Is Obama Just A DDSOS?

Tomorrow is the first day of Spring and the two month anniversary of Obama's administration. Has anything changed? Money is still being funneled to wealthy investors; houses are still being foreclosed; unemployment keeps growing. There is much todo about those evil bonus babies at AIG. Politicians think they can defuse our anger by taking back $165 million out of $170 billion, a sop of 0.1%. Maybe we won't notice their sleight of hand. The bailout is merely a way of paying off wealthy investors so they have their bucks if and when there is a rebound. Since Obama's team is a replay of Bush's team which is a veteran group from Clinton's team..., it's almost enough to make one cynical.

Forsooth, as they say, our problems are deep and broad, both fundamental and structural; meaningful reform would be revolutionary and capitalists and their hirelings will fight to our last dollar and our last drop of blood to stave off revolution. This will be a long conflict and we'll have to forsake that all-American belief in fantasy, as though real life were a movie with magic and heroes. Magic and heroes are for the very selective histories and their Hollywood adaptations. Martin Luther King Jr. might be considered a hero today but he was hated and vilified by those in and close to power back in the 60s. In grade school I was taught about the Boston Tea Party as part of our war against tyranny but the leaders of the day, such as Founding Father John Adams, excoriated the act for its destruction of private property and money was raised to compensate the owners. Yesterday's sinners become tomorrow's saints. The problem is that, to quote a Bob Dylan song title, tomorrow never comes.

There's a marvelous piece by David Harvey that recapitulates and encapsulates both our present predicament and its evolution in an unusually clear way. In many ways one can think of the 1930s' Depression as the Big One that some think today's Big One represents. Historically, capitalism's recurrent crises of accumulation and overproduction and market saturation lead to unemployment and production cutbacks and deflation until the excess is eliminated and a new cycle can begin. The 30s' Depression went beyond that and it took the full mobilization of WW II to put people to work and the massive destruction of that war created the necessity of continued high employment and production to rebuild the industrial world of Europe and Asia. Our difficulties today are similar but worse and have some qualitative differences.

The first qualitative difference is the debt market. Capitalism's engineers, the economists and financiers, have remade our world to have debt be an asset. Of course, debt cannot be an asset nor credit capital, but they pretend it is and design the economy so that almost everybody has to borrow almost all the time to do almost everything. This produces liquidity crises which we've been seeing with increasing frequency as bankruptcies lead to greater consolidation of capital. While the propagandists love to preach to us about competition there is less of it each passing year: concentration of capital is the natural development of the system and whenever rules are written to limit or control monopolies they are immediately undermined and eventually eliminated. But in the postwar world consumer credit was systematized and it exploded to keep markets viable. Today there is a real dilemma in that capitalists need us to keep buying stuff but we're tapped out and seemingly they'd rather starve us and destroy perhaps themselves than to write off our debts. This is why mortgagors get bailouts but mortgagees get evicted. This is a real problem for our creditors to ponder as they sip their Napoleon brandies.

So they're working on the solving the capitalists' debt problem through indenturing us through our taxes and shrinking social spending into an endless future. Today the report came out that the Fed is printing $1 trillion in new greenbacks to flood the economy in the hope that something will happen. (Some have written that such an approach would work better if they simply mailed all of us packages of $100 bills.) This increases the likelihood of hyperinflation, particularly if the Chinese stop rolling over their purchases of Treasuries. Fascism and war were the outcome of Germany's hyperinflation in the 1920s and in a nuclear world I think most of us, the sane ones at least, would prefer not to go that route.

The second qualitative difference is the massive increase in productivity over the past four decades or so. Fewer and fewer workers are needed to produce the necessities of life so even with restructuring it's hard to envision a bright future for the jobless. This is particularly acute for the future of the US. It makes no sense for our large and rich country to become post-industrial, as though we no longer needed the stuff coming off the assembly lines and for the US to run continuous trade deficits signals the absurdity of this development. All countries, that is, a land with a centralized government and laws and its own currency and central bank, need to sell as much as they buy and off-shoring our jobs makes our problems worse, not better, except for investors. The era of capitalism, of deriving concentrated wealth from exploitation of workers' surplus value, has become obsolete. A new paradigm is needed.

Professor Harvey's article is concerned mostly with this issue. The history of domination and exploitation was constructed on the ownership of private property and governments and legal systems and propaganda machines (including our own news and opinion media) were created and evolved to enforce and enhance rights of owners of private property. Ol' Abe Lincoln wrote, spoke and died over the belief that a nation can't continue half-slave and half-free. And Americans couldn't have a viable workers movement with Section 14-B (Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, as amended) that allowed the open shop, nor keep borrowers solvent with usurious compounded interest rates that became universal after the Carter-Reagan transition, nor markets growing with steadily lowering wages. The heavy thinkers advising our rulers are making sure that wealthy investors keep and increase their control and that we pay our debts, and their own as well, and do this without having open revolt. I don't know if they can succeed. But if we rebel we need to think through how we want to remake our world and our thinking needs to be as deep and broad as the problems we face. In the short run we can only demand that our government defend us against the predators and at their expense. Ultimately, however, we will need to rewrite the social contract that includes our being productively employed and decently housed. The USSR eliminated private ownership in means of production and in land, and we might consider using that model at least for land and the housing built on it. And this will require that we reflect on individuality and its emblem, the cowboy. We have to start thinking socially and our views of a "man's castle" and all that implies. A long struggle indeed.