Lawyer? Liar Trader? Traitor

This is an important blog to me for two reasons. The first is that it's my Ghostface Killah moment, where I belatedly reveal my face. The second reason is intimately linked to the first.

This is my face after a day of roofing, and etched on my face is precisely what has been derided in our get-rich-quick culture. The dirt on my face is just a little bit of the literal grit which elicits nothing but contempt from silver spoon suckers who insist that they can create "wealth" with amoral accounting and narcissistic definitions of "liberty".

The economic meltdown is difficult for "normal" people to understand. "Normal" in this case means "people who think debt is not an asset". Here's how bad our economic lever-holders fucked up: Marx's critique looks more relevant now than at any time in at least 70 years.

I don't mean that Marx's proposed solution is a good idea. His critique, however, has been proven surreally salient. "The capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them with". And that is what we've done.

In 1945, America produced 50% of the world's wealth. "Wealth" back then was directly connected to tangible goods with tangible worth. Gold. Oil. Food. Factories. Natural Resources. Educated citizens. Bridges. Stable banks. Et cetera.

Now, America's "wealth" is only vaguely associated with "things". Even accounting for the digital revolution, where music libraries are measured in invisible computer memory rather than physical stacks of records, we have gone off a cliff. And our neo-capitalists built the road to the cliff. They just neglected to tell us there was no bridge.

We also must take into account that, as a society's wealth increases, its citizens inevitably shift from agricultural and raw material processing to manufacturing and then to service industries. Service industries, by definition, produce "wealth" that is far less tangible than a bridge or a roof or a ton of grain.

In the last 24 hours, I've put a roof on a house and taught a class of high school juniors. These are different types of labor. But both of them can be seen to produce something of worth. There is no shame in the service sector, but there IS shame when a critical sector of the service sector (banks) completely forsake the actual foundation of American wealth, which will always be manufacturing tangible goods.

There used to be a bond between the manufacturing sector and the bankers of some sort. The roofers understood that the bankers had gone to college and knew better than anyone else how to safely invest the roofers' money. And the bankers understood that they would have no fucking idea what to do if it started raining in their house.

But something happened. It got to a point where the bankers forget whose money they were throwing around. They forgot whose money was making them rich. They forgot who kept the rain and snow out of their living rooms. They started to believe that the money was theirs, and that anyone who wanted to know what they were doing with that money was an insufferable meddler, an ignorant chump, a naive Luddite.

So, bankers no longer invested the wealth created by the broken backs of real men in municipal bonds or long-term savings accounts or other safe investments. Why? Did the roofers get greedy? Did the roofers start demanding 150% returns on their pension plans?

No. The bankers did. They couldn't settle with making a living off other peoples' money; their attitude is best encapsulated by Lil' Wayne: "fuck makin' a livin', man, I'm tryin' to make a killin'".

So, they took the wealth of America, the REAL wealth, the wealth created with blood, bones, sweat, sulfur, tears, and tire irons. And instead of investing all that wealth in the traditional market, which will inevitably yield a return (because capitalism DOES work when regulated) they invested it in the neo-market which could yield a HUGE return, but could just as easily result in instant catastrophe.

This was a gamble. And, being a libertarian, I acknowledge the bankers' right to take this gamble. But not with other peoples' money. Yet that is what they did. And they didn't tell the stakeholders that they were switching their investments from industries as stable as booze and ice cream to "industries" that even the most degenerate gambler would steer clear of out of sheer self-preservation. Unless someone else's money was in his pocket.

My collar has been light-blue for quite a while. I've rubbed shoulders with as broad an array of people as anyone else I know, and my anger here is not heated by an irrational resentment of educated folks or intellectuals. In fact, the heat is hotter, as well as brighter, precisely because I KNOW these people.

I know the people who create actual, tangible wealth. One of them is me. And I know the people who have nothing but contempt for these people and their place in society. And I wonder what sort of society we are inheriting when an investment banker judges his chances of making a windfall as paling in comparison to his sacred station of protecting the wealth of working Americans.

Capitalism has run a-fucking-muck. The whole idea of the Dow Jones index is absurd, a self-fulfilling and self-deluding rabbit-hole. When wealth is based upon tangible things that people actually need, that wealth can survive anything save physical destruction. When wealth is based upon gambling that mortgages and credit card bills don't default, that wealth can not survive anything. And, lo and behold, anything happened.