to keep it producing.

I keep thinking about all those derivatives, the financial “instruments” utilized by the people who operate our financial institutions to create immense “wealth” out of thin air. Unblinking belief in growth allowed the repeated, reckless repackaging and reselling of what started out as assets, but steadily lost any real value as each reseller took a piece and passed the trash onward. And upward. Inevitably, these instruments found their way to our largest financial institutions, where now, stripped of the illusion of unending growth, it is entirely possible they are worthless.

In this system in which zero growth is disaster and negative growth is death, I find it increasingly believable that our nation’s banks are now insolvent. It would explain how the first half of the TARP money, some 350 billion dollars (minus a few billion in bonuses for the high priests of finance) seemingly vanished into the system without creating so much as a bump in the downward slide of our economy. 

It all seems a bit surreal, but if it’s possible that the people who claim to understand and manage a system I find impossible to merely comprehend did not see this disaster coming, then it’s equally plausible that the whole thing really is built on bullshit. Maybe I can’t pick up the BB because the BB isn’t there.

I’ve been trying to blog with one finger instead of my usual two because for the past two hours, I, along with something like 1400 other people, have been participating in a telephone town hall meeting with Todd Akin, the congressman for my little corner of Misery. I was in the queue to ask a question, down to around fourth in line when he decided to call it quits for the night. I guess he got tired of beating the same dead horse.

It was clear from the beginning that this “meeting” was about hawking the Republican answer for all problems; tax cuts. Akin believes that tax cuts for small businesses is the only way to right the economy. He stated several times that the stimulus bill working it’s way through Congress will fail to create jobs and will in fact cause more jobs to be lost because “Keynesian economics has never worked anywhere at any time.” Wow. The things you can learn from right-wing congress critters. Here I was thinking all that (Keynesian) government spending on World War II pulled this country out of the Great Depression and into the greatest economic boom in history.

Akin also trotted out the old saw that our government overtaxes so much that it actually reduces federal revenue. That’s right, we could just tax cut our way to prosperity again. See, according to Akin, the dividend and capital gains tax cuts the Republicans enacted early in dubya’s tenure helped small businesses so much that they were creating a hundred thousand jobs a month a few years ago. I so wanted to ask the congressman why this isn’t still the case, since these tax cuts are still in effect. 

It’s probably just as well that I didn’t get to ask a question, though. After listening to my fellow constituents, I was doing a good deal of cursing and sputtering. One caller was convinced that a large portion of the bailout money was getting into the hands of drug dealers and organizations like ACORN.

Another was very spun up about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and stated “Barney Frank and Chris Dodd did more damage to this country than the 9/11 terrorists.”

Yet another was irate over Senate Bill 2433, The Global Poverty Act of 2007, aimed at cutting in half the number of people in the world who live on less than one dollar a day. His question was: “Are there enough Americans left in Congress to defeat this bill?” (That’s right, around here, real Amurkins say “Fuck the poor! Gimme a tax cut!”) And then, as part of his answer to that question, my congressman said the United Nations had proven itself so corrupt that it is no longer worth the United States being part of it. Sigh.

So my new software has been kicking my ass. The more I fix it, the worse it gets. Apparently I’ve now somehow broken the comments and that just won’t do. I don’t get many, but I appreciate the one’s I do get and want to see them show up on the page. I’ve decided that, at least for now, maintaining the old look in a new environment is too much for me, so I’ve downloaded this freebie blogging software to let me keep posting while I learn how to build my own site from scratch. So far, I’m liking what I see. Hopefully I’ll be able to incorporate this into whatever I manage to build.