DO YOU WONDER WHY EVERYTHING SEEMS TO BE GOING HAYWIRE WHEN YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG?

DO YOU WONDER WHY EVERYTHING SEEMS TO BE GOING HAYWIRE WHEN YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© September 12, 2011

A WALL STREET BOARD GAME

When I was a small boy, and my mother poured the cream off the top of the milk, I asked, “Mommy, why does the cream come to the top?” 

She put down her cigarette into an ashtray, dipped her finger into the cream, tasted it and smiled.  “The best of everything rises to the top.”

That homily resonated seventy years ago, but has proven misleading.

It came to mind as I watched the debate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination at the Reagan Library (September 7, 2011).  The next night I watched President Barak Obama present his $450 million jobs program to a joint session of Congress. 

The Republican Presidential Debate had none of the gravitas I remembered of the Kennedy-Nixon Debate of 1960.  Nor did it have the intimacy of President Roosevelt’s fireside chats on the radio.  In the 1940’s, we were in the midst of World War Two.  In 1960, we were in the Cold War.  Adults’ respond to physical threat; petulant children-as-adults to economic collapse.  Roosevelt had to deal with both, first with the Great Depression and then the war.  He did so by making a connection with the people if not always with Congress and the Supreme Court, which often found his interventions unconstitutional.

Presidents know how to engage the collective conscience in a time of war.  Perhaps that is why they call so many things a war: war on drugs, war on poverty, war on crime.  They are not as nimble when it comes to jobs and the economy, but they know the vocabulary.  It is unlikely that mention will be made that our form of economics, capitalism, is a kind of war because it depends on creative destruction.  It is built on booms and busts as the invisible hand of the marketplace is allowed to operate as a law of nature.

It is not politically correct to suggest there is something inherently wrong with a self-destructive system constructed on a foundation of instability.  Capitalism is our civil religion and treated with the infallibility and dogmatism to rival Rome.  I’m not suggesting that socialism or communism is the answer, but I am implying, as a layman, that capitalism is out-of-control.  It has been allowed to destroy our social base, and in the process, our working middle class.

I for one,

(1)   Resent lobbyists having more power in controlling what laws and regulations are enacted by Congress in support of their self-interests;

(2)   Resent physicians and psychiatrists in collusion with pharmacy companies using suspect research to justify their claims to rising diagnostic disorders such as depression, bipolar diseases, autism, and other forms of mental illness to justify costly pharmacological treatment programs;

(3)   Resent corporations being a law unto themselves, putting their interests above the nation’s interests;

(4)   Resent corporation with profits in the $ billions, but not satisfied until profits are in the tens of $ billions, justifying the right to go anywhere, do anything to realize such profits;

(5)   Resent Congressmen and Congresswomen, presidents, and candidates of these offices being constant campaigners raising and spending $ millions of dollars to win election or be reelected.

(6)   Resent that job security doesn’t exist for most Americans in the richest country on the planet.

Look around you at the empty buildings that once housed Borders, Hollywood Video, Blockbusters, Montgomery Wards, a GE plant, GM plant, a shoe factory, textile mill, neighborhood pharmacy, bakery, grocery, restaurant, family farm.  They have all been swallowed up by corporate aggregates as capitalism transforms everything it touches.

It is not just name brands that are changing, but companies and industries at a maddening scale.  This is called progress, but at what cost?  We have become enslaved to innovators and entrepreneurs that count on people being bored always looking for something different, as personal relationships have become synthetic and inner direction dulled to nonexistence.  No one seems to notice such places as Best Buy is Circuit City with different lighting. 

We celebrate entrepreneurs with the same gusto as our ephemeral sports heroes never looking back to what is destroyed never to be replaced. 

We don’t seem to feel entropy gaining on us, the condition where everything is destroyed that is real and everything in its place is not.

In this synthetic world of Wall Street as a board game, there is a hunger for engineers, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, chemists, intellectuals, philosophers, the crème de la crème of society.  There is no cry for factory workers, craftsmen, carpenters, electricians, technicians, plumbers, cosmetologists, waiters, cooks, barbers, bakers, and gardeners, the people who hold us together to some semblance of order. 

We don’t seem to equate happiness and fulfillment in doing the ordinary things in ordinary jobs that have been part of the world of man for thousands of years.  Everyone must be a college graduate to fill the needs of a society hell-bent-to-destruction, which is actually the mindset of capitalism as nothing can remain as it is, nothing!

For an increasing number of people in this creative destructive world we call our economy, the ladder is kicked away when it can least be afforded.  The unemployed and underemployed are college graduates deep in debt for their education, as well as workers in their late forties or early fifties, who have worked hard to reach a level of security only to have it slip away, and they have done nothing wrong.

Society blames them for not majoring in the right college curriculum, for not saving, for being spendthrifts when the marketplace has been bombarding their minds with subliminal stimuli around the clock for years.  Lest we forget, the national economy (Gross Domestic Product) depends on profligate spending.  Two-thirds of the GDP is domestic consumption.  

This state of perpetual economic turbulence has yet to trigger mass social reaction.  Perhaps it is because only 30 to 40 million out of more than 300 million are in gut wrenching financial crisis.  The government and corpocracy dance around these perturbations and pushed them off to the future seemingly oblivious to the fact that the future is becoming hauntingly close when everything will ultimately hit that wall.  God help us then.

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1945, 1989 NOSTALGIA

My sense is that less people born of the lower class will be able to work their way into the middle class with some degree of financial security.  This was a possibility for those born during the Great Depression when most Americans had little. They dealt with that reality as best they could and became characteristically frugal.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and war was declared on Japan and Nazi Germany, FDR received little resistance to massive austerity policies.  That included transforming automobile plants and other manufacturing facilities into factories to produce tanks, planes, ships, guns, bullets and bombs, turning textile mills and shoe factories into military supply stores, and universities into research centers to develop new weapons.  Ordinary citizens accepted rationing of milk, sugar, salt, coffee, butter, bread, meat, poultry, fish, fruit and vegetables, kerosene and gasoline with patriotic zeal.  Sacrifice was asked for and received as the Great Depression trained the nation to sacrifice.  Hardship had annealed citizens to be ready as adults, not self-indulgent complaining children.

Since World War Two, corpocracy has transformed everything it touches.  Go to any city of any size and you will see empty buildings where only recently industries thrived.  Brands, companies and industries are created and destroyed daily, so are jobs.  Thirty years ago Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida employed nearly a 1,000 engineers earning $50,000 to $75,000 (1980 dollars), now only a fraction of them are employed.  This is happening to tens of thousands of high tech employees as well as unskilled or semiskilled workers.  Where most companies had recruiting centers, they have now been turned into displacement centers. 

Thirty years ago, the talk was about lifetime employment, total employee involvement, but not today.  Now with the Internet and electronic and visual wonders of all description, not to mention robotics, work has changed as well as the place of work.  The fever of change never seems to spend much time on damage control or collateral damage to the lives it impacts.  It is too busy reinventing itself.

North Africa has had its “Arab Spring.”  We have yet to hear from the 30 to 40 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed, slaves to uncertainty. 

These disenchanted workers have been relatively quiet while the theatre of the absurd continues.  When workers realize it is not a Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative problem, but a reality show, all hell could break loose.  Political gridlock is nothing if not an excuse to do nothing.       

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LOOKING INTO THE REARVIEW MIRROR

As I sat and listened to a talking head discuss the president’s remarks with a member of Congress and a presidential critic, it occurred to me this was show business orchestrated for television ratings and the network’s bottom line.  Nothing changes.  The moderator leads the discussion like a six grader with the guest dodging questions as if they were bullets.  It would be entertaining if it not so pathetic.  The big microphone is the moderator’s power, and the guest, while being insulted, thanks the moderator for airtime.  Unbelievable! 

Unfortunately, it is not the signatory years of 1945 or 1989.  It is 2011 and the world is a changing.  Meanwhile, these television conversations sound as if an old recording stuck in the groove of those two dates with the United States still stirring the drink. 

I asked myself, am I exaggerating?  Am I simply a pessimist?  Or has something monumentally changed and we have failed to recognize it?

In the debates, I listened to Governor Rick Perry talk skeptically about global warming and science, confidently about social security being a Ponzi scheme, and unabashedly impersonally about the death penalty.  When he alluded to Galileo, incorrectly as it turns out, I thought he might be more comfortable in the seventeenth than the twenty-first century.  I listened, to Governor Mitt Romney as well, and immediately thought of President Warren Harding, who looked like a president but was a terrible one.   

We have been looking into the rearview mirror (see A Look Back to See Ahead 2007) since the 1960’s as we drive hell bent into the future.  Small wonder we are in trouble.  Perry, Romney, and Obama are generational products of this rearview mirror persuasion, products of anachronistic universities and atavistic faculties paranoid with what might be chasing them rather then what might smash them to smithereens ahead. 

Perry, Romney, Obama, et al are clearly sincere, but so handicapped with this education, as are we all, that they cannot lead and we don’t know how to follow.  It would seem we are on automatic pilot to the 24/7 repetitive drone of white noise on cable television, a soap opera serialized into a mantra.

Education, like religion has lost its way.  Economics suffer for it.  Into the void have come American business educators and management consultants to treat education as a corporate problem.  Profit has reduced education to a strange vocabulary of “balance sheets,” “profit margins,” “performance indicators,” “connecting the dots,” “metrics,” “units of assessment,” “impact indices,” ad nauseam.  Everything is about results process is taken for granted.  And business through lobbyists rule government.  

New innovative corporations are born every day in information technology, which begs the question, why does the economy continue to flop?

Nearly half of young African Americans are unemployed.  It doesn’t help that nearly as many drop out of school before they finish high school.  Meanwhile, the median income of all American men ages 25 to 64 have declined in real dollars nearly 30 percent between 1969 and 2009. 

Even if the students stayed in school chances are they would graduate with writing, reading, calculating, social and thinking deficiencies for a post-post industrial society.  Moreover, 90 percent of American high school and 80 percent of college graduates are not fluent in a foreign language while people of most other countries are multi-lingual.  . 

When money is the civil religion, money is thought to be the solution to every problem.  Finland spends approximately $5,000 less per student than the United States, yet Finland is at or near the top in writing, reading, science and mathematics, while the United States is near the middle in reading, and towards the bottom in science and math. 

The United States came out of World War Two triumphant, and rode the manufacturing and economic boom to the limit.  The country panicked in 1980 when NBC television showed why Japan and South East Asia were eclipsing the US dominance in automotive and appliance manufacturing.  American manufacturing copied Japanese quality and workplace strategies without regard for the differing cultures between the two societies.  Then the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the US was heady with the sense of being the lone superpower.  It was then that the US let its guard down.  The drift followed. 

These two instances illustrate a reactive passive society slave to comfort and complacency with little awareness or capability to reverse the inclination (see Work Without Managers 1991,The Worker, Alone 1995, Silent Killers, 1998 and Corporate Sin 2000).  We have watched our manufacturing base disappear and with it 30 to 40 million well paying manufacturing jobs.  Part of the problem is an optimistic bias with our brains tilted towards the positive whatever the situation. 

The president in his speech Wednesday exhorted, “buy made in America,” referring to American automobiles when we have become essentially a service jobs nation.  These jobs are by definition low paying for the most part.  The horse is out of the barn and has fled to the East. You don’t have to be an economist to see that our system of economics is built on explanation not exploration of root causes.  The casualty is the shrinking of the working middle class.  It cannot be saved if we fail to ask and answer the right questions.

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