Republic of Athens

New fix, old tricks

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As our newest White House millionaire awaits inauguration, the rest of us are left to make sense of a gimmick-driven economic system — perhaps rivaled only by a good old-fashioned Ponzi scheme, or possibly by the savvy of the alleged “Nigerian prince” of unsolicited email infamy.

Like Charles Ponzi’s wildly successful (and wildly short-lived) investment scheme in the 1920s, the craftily orchestrated “rescue plan” for Wall Street is a more sophisticated version of paying returns to early investors entirely out of the money paid in by newer investors. The difference between Ponzi’s scam and the modern-day rendition is that no one in Washington has even bothered to get consent from the unwitting later investors, more commonly known as ordinary American citizens.

What the unlucky “Nigerian prince” was unable to extract from us in his imaginative pleas for just a little money up front (“I’m good for it, I swear!”) in exchange for the reward of eventual riches, our own domestic royalty has wrested from us without so much as a form letter.

While the working and non-working poor scan the aisles for the cheapest loaf of bread in the hopes of  fitting a can of corn into the week’s expenditures, the ruling elite can find $700 billion of our dollars in the back pocket of an old pair of pants. We’re told that, in the form of more jobs, more loans, et cetera, a monumental bail-out for the rich will ultimately help to save the economy for all of us.

The problem is, millions of Americans who already have jobs can scarcely manage the requirements for bare subsistence. And that’s not some new phenomenon, attributable only to the most recent economic crash. Though ever-worsening, it’s long been the status quo that vast portions of the citizenry are without their own homes (if they have shelter at all), can’t afford to take on loan payments, or pay exorbitant, out-of-pocket health care costs, much less contribute funds to political campaigns.

So, not surprisingly, the eerily silent masses often don’t even get honorable mention in Washington’s discussion about how best to rescue the economy from its own decision-makers’ failures.

The poorest American poor, the invisible class whose struggles are tucked away in the inner cities and rural countryside, are either relegated by our privileged politicos to the domain of financially strapped social services and charities, or accepted as a kind of quaint abstraction, a patch in the glorious quilt that is Americana.

Sure, the gap between the richest “haves” and the poorest “have-nots” is, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, greater in the U.S. than in nearly any other so-called advanced democracy in the world. And granted, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that, by the federal government’s own threshold, nearly one in four American children lives in poverty, the highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world. And true enough, the projected future looks dismal at best for millions of already impoverished Americans.

But it’s probably best to reserve that “crisis” talk for describing the setbacks of people who own lots of stuff. After all, the effects on such folks are much more readily apparent — having to scrap plans for the new patio pool, or sell the summer home for below market value, or settle for that less expensive hotel on this year’s trip to Venice. The suffocating squeeze, one might argue, is simply more noticeable to those who started with a bunch of luxuries. Conversely, what has a person with nothing got to lose?

Precisely. Broke is still broke. When they thrived, we were broke. While they struggle, we are broke.

Like the money-grabbing tactics of credit card companies, and the dependence on racking up late fees from the financially desperate, our federal economy itself leans on the languishing of the many for the prosperity of the few. It’s the infinite credit card mentality in action. Living beyond one’s means for those who already have a lot is a practice that tends to spring from greed or frivolous desires (or bad math). Living beyond one’s means for those who have nothing is sometimes an alternative to dying on a cold sidewalk.

Masses of poor people are desperate enough to compete and toil for woefully insufficient wages. Ripe conditions for the ultra-rich to subjugate the services of a weary, obedient, and needy labor force. Super-capitalism at its best is a tried and true method for simultaneously ensuring poverty for millions while expanding the wealth of a few.

Historically, and even amidst our current, strangling economic squeeze, poverty itself has never met the federal government’s criteria for an emergency action plan.

When the old cliche of “The poor get poorer, and the rich get richer” remains intact, there’s no urgent scrambling from Washington to rectify things. Not only do such conditions fail to qualify as a crisis, but they’re accepted as a hallmark of the American way, a testament to “rugged individualism,” survival of the fittest (or richest) at any cost.

Given that they’ll do most anything to avoid starvation, the poor are a crucial resource for the ruling class. It’s when the poor get poorer, and the rich get less rich that we’ve got a crisis on our hands.

Our elected leaders are quick to clarify that this massive hand-out for the super-rich is not to be mistaken for anything that resembles a nasty ”nationalization” of U.S. banks. And they’re right. While the bail-out constitutes a form of partial nationalization, it maintains the integrity of a plan whose facilitators are careful to socialize the self-inflicted losses of banks at the expense of taxpayers, directing the profits back to those responsible for the fiasco.

Genuine nationalization of U.S. banks, on the other hand, could abolish the Wall Street casino game, help to reverse the economy’s downward spiral, provide some relief for those who need it the most, and possibly commit all sorts of other unsavory, even un-American, offenses.

To a cringe-inducing effect, we’ve heard candidates reaching out to the electorate with lots of slick sloganeering in attempts to woo common “Joes” everywhere — Joe Six-Pack this, Joe the Plumber that. This kind of approach might well appeal to the Joes who are interested in awarding style points by texting their votes for the next presidential idol. However, in reality, election cycle after election cycle,  Joe and Josephine hard-working-but-broke have remained Joe and Josephine hard-working-but-broke.

But for now, let’s experiment (again) with taking the politicians at their word. Let’s assume that the bail-out is bound to pay dividends for all of us. Let’s rest assured that, for the rich, er, for America’s sake, there’s the real promise of a landmark rescue mission of epic proportions.

And what if, by sheer chance, the new prosperity fails to reach the poor? Well, there’s still the lottery (in states where it’s available), that elusive “hail Mary” shot at financial salvation.

Related articles:

• Hating the Poor for Not Being Poor Enough (mydd.com)