SOS Different Decade

I have been reluctant to write much in the last few weeks for several reasons—mostly I want to avoid sounding like a cassette tape stuck on rewind and play of the same passage. At the moment, the future of the economy is the largest issue most people are dealing with. Unfortunately, most discussions concerning the economy are abstract. That is, they focus on surveys, market prices and figures and ignore the human cost of economic realities. Frankly, the dehumanization of economic realities is the bane of free market ideologies. (See! I sound like a broken tape deck!)

The auto industry bailout is the current media darling story with the spectre of deflation rapidly coming to the forefront from behind. Why no one seems willing to comment on the fact that the present cost of buying and operating an automobile are the two main reasons sales have fallen to nearly zero would be a mystery if I were not such a cynic. We are presently experiencing a period of economic readjustment, a moment when the economic excesses of the elite few are in the process of rectification by the economic and social sacrifices of the working class many. Banks are cheerfully taking federal money without loosening credit restrictions. Auto manufacturers are taking federal money without appreciably changing the way they do business. I await breathlessly for the predictable fingerpointing by management to the “outrageous” benefits and wages of auto workers. No one will even begin to address the economic cost to our society of auto part outsourcing to foreign manufacturers.

Our wonderful governments will continue to threaten us with service cutbacks and berate us with the necessity for tax increases without ever addressing the way they do business. Employment initiatives will continue to focus on luring corporate jobs to an ailing economy rather than seeking entrepreneurial solutions of both the mini and maxi kinds.

In short, we will see business as usual in 2009 and the average worker will unequally suffer the consequences of lackluster leadership and the greed based world perspective of those leaders.

The Roots of Social and Personal Depression

I haven’t written in a few weeks for several reasons. One, of course, is that personal commitments all clamored for attention at once and took several weeks of undivided attention to meet. Another is that, frankly, I watch the government response to the economic disaster unfold and I become severely depressed. I watch the same old solutions that have managed to drive us to the present point of distress tarted up in fancy rhetoric and presented as necessary solutions to the endemic social conflicts that are the real causes of our present difficulties.

Somehow, economic issues have become separated from civic issues in the social consciousness. Perhaps the so-called collapse of Marxist Socialism with the fall of the Berlin wall in ’89 functioned as defacto proof of the necessary division between the acts of government and the pursuit of personal wealth. The fact that the old CCP in Russia and the PRC in China are far from Marxist in their politics and policies means little in the common perception. What is also forgotten or misunderstood is how the generation who fought the Second World War pursued economic policies that were consciously rooted in their sense of civic duty. Make no mistake, their social/civic record was not spotless or idyllic. Their racism was an undercurrent that tainted all their decisions until the late 1950s. But even in regards to their racist failings, members of that generation took action that was rooted in civil rights and which brought an economic benefit to all citizens of the US. LBJ, for all his faults, did wonders in bringing that hidden undercurrent to the surface of the social and governmental mainstream by establishing legal tools for its civic redirection and civic redress. His War on Poverty was a magnificent effort that assisted millions of Americans move from abject poverty and hopelessness into the mainstream of American civil and economic life. The effort was gutted and destroyed by those who believe the same “free market” nonsense that infects the politicians of the present generation.

We have ideologically/intellectually separated business decisions from civic consequences. The dramatic rise in unemployment is simply a figure not a story of despair and hardship for those who suddenly find themselves unemployed and unable to financially meet their family's physical needs. The worldwide rise in food prices is an economic phenomenon of an impersonal, mechanical market not the story of millions who exist on the brink of starvation because their income cannot cover the increase in staple food prices. The destruction of the industrial manufacturing base in the pursuit of a high profit “service” economy is not seen as an assault on the livelihood of the minimally educated or traditional craftsman. The consequences of such decisions are framed as impersonal forces at work in a “bottom-line” economy. The social and civic consequences of such “business” decisions are ignored.

Our congress votes billions to bailout greedy billionaires in order to save “jobs” and perpetuate an economic world-view that is destructive of human dignity. Truly depressing.