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The Casino Junkies Are Running the WorldSeptember 22, 2008 Long time ago, like when I was a Penn undergrad and writing a column for the Penn Voice, an economics major friend of mine took issue with a column I'd written titled "Private Profit, Public Problem." He said I just didn't understand what economics was about. I conceded the point, and over the years I've tried to understand what economics was about. Trouble is, economics as it's taught in college and practiced in the gummint is so divorced from reality as I know it that I have a hard time grasping it. Same goes for deconstructionist post-modern culture crit -- just in case you thought Robert Rubin and Jacques Derrida had nothing in common. I don't remember what I wrote in that long-ago column, but the gist had something to do with the fact that sooner or later a whole bunch of individuals chasing after profits had negative implications for the public good, and the public had no good tools to deal with it. Keep in mind that this was seven or eight years before anyone ever heard of Reaganomics. I don't know what percentage of the current U.S. population came of political age after Ronald Reagan was elected, but whatever the percentage is, it's scary. So I've been watching the latest flock of chickens coming home to roost and wondering where my old buddy is, so I could drop by and go "Nyah nyah, nyah nyah." Watching the country go down the tubes over the last 10 years or so has not been fun, however. Plenty of people know what's going on, but I don't know many of these people, and they don't write for the mainstream media, so I feel like Cassandra jabbering in the wilderness while wheeling wheelbarrows full of manure to the manure pile. What a goddamn mess. AlterNet has had several good articles that are good on the gory details and literate besides. I particularly commend one called Meltdown and Bailout: Why Our Economic System Is on the Verge of Collapse, by Joshua Holland. I wish I could distill this article into a one- or even five-minute presentation that my friends and acquaintances would sit still and listen to. Keeping the global interconnections straight in my own head is challenging enough, however, so what I'm pondering is how to translate the macro picture down to the micro level. Joshua Holland wrote: "If, as one definition holds, capitalism is all about maximizing efficiency, what happens when meaningful production becomes so efficient that the system ends up cranking out more goods than the population needs -- more than it can absorb?" One flip-side question that occurred to me is what do our jobs look like in a system that's hell-bent on "maximizing efficiency"? An awful lot of us are interchangeable cogs on assembly lines turning out "have it your way" burgers, or checkout lines at places like Wal-Mart. Another question: How does the system go about unloading those surplus goods it's created, the widgets, the cosmetics, the drugs, the political candidates? Marketing. Advertising. Persuading us we need this stuff by hammering home the message, day in, day out, that we're inadequate without it. Not only have these people degraded the environment, they've degraded the language by relentlessly using it to manipulate, insinuate, and come as close to lying as they can without getting busted. As a writer and an editor, this makes me sick. The contemporary Republican Party has succeeded spectacularly at harnessing the utter amorality of Big Business to the religiosity of the religious Right. With one hand they're creating the problem -- a society in which whatever can't be measured in dollars has no value at all -- and with the other they're holding out a smoke-and-mirrors solution: "traditional family values" that pretty much ignore economic issues altogether. Neat trick as long as you can get away with it. What I'm doing is pointing out that the unregulated free-for-all we've had since the early 1980s is basically like a big casino. If people want to gamble with dollars, fine; but these people are gambling with companies, countries, and, ultimately, human lives. Whether it's because of greed, testosterone, or adrenaline addiction, these people are out of control. Their concern for human life is on a par with that of your average drug kingpin or power-mad dictator. If they were your relatives, you'd be praying for their souls and trying to get them into rehab. If they were drug kingpins or power-mad dictators -- hey, don't we declare war on those guys? P.S. September 23. Here's another good article: "10 Things You Should Know About Bush's Trillion Dollar Fleecing Plan." Check out the links on the right side of the page, too. The Otto Spengler piece recommends A World of Chance, by Reuven and Gabrielle Brenner, two Canadian economists. It pushes the casino imagery even further and seems a whole lot better grounded in real-world human behavior than the neocons.
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