Warning: This post contains the F word, which does not appear in many economics texts but it does appear in a Mudhoney song that defines our current economic times.
It’s late September 2011 and every day in lower Manhattan upwards of 2000 people are gathering. They are not there to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the contemptible hijackings and subsequent attacks on New York’s financial district, which is indeed the lifeblood of the world economy.
Many of them are not sure why they are there. They just felt a calling. They know something is wrong and they’ve targeted Wall Street.
Multiplatinum, Grammy-nominated band Radiohead gave a free performance at the demonstration during the demonstration’s second Friday. And there was no press coverage.
The evolution was so slow. It took a generation. It was 30 years since the Reagan administration stormed into the White House after a panicked electorate swallowed the exaggeration that the economy of the late 1970s was destined for ruin. The conservatives took over Washington and the message. By 2011, the majority of Americans had only ever heard a message that if we give the money to the wealthy, they will know what to do with it. They will create the jobs we need for survival.
A generation of Americans was told that the only way to grow the economy was through a noxious cocktail of tax cuts and no regulation.
The stock markets have typically had dismal Octobers. The 1929 crash happened in October, as did the 1987 “glitch.” In October 2008, it all fell to pieces. After years of being barraged with the teachers unions, the public employees and the lifelong losers who mortgaged houses with no intention of ever paying them off, the American people collectively reached the conclusion as October 2011 rolled in that Wall Street was the problem.
We reached this deductively. By 2011, unemployment was chronic, the wealth gap was obvious to anyone with a pulse, and the middle class ceased operations as a going cause. In short, the American way of life, fueled by a fluid economy for decades, was flat out fucked.
As the Mudhoney song “Flat Out Fucked” says:
So mixed up
No room to move
I ain’t got nothing
Got nothing to lose
Reaganomics reached its logical conclusion of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer in the fall of 2011. We could have argued that at any point in the prior 20 years, but by now, Americans had no more money, no more hopes and nothing better to do. So they assembled on Wall Street.
And the media didn’t cover it. Probably because the few remaining media companies had themselves becn absorbed by even fewer conglomerates whose stocks were traded on the floors of Wall Street. As were their sponsors. You didn’t see Fred’s Hardware Store advertising on the Time-Warner owned CNN, did you?
Coincidentally, the death of Reaganomics happened at a time when effective tax rates on all Americans and corporations, the tenets of neo-conservative economics, were at an all-time low. Again, taxes are low and there’s virtually no regulation - and the economy is flat-lined.
“Free Trade,” a focus-group term meaning children and slaves manufacturing cheap goods for which you still pay full price while the elite investor class pockets the difference, was supposed to save the economy. It was supposed to open American manufacturing to other markets, however the theory breaks down when you realize 1.) the domestic manufacturing base is gone, and 2.) more than half the world lives on less than a dollar a day. How are they going to afford our stuff?
But free trade is another tenet of this ideology, and while it’s at an all-time high, the American economy is tanked.
In short if we changed the soiled sheets of the neo-conservative wet dream, we find that everything getting these people off has a long-term, negative effect for the overwhelming majority of people in the society. And by “overwhelming” I mean roughly 98 percent.
Examining this from another angle, we conclude that if the problem is Wall Street, then:
- The problem is not taxes.
- The problem is not the debt.
- The problem is not too much regulation.
- The problem is not unions.
- The problem is not secularism.
- And in addition to the propaganda bomb whose radiation has violated us for decades, we should also add that war is not good for the economy.
The problem is Wall Street, and the thousands who gathered in lower Manhattan to send a message to the political class were there because they finally understand the consequence of our blind history. If the system allows money to flow to people who don't need it, they will hoard it. If the system allows money to flow to people who need it, they will put it in circulation. Either way, the system picks winners and losers.
