"What Happened?!"

Ed, a longtime friend, writes to say that what he thinks has happened to result in the latest “bailout” of a U.S. corporation is that when the U.S. demanded a “bailout” for the fat-cats in the money-changing industry – i.e., the bankers in one form or another - the Congress was ready to kiss ass as usual. Sixty thousand lobbyists in the Bordello on the Potomac aren’t there for a tour of our national monuments. Then, however, when the public outcry became threatening to their fat-cat jobs, the heroes of democracy suddenly got some “leadership” character. Ed thinks Wall Street has threatened to launch an attack on retirement funds, general investment media, and, I presume, entitlement programs in general. He warns that what follows will result further in Wall Street’s retaliation against mainstream U.S.A.

Ed was one of few people who agreed with me when I predicted years ago – almost a decade, in fact – what is happening today. I agree with him in this instance entirely. There will be, in other words, hell to pay.

Of course, none of it makes a bit of economic difference to me. I dropped out of the insane system that has produced this Lewis Carroll-ian dream more than two decades ago. I was never a “joiner,” and behaving like a jackass simply because a group of my kind was behaving like a jackass became anathema to me while I was still in high school.

‘’’But I don't want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
"’Oh, you can't help that,’ said the Cat: ‘We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.’
"’How do you know I'm mad?’ said Alice.
"’You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘otherwise you wouldn't have come here.’”

I didn’t “come here” – which is to say I dropped out. I’m no goddamned idiot and you can’t make a slave of me – I’ll die fighting you (and take my share with me). With what’s about to come down very near now, there may be those who wonder what I did in order to have survived to be able to be watching this re-enactment of Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole.

Does anybody believe that if the Congress and the public refuses to give the bankers and financial swindlers of corporate America what they want legally, they won’t go right ahead and take it on the sly and illegally, anyway? Are you serious? You believe the fact of fifty thousand plus lobbyists in Washington, D.C. means the congressional watchmen you trust to watch the treasury are trustworthy? If you believe that, you are the principle reason we’re in this latest “screw the taxpayer” orgy.

You’re one of the morons who will vote in this next election, then bray that you’ve done your patriotic duty.

A lesson in economics – truth politicians spend most of their time suppressing – is in order. First, what we call a “dollar” – and pretend is money - is not money; it is a U.S. Government I.O.U. It is backed – i.e., given value – by the sweat, skill, and talent of the productive people of the United States. “Productive” people, in case you’ve never thought about it, are those who actually produce something real – that is, make it or make it from what is taken from the planet upon which we live.

All money, all “wealth,” is incontrovertibly derived from the planet Earth. Capitalism by definition is the turning of the earth and its resources into capital – money. Any medium of exchange, or unit thereof, is therefore representative of an amount of something derived from the earth.

The I.O.U. dollar is merely what is called by Harvard scholar types a “medium of exchange.” What does that mean? It means something that represents – represents; not is - a real thing of value, something, a commodity, derived from the planet. That, unfortunately or otherwise, includes a human being or his skill, knowledge, or ability to do what another can’t or won’t do.

Understanding economics is most easily done when the earth and all its peoples are represented by an island, one with only a few people on it. A microcosm, in other words. With time, the “money” inhabitants of the island have printed or minted becomes representative of nothing as the natural resources available on the island are used up. In the microcosmic example I used on a talk radio show from KOIA San Antonio decades ago, that of an island where the only resources were bananas growing there, the bananas have all been eaten or used otherwise. The trees have died (it won’t be too hard, in today’s ideological state, to imagine that the islanders have so polluted their island, and refused to do the hard work of cleaning up and/or caring for the trees).

The islander’s money now represents only the skill, knowledge, and labor of the inhabitants. For those unwilling or unable to work, the “medium of exchange” money is, in fact, simply a claim on the life and person of another islander. That’s all. If there are one thousand “dollars” on the island, and one hundred islanders, then each islander is worth ten dollars. Eventually, of course, the people on the island will be obliged to eat one another. And those who have succeeded in acquiring money – control and right to the life and person of another – will sell their fellow to be eaten. For money.

On the immense island that is the United States of America, under the infantile economic system that is corporate capitalism, a professional baseball player is worth literally tens of thousands of times what a soldier, or teacher is. Where the currency that is human beings is concerned, an adolescent female who cavorts semi-nude while singing doggerel verse is worth - valued at - many, many times what a doctorate-degreed musician is.

In the fall of 1956, as I was returning from a mission into Hungary during the revolution there, and having accomplished a feat of arms I knew few men on earth could duplicate, I stopped at a shop in LaGuardia Airport to buy a newspaper. The paper was still talking about the “heroics,” of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Bill (Moose) Skowron, and the Yankees pitching staff in the recent Baseball World Series. All of the Yankees would doubtlessly be making a lot of money next year, the paper said, and I recall calculating at the time that Mickey Mantle was being paid nearly twenty times what I was.

I sat staring at the ceiling for a long time, wondering what the future might be for a country with its priorities and perspectives having to do with money and personal worth – the product of its thought processes – so twisted that it would pay to play a children’s game twenty times what it would pay for risking of life and killing in combat. In the years that followed, as I watched the nation’s economic perspective grow more and more irrational, distorted and disproportionate, I became even more certain of the conclusion I drew then.

The conclusion? - just what has happened to result in this essay. There is, of course, a mathematical algorithm – for the reader who is a mathematician, a series – modeling what has been happening. Sometimes called “the Butterfly Effect,” the process is a chaotic one, meaning that a small and otherwise insignificant factor has staggeringly disproportionate results.

Let me digress – perhaps even further - for a moment. When I was a kid in high school, it occurred to me that there were two worlds. One was the world I lived in, where building things, producing, rearing, and husbanding real, weighty, ornery, resisting things was daily, perennial experience; and the second world was the world of language – rhetoric – wherein everything was a construct of mere words.

In the real world, every cause had an inevitable, often ineluctable consequence. Life was like my already then favorite sports, judo and wrestling. Make an error, you paid its prices. Nowhere to hide, no excuses, no escape. Most things were accomplished only with effort, sometimes great effort, and the rewards for effort were proportionate to the effort. Again, nowhere to hide, no excuses, no escape.

In the world or rhetoric, however, everything was entirely different. One could defeat the most skilled opponent simply with a turn of phrase, create a fight (the kind of “fight” politicians speak of daily) out of pure language, hide from his weaknesses behind a word blizzard smoke screen. One skilled with language could create anything he desired. I sometimes thought that the Apple in Eden was language, because with language man could rival even god – he could create.

Indeed, for those sufficiently astute, mere words are the medium of exchange representing reality – the planet. Like the U.S. dollar, they are a fiction, not a resource; they are a fiction, the ideated-only representation of a real thing. A person who accepts this ideated currency for anything he has produced with his labor, skill, or mind is a fool, accepting for something real and of the real world something that is an idea – a promise – alone.

In the world and virtual reality of language, that which was produced by the hands and mind of and individual is always worth the same kind of effort by and from another, no matter its effect in reality.

The value of a printed piece of paper is indeterminate and fickle as a nation who will pay a baseball player tens of thousands of times what it will pay one who teaches or guards his children.

It is as fickle as a nation who will arbitrarily and without study or any other kind of basis in fact simply decree that the value of a woman’s work is the same as that of a man, or that the value of work or product of an individual of one race is the same as that of an individual from any other race - or color, or creed, or clothing style – thusly depreciating in the same manner as the baseball player the teacher, soldier, or policeman the work, product, and person of everyone else.

It is as fickle and ripe for self-destruction as a nation that requires lending to certain people on the basis of their race, creed, or gender alone, thusly depreciating the value of credit in general – making it cost more and more - for everyone else.

It is as fickle as a nation that decrees in its educational establishment “no child left behind” – meaning that all children must stay behind.

It is as fickle as a society that will give its immature and unsophisticated children command of amounts of money sufficient to let them turn an otherwise pitiful clown masquerading as an artist or entertainer into a multi-millionaire, and let unscrupulous – corporate, of course – business prey upon the children’s immaturity.

Et cetera, ad infinitum – infinity now thunderously evident.

Of course, in addition to all of that feckless fickleness and in order to be able to steal at will from its productive citizenry, the government makes law that requires the productive citizen to exchange his blood, sweat, and tear, real-world product for a piece of paper represented by the baseball player’s product. The cold war warrior dueling with a handgun three AK-47 armed Soviet soldiers in Lövér Forest in western Hungary will be paid in currency valued in major part by a baseball player.

Money whose value has been inflated by the baseball player’s product and keeps the product of the farmer dirt cheap also keeps the public bewildered as to the value of anything. In a nation whose corporate government sings daily its “free market” litany, it is price-fixing at its most insidious, unseen, and vicious. The value – i.e., purchasing power – of “baseball player money” is being changed minute by minute as this or that profligate and asinine bargain or purchase takes place – that, in fact, while the productive person has no way to know what has happened or is happening to his money, his produce, or his value as a person.

The result today is that no one made available to the public by the news and information media, or by the government that controls them, can say what is happening or will happen. Joe Scarborough, host of this morning’s “Morning Joe” program, complains that no one, Congressman, Senator, President, Secretary of the Treasury, or political pundit is willing or able to say what has happened.

Of course not! How do you balance a checkbook on an account from which anyone can draw as much as he pleases and without recording the withdrawal, and the money being withdrawn has value which varies erratically from day to day?

Neither the average citizen nor the baseball player has any idea concerning how much President Bush’s war has cost him. The truth is, neither does anyone else, because there is no way to know! Even told, and an explanation given (the accuracy or utility of which, like the Heisenberg Principle, must be uncertain) he is unable to assess the effect of the theft until he can’t pay for things for which he once could pay and can’t borrow in order to pay for them, either. Eventually, however, everyone on the island that is our nation must borrow “money” – “money,” don’t forget, that has no certain value and whose repayment may, in fact, be impossible. The cost of everything on the island has been so inflated by the cost of things otherwise worthless, that all trade stops for re-negotiation of values and worth. What is true of the individual islander, of course, becomes eventually true for everybody on the island – or nation.

And that, Joe Scarborough – and John Q. Citizen – is what has happened.

To be continued (one solution) . . .