Good Evening Friends,

We are going to leave this topic, you will all be relieved to learn. I'm getting tired of it now and I've become repetitive, quite a while back. If I haven't made my point by now, I shall never do so. Of course, there are one or two points I might elaborate on, but... nah! To sum up, here's what I've been suggesting.

My whole argument has been animated by a single principle, given to us by the great French Existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980): (consciousness is not what it is but what it is not) which ultimately ends up as Man is the desire to become God. Having been personally persuaded by this, I proposed that throughout global history, the extent to which an individual might consider himself successful, depended and does depend, in part, on the extent to which he can mirror or mimic the lifestyle of the socioeconomic class above the one which he inhabits. You may have heard about the vast (over) self-designation of people as belonging to the middle class.

This tendency to try to mimic the classes above ourselves is reflected in the black market, as well as the discount retail set up, for "knock off" designer clothes, purses, and the like. In other words, there is a tendency to want to seem, to the outside world, richer than we are. I think we have to say that this tendency is particularly marked in American society because of the unique history of how capitalism developed in America. You may recall the thesis, I offered, developed by a professor of economics called Rick Wolf. America had one hundred fifty years of an absolutely unfailing rise in real wages for workers, worker productivity, and last but not least, the profits of the capitalist owners of the means of production.

It had seemed as if a "rising tide lifts all boats," and so forth. This seeming paradise, according to Dr. Wolf, helped to shape an American midset of exceptionalism. Indeed, one of the explanations bandied about during this period was to "look up" (He likes us better than everybody else). The American working class expected that we would be able to consume more and more with each generation. This went on from 1820-1970, says Wolf. But it stopped in 1970, for various reasons, and real wages have remained flat since the mid seventies.

But we of the working class didn't "give up" and stop consuming. Among other things we did to keep the consumption going, was to borrow, far more than any other working class. Wolf says that the bourgeoisie loaned, the money the working class should have been getting as wages, back to them; which they had to repay with interest, of course. Credit is the fuel that allows us to mimic the appearance of the lifestyle of those classes above our own.

Kevin Phillips cited Time magazine from 1977, which stated that '"the Affluent Society has become the Credit Society, and an insistence on buying only what can by paid for in cash seems as outmoded as a crew cut (1)."' So, where the ability to consume from wages ends, the ability to borrow, in order to project a sense of affluence, begins.

And an economist at Philadelphia's Fidelity Bank, Lacy Hunt, said, '"the ability of the consumer to take on more debt will be the underpinning of th economy in 1977. This is the year of consumer credit (2)."'

Personal debt began to take off out of sight in the eighties and this state of affairs dates back to "innovations" of the seventies. Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 1971. Currency trading and foreign exchange markets "boomed;" and future trading began in 1972. The infrastructure that supports the speculative exotic financial transactions we are barely aware of today. For example, the first mortgage-backed bonds started in 1975 (3).

Credit is our ability to project "affluence," and this has its contemporary origins in the fifties, Truman's America, actually (4). An entire investment (for the investor class) infrastructure was built up to bet on the performance, to oversimplify, that debt. You could say that the investment sector made real money off the fantasies of the working class and the poor. Think about that.

Have you ever seen any of those movies concerning Greek mythology or some such? Do you recall the usual scenario in which the "old" gods seem to begin to fade away? This is invariably explained by the fact that times are changing and Christianity and other new religions are gripping the imagination of the masses of the population. There are fewer and fewer people who believe in the traditional deities, and thus their anchorage to this reality grows steadily more tenuous.

But there are always one or two of the old gods who are determined not to go away. These tend to be the strongest willed of the old pantheon. There are determined to make the people remember them, fear them, and worship them. Usually they stir up an evil, Byzantine scheme, and then it comes down to a volcanic one-on-one battle between one of these "old" gods, usually depicted as bad or evil and some wizard or some such, who represents modernity or the "good," and so forth. The side of "evil" is concerned and ding dong The Wicked Witch is Dead!

The structure of the political economy is like that, don't you think. The Bourgeoisie retain their power just as long as most of us are willing to believe, in what Ronald Reagan once called, "... the magic of the marketplace." Valhalla, Olympus.... whatever.

And while we're on the subject of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush, his political heir in many people's view), you may recall that I proposed another connection. I wondered if there might have been a connection between the deregulation of finance that started off in the seventies and eighties, which, of course, mostly benefitted the rich - and the marketing (via the infomercal) of certain get-rich-quick techniques. Therefore, did George W. Bush, and to a smaller extent, Ronald Reagan before him, see themselves as a kind of Republican Prometheus, giving the lower classes a magical means to the good life, especially since hope was bleak that America would ever again be the industrial force it had been in the post war years up until the seventies, for various reasons.

I don't know if I ever mentioned this, but I have privately wondered if George W. Bush, with his famously tolerant attitude toward undocumented workers from Mexico, - somewhat unusual for a Republican - his advocacy of a "guest worker" program and the like, hadn't privately conceived that illegal Mexican immigrants might, somehow, be made to comprise the new American underclass, while everyone else is enjoying the good life - that is, until these, now undocumented Mexican worker, become fully assimilated, and they, too, can make millions buying real estate with no money down, and so forth. Then repeat the process, perhaps changing the demographic of global desperate brought into country.

But I suggested another interpretation. Beware the Ring of Sauron, I said, of these techniques which seem targeted to the working class. In other words, such things like buying real estate with no money down and placing ads (for whatever) in newspaper or the Internet, selling odds and ends from some warehouse, and others, and of course the faith exercise of buying lottery tickets are the poor man's version of what the rich man does, in todays deregulated finance. But as I pointed out before, all fantasy stories of the Ring of Sauron paradigm, never end well for the mortal that has come into possession of the godly ornament.

That is, because as I said before, the mortal remains as comparatively fragile as ever. He does not have the invulnerability to protect himself, as the god does, to protect himself from the very forces he unleashes. I wondered if there might not be some real life analog to this dynamic. I theorized that there must be. The analog I proposed was this: the rich do things with respect to their financial and business dealings, certain things on the edge of legal propriety, and routinely get away with it (or, indeed, do these things without anyone ever acknowledging the commission of a crime); but if the lower classes try to do similar things, analogous things, they may suffer penalties and deprivations, up to and including getting the book thrown at you and being sent to prison.

Let's take one example. Democratic senator, Tom Daschle had to withdraw his name from nomination for a cabinet post in the Obama Administration over taxes. The present Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, also had a tax issue. I didn't pay attention to the details but he had a tax issue. Many people said that, having previously been the president of the New York federal reserve bank, Mr. Geithner should have known better. In any event, he said he was sorry and then went on to be overwhelmingly confirmed to the post by the senate.

This comes under the category of "Kids, don't try this at home!" Credit checks are a routine part of the backround investigation for prospective employees for even very low level, low skill, low wage jobs. I bet it would be hard for a working class person to get a job as a bank teller, if, say, his record showed that he had an outstanding tax bill; suppose he accidentally bounced a check to cover the bill, because he'd thought an electronic transfer from the settlement from an auto accident would hit his account in time, but it didn't.... so on and so forth.

I didn't follow Geithner's explanation but it was something convoluted, I'm sure. I'd take a thousand to one odds that our friend wouldn't get that bank teller job.

Anyway, I'll continue with my summation in the next post.

wingedcentaur.