I am blue. I happened upon a grim statistic yesterday: $86,000,000,000. What is it? It is the amount of profit posted by Wall Street firms in the first two years of the Obama administration. Doesn't particularly stand out -- I mean, these dudes do nothing but focus on money making money. It stands out to me when I see it paired to another statistic: $77,000,000,000. This is the amount of profit posted by Wall Street firms in the entire eight years of the G.W. Bush administration.
So they are on track to make $344 Billion in profit over the course of the Obama term (assuming he is reelected) which is 4.4 X of the profit in the GWB term.
I am not against money. In fact, I have some myself. But the above stats are startling. It is why this Occupy Wall Street thing coalesced out of the ether. But, the movement is fatally flawed because the only people who can really appreciate such stats are not going camping in a city park. They have jobs, families and obligations that prevent neo-hippie/world bank protester behavior.
Let me be clear about something: I like money. I would like to have more. I don't begrudge the enterprise class for earning a lot of it. But it is really beginning to feel like hoarding now. We the taxpayers bailed out these companies; the least they can do is set up micro-lending banks, take haircuts on home mortgages, or finance a factory or two. But instead, they hoard. It has come to pass in this country that amassing money for the sake of money is a proper ambition.
It wasn't always like this. In fact, our founders instituted the estate tax because they believed that enterprise was a better societal goal than winning the sperm lottery. But now the estate tax is deemed a horrific government grab against private interests. How did it get this way?
According to my armchair analysis of the universe, it started where almost all bad things have started in this country: Nixon. He began the modern process of turning the once respectable Republican Party into some type of primitive cerebellum of fear, greed, anger and gluttony.
In future posts, I will explore the time-space pressure wave of destruction wrought by the emergence of Nixon. But for now, I will simply acknowledge the blues that is the signature of our generation. Other than the dot com bubble we have witnessed more than our share of economic and social complexity. The Moody's downgrade of American credit-worthiness (which was a stupid decision, by the way, but more on that later) is more metaphorical than it is real; I mean where else will you invest your bond fund? Italy? In my lifetime we have been terrorized by the Cold War, seen the unmitigated destruction of green space, got to buy our homes during the housing bubble, been terrorized by global warming, Bin Laden, the white collar recession of the early 90s when we were just beginning our careers and now the biggest recession since the depression right when we are supposed to be amassing assets having hit cruising altitude in our careers. I've got my 22 year-old living in my house, and my parents coping with their retirement cut in about half.
Things need to change. What and how? That can only be assessed after a proper reckoning with the past.
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