Over the past several weeks, Congress and the Department of the Treasury (while that guy, that...what's his name..."Tree?" "Shrub?"...oh, never mind, he's irrelevant...watches it all on the teevee) have been engaged in a drama so absurd you'd think you were watching a Monty Python skit: a bread line for the Armani Elite. Men so obscenely wealthy that a single one of their lunch tabs for a work day would break the average families food budget for a month are lined up at the trough of government largesse, sucking up our great-grandchildren's money as if they were starving. This is the great "Wall Street 'rescue'" of 2008-2009 (and who knows how much longer?). It's all been billed as a means of "loosening up credit," the lubricant which our economy needs to run smoothly day-to-day. Let's set aside, for a moment, the fact that, some $200 billion into a $700 billion bailout, we're still not seeing any results (duh...the fat cats are taking the money, saying "thank you," and putting it in the bank). If we're dumb enough, as a country, to hand huge sums of no-strings money to dishonest, incompetent men in hopes that they'll suddenly develop a conscience and "do the right thing," we deserve to be swindled.
What is most distressing about the current crisis isn't the larceny going down as we speak, or even the rash of irresponsible, reckless decisions that lead to the current mess. What's most distressing is that we're calling this a bailout of "The U.S. Economy," as if the term is exclusively defined by the activities that go on inside a Gordian knot of networked computers in one small corner of a small island just off the east coast--and not by the actual businesses, employing actual people and producing actual products, which span the continent and feed that gamblers' Mecca its stake money.
David Brooks, in his column today, describes a recurring "pattern of decay and new growth" in which companies like Pan Am and ITT wither away and provide the compost for new ventures like Southwest Airlines and T-Mobile. That's all well and good--the "circle of life," Kum Bah Yah, yada yada, let's all break out the marshmallows and sing some capitalist-campfire songs. And if the "capital markets" provide a faster composting method, well, I guess that's alright too--the money to finance real businesses has to come from somewhere. Selling off newly-obsolete custom-designed factory robots one at a time on eBay would be sort of slow and tedious, and breaking them down to their (more easily liquidated) smaller component parts would be even slower.
But make no mistake--Wall Street has become so full of itself, so convinced of it own indispensibility (and we've bought into the mythology with such fervor) that you'd think IT was "The U.S. Economy," and not merely a giant crap table where the most well-heeled of the pinstripe set whoop it up with our money, our jobs, our lives, our futures, and our national security.
If a Wall Streeter holds a big position in a company like Pan Am, and that company shows signs of weakness, he simply sells his position, moves that money to some other company, and continues his pursuit of The Armani Dream. The employees of that company, if they're lucky enough to collect unemployment, live in a state of mounting panic for as long as it takes to find somewhere else to work, where yet another set of highly-paid executives (who never miss a gourmet meal, no matter what idiotic or criminal decisions they make) works them like marionettes in the next act of the perpetual anxiety-dance that constitutes 21st century middle-class life. And that's the best an employee can expect--she might not be able to find new work at all. The downward spiral from "fully employed" to "homeless" can be frighteningly quick if you're a middle class family.
But the moneyed class is so completely divorced from the day-to-day realities of life in America that their moves resemble the Universal marble-game from the end of the movie Men in Black. And the richer and more powerful they become, the more they chafe at government restrictions, regulations, and impediments to the construction of ever-bigger, higher-stakes casinos with which to scratch their adrenaline-fueled, hedonistic itches. For all the dice-rolling they do with futuristic, high-tech "financial instruments," it's ironic that when they crap out, they so quickly reach for the violins, as if somehow "circumstances beyond their control" caused their "oops, my bad" moment--cue Sally Struthers--"won't you please help these poor, hard-luck cases pay their private tailors?"
It's amazing what a shortage of casinos we must have--every state has 75 different scratch-off lottery tickets (ever have to wait in line in a convenience store in a poor neighborhood?), Native Americans are building new casinos at a fantastic rate, and Wall Street, a.k.a. "The U.S. Economy," has followed suit in style. Credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, etc, etc, represent the new Monte Carlo, right here in the good 'ol U.S. of A.--and yet, still, the executives with their hands out for the the biggest taxpayer charity go on overseas junkets to slake their insatiable thirst for more.
The U.S. economy, at the top end, will likely bounce back. The yacht-hugger class won't miss any meals. Out here in the flyovers, though, in "real" America, (where the real economy slogs it out in the mud), things are looking dark. It's unlikely that the American middle class will continue to exist as we know it now--labor is cheaper in China, and brainpower is cheaper in India. None of this matters to the Wall Streeters--it doesn't matter to them who builds things, or makes the collection calls, or runs the credit checks.
I wonder if they understand, though, that in order for them to have their billions in Monopoly money to play with, somebody has to BUY something? It seems as though that's a slight flaw in their gambler's dreams. Somebody has to put up the stake money, or the game's over. It was bad enough when the dandies were playing with their own money--worse still when they started gambling the life-savings of Americans who actually had to work to earn their money. But now they're playing with the future earnings of people who haven't been born yet. When that pool of money dries up, I suppose they'll do what any self-respecting massive enterprise does, in this day and age--they'll borrow from China. And when that pool dries up, India--and when that dries up...
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