Forget about the War For the Union--what's going on these days is the War On the unions. Do not count me among those who are mystified by Washington's ability to throw endless streams of billions of dollars at banks and other white collar institutions but not to give even a few paltry billion to the auto industry--as a bridge loan, no less--to keep the last great bastion of American heavy manufacturing viable.
The people giving out the money come from the same white-collar backgrounds as those they are helping. Thus they are protecting their own best financial interests. They don't give a damn about blue collar workers, who are the real backbone of this country, and some of them actually desire to use our current economic crisis to bust the unions once and for all. After all, in the long run, that increases their profit margin. Who cares that it drives hundreds of thousands of people out of work and out of the lower rungs of the middle class?
I do, for one. There is a dignity to honest, hard, physical labor that certain "clever" people do not wish to acknowledge. They also cannot or will not admit that it is the ultimate source of the dollars they have to play their financial investing games. Since they don't recognize the connection, they don't have to see the consequences--the worst of which is that they are cutting their own throats in the long run. At some level, tangibles must be exchanged for other tangibles. "Cold, hard cash" for the physical results of production--an object. When it's just numbers on paper, it has no basis, no foundation, and ultimately will collapse.
I've been saying that for decades, but I'm not sure even I understood the implications completely. I am beginning to wonder whether our going off the gold standard during the Great Depression was such a good idea, though in the context of history, it was both good and necessary.
And I will say that any tangible production qualifies, even the production of ideas on paper. After all, that gives us books and pamphlets and magazines and newspapers--all things that exist, that can be touched and felt. The disconnect exists when we remove anything tangible from the equation. Think about it: even in the case of stocks, the certificates represent the tangible assets of the corporation issuing them. There is supposed to be some monetary equivalence between the value of the certificates and all the corporation owns and produces. This is one of the reasons a lot of people don't like stock splits. It makes them wealthier on paper, but does it really represent accurately the company's value? If everyone with shares were to demand all at the same time either cash or a literal piece of the company (a desk, say), would everyone get the total face value of his/her shares? If the answer is "yes," you have no problem. If the answer is "no" on the other hand, you are in deep, deep trouble.
For that's when you've disconnected the tangible from the tangible. Never forget, at some point somebody is going to want to reconnect and possess the tangible. If enough people get the same idea at the same time, it won't work when the on-paper value exceeds the actual tangible things the on-paper value is supposed to represent. So when you start trading the value of an adjustable rate mortgage based on its potential for profit (e.g., when the interest rate goes up), you've uncoupled the mortgage from the physical property it represents . . . and if you cannot sell the property for the inflated on-paper value of the mortgage, you lose money. If enough people lose money, we have a meltdown. Hence our current collective circumstances.
It is true that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. What I want to know is why do all the people who don't know history have all the money, but the rest of us are the ones who suffer the consequences of the others' ignorance? Because they are willing to do anything to keep their "piece of the pie" at the expense of the larger good of the entire country, that's why. They've convinced themselves that they are one and the same, and the rest of us don't count.
It's not unlike that crap that Sarah Palin, for one, was spreading during the recently concluded campaign about "Real America"--with her implication being that those who are not "Real Americans" are lesser beings, somehow, and are not worth the blessings "Real America" has to offer. If the economic meltdown completely destroys our manufacturing sector, however, those "Real Americans" with all the money are going to have a rude awakening: their "money" isn't going to be worth spit, either, precisely because they trashed the value of labor and of what labor produces. I'm not sure I want to be around to try to live through the chaos that will create.
And a very Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.
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