There have long been two economies matching a relation between horse and rider. An Investment Economy came to sit on top of the Productive Economy. The two were never well connected. Connection seldom improves. The riders sit on saddles called Stock Shares which rise or fall imperfectly with the horses but more in accord with massively interacting opinions of riders in what we call the “Free” Market.
Nothing solidly connects ownership shares with horses. The saddles have no cinches. Only the gravity of possession connects riders to saddles. Only the riders’ hopes that history will prolong itself keeps saddles on horses. Ownership markets are therefore rather slippery, shaky businesses. Whereas a healthy, efficient, adaptable, fast horse contributes greatly to the interest of its rider(s), the market-minded dreams, confusions and errors of riders can bring horses to their knees or founder them into the knacker’s shed for dismemberment.
A better way to view these relations is, the rider is Management, not ownership. The owners are monkeys jumping on and off management’s back. A Board of Directors is a cabal of monkeys who often know nothing about horses or riding. They are high in the air with nothing to guide horse or rider but reports from the rider and rare noises from the horse itself or its union representatives echoing up from hooves on the road.
Owners and Banks see themselves as the only true creators of employment and wealth. That is totally ridiculous. They see themselves as the turners-on-and-off of faucets that keep riders and horses hydrated with money, both cash and credit. The lifeblood of everything is not possession of money as property but the circulation of money. (The biggest bankers are vampire bats that drink blood and urinate credit.)
Where circulation suffers, the value or marketability of property also suffers. Banks (i.e., cabals of owner/creditor/lenders) that withhold money from circulation to horse and rider in favor of enriching themselves illusorily and destructively by aiding circulation only to the Investment Economy make the total economy top-heavy and unbalanced.
Horses and their Riders suffer and decline. The Monkey Cabals in boardrooms look outside the country for cheap horses. Riders, of course rode either horses or banks. Bank riders/managers and the monkeys on their backs get paid enormous sums which equal all the blood lost to the poor horses. They fall apart into little people on unemployment. Then, the monkeys’ mouth-pieces harangue the public about taxes, entitlements and how they want not to be bothered with keeping little people alive.
Monkey wisdom has been shown in recent history. It showed how horses called banks can trample on the backs of other, really productive horses’ riders and their innumerable, non-banking monkeys. The landscape is littered with flattened horse-carcasses, broke monkeys, worthless saddles, unemployed riders and little people. Genetically, only minuscule segments of genomes distinguish monkeys from humans. People with heads full of abstraction are little better at living in the world than monkeys are at living in trees. They like trees showing lots of green.
Robert Reich writes, “In a typical recovery, profits lead to more hiring. … because in a typical recovery, American consumers head back to the malls — and their buying justifies more hires. Not this time. All the hype about Christmas sales over the last few weeks masked the fact that American consumers demanded bargain-basement prices. [Which] … dramatically reduced sellers’ margins. … profits won’t be coming … in 2011.”
So, the Bush geniuses drove the nation into nearly hopeless debt from war spending, and then the monkey’s drove ordinary consumers to the poorhouse, starting with the the real-estate bubble’s collapse. Somehow, some of Bush’s corporate banking monkeys rode across into Obama’s cabinet. Did they gull him with lies? Or was he unable to sense danger in too much “departmental continuity” from “expert personnel?” The immensely rich investors and corporate monkeys can, and already are abandoning this country for foreign ridership on those cheap horses overseas or south of the border.
This highlights the big disconnect and growing gap between our two economies, Investment versus Production. Investment requires production of something besides more interest drawn from gradually inflating dollars. The shriveled workforce and dependent poor cannot consume enough merchandise to prime the engine and without stronger sales, the banking monkey’s feet will stay propped on their desks. This is a stalemate, the formula for indefinite recession with infinite regress, or worse. 2011 promises to be great for the top money crowd, as usual, but terrible for everyone else. The groups with extra money invest in each other. All the real machinery in this country grinds down, but the fattest cats stay above the pain. There is a tiny network of monetary monkeys who want things to stay this way and get still worse.
A few months from now, the Tea Partiers, the misdirected conspiracy dreamers, other radical wingnuts and puppets whose strings are tweaked by fascists in treetops, will start to wake up and splay apart, all that anger and energy turning in circles, because there was never any good sense holding it together. Only discontentment and fear. One can but wonder why Obama did not call Robert Reich back into government. Maybe he will decide he’s had enough of these slick banksters and replace them with good folks.
University scholars are less implicated in shenanigans than corporate economists. They have the needed skills of reasoning without the disturbances of personal greed or guilt.
Monkeys in the highest trees will throw much green down to the lobbyists and funds for favored politicians’ campaigns. People as usual won’t know who all the players are without a program, for staging will be confused by several plays performing at once, right up until election day, 2012, when it may be hoped the voters will be wide awake.
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