This Just In: Greed Is Not Good

So, um, prolly you've
heard by now that we're having this little problem with the economy,
eh?

Yeah, as a matter of
fact, it's starting to look like more than just a little problem.
It's starting to look like 1932 again. And, who knows beyond
that? What is there to say that 1932 is the baseline? Just
because the Great Depression is the worst scenario we've yet to experience,
that sure doesn't mean that it is the worst we could experience.
With astonishing amounts of governmental and personal debt sloshing
around the world in a hugely globalized economy, who's to say that
we aren't now headed for the Even Greater Depression?

Oh, and, let's also
not forget that even that isn't necessarily the end of it. Last
time the global economy imploded this bad, it got one helluva lot worse
before it got better. The only thing that could ever have made
the 1930s look good was the 1940s. There's no reason to necessarily
believe that that part can't happen again as well. If we're
stupid enough to repeat the mistakes of the Gilded Age, surely belligerent,
nationalist, chauvinist Americans (and Chinese, and Frenchmen, and Russians)
are also stupid enough to launch another world war or two in order to
chase down scarce resources like oil or gold. Or food. Or
water.

Leaving aside for the
moment any threats of world war, the only good news I see in our current
economic crisis s that at least we're eighty years down the road from
when Franklin Roosevelt broke the psychological barrier previously preventing
brainwashed Americans from owning a government that actually helped
them, as opposed to allowing themselves to be owned by a government
of oligarchs who were helping themselves. This time, if people
are hungry because there's no money, and cold because heating oil
costs so much, and weathered because they've been tossed out of their
homes, and frightened because they've got no job and no healthcare
coverage - if we arrive at that state, watch what's left of the
psychological barriers crumble like George Bush's job approval ratings
or John McCain's lofty principles about running a high-minded campaign.
Watch desperate Americans embrace socialism as if they were the lost
children of Chairman Mao waking up from a long nightmare of capitalist
errancy.

What we're witnessing
now is the complete and utter repudiation of Reaganism-Bushism, of course,
but it runs even deeper than that. Not just the hyper-kleptocratic
version of the American economic system is being left in shreds, but
even its more moderate baseline version - the Eisenhower model of
nice, gray-suited capitalism - is now also on the chopping block.
Even that form of capitalism - quaintly tame by today's standards
of astonishing rapaciousness - was never sustainable, and part of
what we've been seeing this last decade is all the ruses by which
we had greedily squeezed out more than our fair share of the pie now
angrily biting back. The wars, the environmental rape, the exploitation
of nice little brown people all around the world (and, after all, isn't
that why Jesus made them?), the borrowing against our children's future,
the tax avoidance free-riding, the credit card economy, the exporting
of jobs to explode profits, the gluttony of 300 pound Americans and
their SUVs and the giant screens on which they watch 'reality TV'
(a nice euphemism for humiliating degradation) - these are all screaming
out to us simultaneously today, in an excruciating cacophonous harmony
from Hell, that THIS MUST END NOW.

And, boy, did we ever
have it coming. I just want to go on record and say to any historians
from the 26th century who might be reading this: "Yes, it does
say 'American' on my birth certificate, but I want you to know I
wasn't part of this! I did my best and kept shouting out
about our national stupidities. And I always voted for the Green
Party!"

Yeah, it's true, I'm
afraid. We're going down in history as the stupidist and the
shortest-lived of empires (even the Belgians did better than this, plus,
they make great beer). And well we should be so considered, too.
Do they have Darwin Awards for countries, like they do for individuals,
who find uniquely imbecilic (though highly entertaining) ways to remove
their DNA from the collective gene pool (you know, like getting really
stoned and then playing your electric guitar in the swimming pool)?
They should! And who could possibly trump America, we who gluttonously
slurp up oil in order to live like global pigs, sending the proceeds
to fund terrorists with ideologies from the 13th century and weapons
from the 21st to attack us? We who chant "Drill, baby, drill!"
when the giant planet-wrecking asteroid of global warming is headed
right for us. (Even the real dinosaurs come off looking better
than our human imitations of them, since they at least had the excuse
of actually having pea-sized brains to explain why they behaved as though
they had pea-sized brains.) We whose government's insatiable
spending sprees on high priority items, like wars that diminish our
national security and corporate welfare for oil companies or giant agri-corporations,
we fund by allowing China, our rising rival for global power, to own
our debt, and therefore to own us.

And what's that old
line about the first time being tragedy and the second folly?
The most astonishing thing about the economic nightmare we're now
entering is how little we learned from having already gone through this
before. We're not even talking about ancient or foreign history
here, people. You don't have to force Americans to go watch
some History Channel documentary on Charlemagne to figure this one out.
It wasn't that long ago that we went through exactly the same process,
ourselves, right here in gool ol' 'Muricah. Christ, there
are people still alive today who experienced it first hand. You'd
think, having found out in the 1930s precisely what happens when you
let monstrously greedy people who have their hands on the levers of
the global economy go on unregulated bacchanals of decadent self-aggrandizement,
that we'd want to avoid that sort of thing in the future, eh?
Perhaps we'd even vow "Never again", just like we did after the
Holocaust. (But then, given the mass murderous Soviet and Chinese
purges which came after Auschwitz and Treblinka, along with the genocides
of Cambodia, Rwanda and now Darfur (not to mention Vietnam or Iraq),
maybe that wouldn't be such a great promise to make...)

And even if the American
people couldn't make the connection between present circumstances
and past analogues, am I the only knucklehead who finds the whole deregulation
mania something of an odd idea just at a conceptual level? How
is it that the same people who always jump up and down in passionate
support of tough crime laws, loads of jails and busy state killing machines,
don't seem to apply the same logic to nice, white-collar crimes?
I mean, if you need a law to deter people from committing murder, why
don't you need regulations to prevent them from committing greed?
And, wouldn't it make a lot of sense to have these laws, especially
in places where the capacity exists for such tremendous harm to be done?
A murder takes a life and wrecks a couple of families. That's
horrible, and should be prevented wherever possible, and punished where
not. But would it be too much to ask that we also have laws and
punishments and regulations to help prevent white-collar crimes that
can wreck an entire global economic system, bringing wholesale grief
to hundreds of millions of people, and no doubt producing boatloads
of deaths in their wake, all in the name of satiating the greed of already
fantastically wealthy people? Indeed, we have the first of these
victims on the scoreboard already. This week a Los Angeles man
who lost all his money in the stock market shot his wife, three sons
and his mother-in-law before then killing himself. Get ready for
more of the same, and most of them won't be suicides, I can tell you.
They'll be homicides. Murder by greed.

And even if America's
so-called justice system can't bring itself to punish Wall Street
thieves for serial homicide in this case, would it be too much to ask
for a little government regulation to prevent a handful of kleptocrats
from crashing an entire global economic order and spreading death, destruction
and misery across the planet, just so that they could milk the last
remaining pennies from the golden goose, its bloodied carcass lying
twisted and prostrate across the trading room floor, nothing but lead
spilling out of its slashed belly? Ah, but that would not be capitalism,
eh, Mr. Graham? That would be fettering innovation, right, Mr.
Greenspan? That would limit Holy Growth, no, Mr. McCain?
And we can't have that.

I don't really understand
the perverse psychology of people like these Wall Street masters of
the universe, whose desire for additional wealth seems incapable of
being satiated. Personally, I don't think I'd know what to
do even with the mere pittance of a million bucks, so it's really
hard for me to figure it out when I see them feeling so hyper-compelled
in pursuit of throwing tens of millions more on top of their existing
piles of hundreds of millions. I mean, you can only sail on one
yacht at a time, right? You can only live in one mansion at a
time, right? You can only sleep with one gorgeous call girl at
a time, right? Oh, um, okay - well, never mind that last part.
But you catch my drift here, no?

In truth, when I look
around this fine country that calls itself my home, I have to conclude
that it's actually me who is the anomaly. I'm not sure what
genetic quirk or what massive failure of the educational machine produced
a freak like me, but - apart from not wanting to go into debt, and
from owning a handful of very modest toys like a computer or guitar
- I really don't give a shit about money. Go figure, eh?
You know, my car, bought used, is ten years old. I think.
I don't really remember for sure what model year it is, though I'm
pretty sure I could tell you how many cylinders it has if I stopped
to ponder the question long enough. This strange absence of an
unending greed for Money! and Things! seems to leave me way out in the
bizarro fringe outcast category within what passes for a culture for
those 300 million inhabitants in the middle of the North American continent.
Just 'cause I don't constantly seek cash, or measure myself by the
size of my wallet, I'm like six standard deviations from the norm
in the disaster affectionately known as America.

And just how disastrous
is our national disaster? Leave it to Sarah "The Embarrassment"
Palin to answer best. She illustrated the other night in her 'debate'
with Joe Biden how deep the country has sunk these last decades into
the miasma of a culture of petty selfishness, and an ethos of pathetic
greed. She reminded us that in Middle America, where she and "Todd"
(hey, you scary monster, I am not on a first-name basis with your First
Dude husband, and I don't ever want to be) purport to live, paying
taxes is not patriotic. Biden's response should have been to
ask whether all the Americans who've paid all the billions in tax
increases in every war America has ever fought prior to this one were
unpatriotic, or just suckers. He should have asked who she expected
would pay for the body armor to protect her son in Iraq (as if they're
gonna let that kid anywhere near any real danger), for our roads, our
schools, our post offices, our Army and Navy, our Social Security benefits
or our police officers. For that matter, he might also have asked
who would pay for Air Force One, who would pay for the tens of millions
of public campaign funds now being spent by the McCain-Palin campaign,
or who would pay for the army of bank regulators we'll need to clean
up the economic mess her ideological soul-mates have left us.

Still, I can't help
thinking that millions of Americans sat at home watching this, enthusiastically
nodding their head in support of her lunacy. Let's face it,
after a generation or two of Reaganism-Bushism permeating the culture,
no politician can even talk about raising taxes in America anymore without
risking career suicide. It has become the new third rail of American
politics. And that says so much about us. Because, not only
do we want all the benefits of government, but polling data clearly
shows that we actually even want the government to do a lot more than
it is already doing. And yet, at the same time, selfish, narcissistic
Americans have been well trained now by pandering right-wing politicians
to expect it all for free. Cutting taxes without simultaneously
cutting expenditures (let alone while massively increasing expenditures)
is one of the single most recklessly irresponsible acts a government
can undertake. Since the only solution to the deficits that must
ensue from this simple math is to borrow the difference, the polity
in question is simply taking its desire to live large and handing it
off in the form of a problem for someone else to deal with, on top of
their own problems. Plus interest on the loans, of course.
And who is that someone? Faraway foreigners? Some despised
underclass? The millions we've incarcerated as criminals, perhaps?
Not at all. The crime runs even deeper than that. It's
our own children who are getting the bill.

Which is precisely what
we've been doing. I saw Californian voters, when I lived there,
launch the modern taxpayer revolt movement by passing the infamous Proposition
13, which took a meat-cleaver to property taxes in the state.
Never mind that the effect would be the same on California's schools,
which are largely funded by property taxes. They went from being
the best in the country to nowadays hanging around with Mississippi,
down at the bottom of the list. But who fucking cares, anyhow?
People got their bloody tax cuts, and they got to buy that nice, shiny
new car they wanted with the money. So what about the kids?

And so it has gone these
last decades, tax cut after tax cut in America, which really means tax
transfer after tax transfer. And now we have a ten trillion dollar
debt we are passing along. So that means that the next generation
will have to pay enough in taxes to run the government then, plus the
share that the current generation didn't really feel like paying to
run the government today, plus interest on that borrowed amount.
What does that mean, up close and personal? If, right this very
moment, we somehow stopped adding to that pile more debt and more interest
every day, and just handed out the bill for what is currently owed,
it would average out to $67,000 for each and every taxpayer.

I know what you're
thinking. That sucks, eh? Well, at least the good news is
what you got for it. For instance, a really expensive war in Iraq
that diminished American national security. And the chance for
really, really rich people to become really, really, really rich people
through humongous tax breaks. How about a GOP pork-barrel spending
spree - including the Bridge to Nowhere - of unprecedented size
in American history? Huge oil and agricultural company subsidies?
A giant prescription drug bill which provided corporate socialism for
drug and insurance companies? A chance for George W. Bush to frolic
in the White House for eight years? I'm sure every American,
working some job they're not particularly fond of, won't really
mind the extra hours they have to work to pay for all this. Especially
since, if you make, say, 15 bucks per hour, that would only translate
to 4,467 hours you'd be working to finance your share of this past
years' pig-out. Based on a forty-hour work week, that's roughly
two-and-a-quarter years worth of your life. When you look at it
that way, it doesn't seem so bad, does it? And, again, that's
just if we stop deficit spending now, and stop accruing interest now.
In fact, we're actually deficit spending about another $400 billion
per year, every year, which just gets added to the pile (and lots more,
as well, if John McCain is able to slash taxes on the wealthy even further).
Moreover - maybe it's just my pessimism kicking in here, but -
I don't think the Chinese or our other creditors are going to be much
inclined to waive the interest accruals due to them for financing our
decadent little party. So, in fact, the above accounting of our
national and personal liabilities are actually rather, ahem, conservative.
In every way imaginable.

But, of course, America's
problem is way deeper than one kleptocratic president or even a generational
binge coupled with a three decade long vacation from responsibility,
not to mention rationality. We have established a pervasive culture
of greed, and that's one angry chicken that has now come home to roost.
What's worse, we've lost the capacity as a society to even imagine
an alternative ethos to guide us, though the looming economic tsunami
may be just the thing - and likely the only thing - big enough to
get us thinking once again.

This massive poverty
of imagination is what is killing us now, undermining us at the most
fundamental levels of societal identity. To grasp the magnitude
of our problem, consider how we socialize our citizens and how our culture
sets the priority structure of their values and aspirations. Sure,
some Americans think it is noble and wonderful to pursue careers which
serve the public interest, but most are taught, and simply accept, that
one should aspire to making boatloads of money, and that the measure
of one's achievement is the size of their bank account and the number
of toys parked in the driveways of their McMansions. I am constantly
astonished by the quantity of Americans whose expressed goal in life
is simply to make lots of money, which I find especially bizarre since
they don't seem to have any particular use in mind for all this cash.
What this phenomenon has long suggested to me is a country full of sheep
so unoriginal in their thinking that they can't even figure out what
to aspire to on their own, and a society so bankrupt in its morality
that it feeds them the goal of wanton greed to fill that yawning void.

All that's bad enough,
but, besides the current economic meltdown and a society populated by
moral midgets, there are also other repercussions to this ethical failure
and this poverty of imagination. Chief among these is the false
choice we are always presented between governance in the public interest,
on the one hand, and prosperity, on the other. This bogus diversionary
tactic forms the central argument of the economic predators who've
been bleeding the country of its wealth (and, in fact, prosperity),
as to why we can't have regulation. You know, all that Washington
red tape (you can't profit off of pollution, you can't exploit children
as factory workers, you have to pay a minimum wage - horrible restrictions
like that) will keep innovators from innovating and entrepreneurs from,
uh, entrepreneuriating.

And, you know what?
They're actually more or less right. They're right if, that
is, you accept as a predicate would-be innovators and would-be entrepreneurs
who are only motivated by an ethos of personal greed, which has been
duly pounded into them through the socialization processes of a society
that lost its mind and its moral bearing decades ago. Sure, okay.
Under those conditions it's probably true that most people will only
work for themselves, and will only be motivated by self-interest.
But what if we taught these people something different, right from the
get-go when they were toddlers, and reinforced those different values
throughout their adult lives? What if we taught the members of
this society to value the community's welfare as much as their own?
What if we taught them that massive personal wealth was not only not
the highest achievement to aspire to, but actually a sort of crass and
tacky goal, only to be found amongst the most juvenile and selfish in
the society? What if we strongly imprinted the idea among our
people that improving the welfare of the country (or, gulp, the world)
is an important life aspiration, and that those who do so are considered
among our most admired countrymen, rather than those who have acquired
the money to purchase bitchin' toys and trophy wives? Is it
not possible that our citizens would innovate, and that they would be
every bit as motivated as they are today by greed? Maybe even
more so?

And, therefore, could
we not transcend this false choice of good governance versus prosperity?
(Not to mention the fact that whatever prosperity we've experienced
of late is not going to the society, anyhow. In the last three
decades, while GDP has grown at a handsome clip, the middle class -
and, of course, we've long ago now abandoned even talking about those
below middle class status, let alone fighting a war on poverty - has
not even stood its ground, but rather has actually lost overall purchasing
power. That, of course, leaves only one mathematical explanation
for what has happened. You guessed it. All that growth in
national wealth has gone to the already richest Americans.)

You know, I'm not a
subscriber to the prescriptions of communism for constructing the best
system of political economy, much as that might come as a shock to any
conservative reader of this piece. And I think it's fair to
say that the world's experiments in communism to date - to the extent
they weren't actually just experiments in totalitarian brownshirtism
- failed in large part because they possessed just the opposite flaw
as that described above. They attempted to build economic systems
on the equally false notion that selfishness can be completely erased
from human psychology as a motivating force. It can't.
And any system dependant on that proposition for its success will have
none. But, by the same token, a system that is built on the premise
that people are only motivated by selfish greed, and therefore can only
produce prosperity by letting every actor pursue their own self-interest,
unfettered by any societal concerns, is an equally disastrous notion.

And such a society is
equally bound for the ash heap of history, just as was the Soviet Union
or Maoist China.

In fact, I 'm pretty
sure that's just exactly what the cosmos is screaming in our ears,
at about 150 decibels worth of volume, right at the moment. The
only question is whether we are so deaf we can no longer hear the warning
call, even when it's broadcast over a galactic PA system.

But just in case, here
it is. Newsflash for America! This just in! Sorry
to burst your little bubble, people, but it turns out, after all, that...

Greed is not good.