The sound of an economy crumpling

Oh, what a lovely recession

January passed with its drumfire of gloomy figures processed into dreary statistics – mostly records in unemployment rates and factory closings – by the same “protocolistas of the obvious” who used to whoop up the system of total deregulation. From Panasonic to Toyota, from GM to Microsoft, all major industries have lost jobs, thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs. It's called downsizing, but don't let that fool you, it's good old pinkslipping. And I, for one, have the nasty idea that the multinationals and other feudal lords of our economic system are using the recession as a smokescreen to dump a few extra workers and whup the others into shape using "optimization processes." By the same token, the downturn in demand is real and it is gradually rippling through economies like some vigorous tsunami not yet rising to full size in shallow waters to form a horrid and lethal wave... Even the high-rpm engines in China and India have suddenly slowed down as well, brave little Switzerland, with its heavy reliance on exports and generally robust economy is feeling the cold. Still, the Swiss government doesn’t dare take a stick to UBS and other banks that squandered billions in high-risk financial adventures and have been paying out bonuses to bankers, presumably to shut them up. The whole system has become so infantile, one wonders whether these men and some women ever grew up.

Meanwhile, President Obama tried to move money into the American system in a somewhat sustainable manner, i.e. putting it into enterprises like weatherizing homes, improving schools, bridges, roads, or simply dumping it into states. Spreading it, in other words. Real stuff for a real economy. And it is desperately needed, has been for decades, but the ultimately-liberated market gurus wanted to drown government in a bathtub, n'est-ce-pas Mr. Nofziger? We remember that the investment economy tried to make money out of money with all sorts of schemes some of which were not more or less bogus than Madoff's Ponzi scheme. This makes France's Third Republic in the last decades of the 19th century look like a paragon of rectitude.
Naturally, Obama is experiencing static from the Republicans, who are still feeling their collective bile rising at having lost to the pipsqueak Senator from Illinois. They still repeat the mantra of tax cuts for the rich like some hideous Baptist tchotchke that keeps repeating "What would Jesus do?" They have obviously run out of any constructive ideas and in the vacuum has stepped the grand gasbag Rush Limbaugh. This should sink what’s left of the old GOP in a few months, unless some more reasonable politicians like Olympia Snowe from Maine show up on the podium to give Boehner and Co. a whack on the fanny. But astoundingly, they managed to nitpick it to the point where it might not, in fact, be terribly effective.... As a friend who suffered testicular cancer once told me: "The pump still works, but the well's run dry." That, at any rate, is Paul Krugman's view in the NY Times today.

As for Limbaugh (and his colleagues like Beck, Savage, Boortz, Coulter, etc.) he is an overpaid, ignorant, narcissistic and somewhat obscene attention-seeker, a kind of fat, old and male version of Britney Spears. She, at least, managed to put two kids into the world and still has a chance to change her ways. Limbaugh, on the other hand, actually seems to believe his own bilge and is sclerotically repeating it in the hopes that the "base," meaning the lunatic fringe, will keep on supporting him. And it is, it is. In the US, frauds still make money. In fact, if you want to even sell a good idea, package it in fraudian garb (a topic I shall return to, no doubt).

But let us not focus on the symptoms too much. After all, what more could the GOP do but attract attention in one of the venerated American ways, by being vulgar, ugly and aggressively imbecilic.

This still leaves Obama having to use a fair amount of force to push through a bill over some resistance. And the bill’s popularity has been dwindling according to a Rasmussen poll. This may have to do indirectly with Tom Daschle’s tax woes, or rather, the fact that he forgot to pay taxes on some limousine he was using. The Great Unwashed does tend to cross-pollinate data, I am afraid. (Chatty footnote: Back in the mid 80s, when the Reaganauts were ranting against both miniature, allegedly Communist Nicaragua and Moslem Lybia, about 60% of people in a poll in Florida believed that the dominant religion in Nicaragua was Islam...) The other problem may well be a failure to learn a fundamental lesson from the financial fiasco. Let us put the "ownership society" back on the slab for a moment. But this time, let us not forget its cohorts: personal debt and the notion of instant gratification. The latter is another concept that used to be widely discussed, but seems to have gone the way of Vance Packard and the social critics of a generation ago.

Gimmee

There's a reason why it's called piggybank

Owning a house, a car, perhaps having some creature comforts in life is fine. But just because your neighbor has it is not reason enough.

People were even warned by the very gurus of the fast buck: There is no free lunch. And fast food is not healthy. Brokers only managed to sell cheap mortgages to low- or no-income people because of the pervasive notion that anyone can strike it rich easily, because that is the American way. It's not. The American way is to make the rich richer, and the less well-off be damned. This plain fact has been documented over and over again for decades. It can be read in Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962), for example. This myth is still swallowed as gospel by millions of Americans every day, and at times it even crosses the Atlantic and infects people's brains in Europe.

Take it easy

It took at least 30 years at least to get into this phenomenal mess. The way out is going to take some time, and it will require not only intelligent and firm navigating on the part of the Obama administration, but also a new paradigm for Americans in general. Patience is one solution. The other is: coming down to earth and being satisfied with less, otherwise you will become the prey of slick-mouthed salesmen. And the first step is recognizing the problems of addiction…. To be continued…