Greed is Not Good

"Greed is good." -- Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Steet

How precocious, way back in 1987, to make that trenchant observation on the American condition. Of course that was at the end of the Reagan Years, but no one could have predicted the absolute mess we have today in an economy built entirely on greed.

You'd have to go back well over 100 years, to the so-called "Gilded Age", to find an equivalent set of economic circumstances in American history, the age of the Robber Barons, the age of brutal suppression of the working classes, the age of corruption in politics and the spoils system in political appointments.

Kind of sounds like today, doesn't it. That's not a coincidence.

It was a combination of things that eventually ended the Gilded Age: Theodore Roosevelt and Progressive Movement; WWI, the various recessions/depressions in the economic cycle, culminating with The Great Depression, the New Deal and finally the societal changes resulting from WWII.

The neocon post-industrialist fascists who are now in charge of things have made no secret of the fact that they want to roll back each and every one of these advances and reforms, at least back to the way things were before the New Deal (and even farther if the truth were known).

And sadly we're well on our way down that road. The minimum wage hasn't been increased in nine years, and it looks like there's no chance for an increase with the current party in power. They'd like to do away with it altogether but they haven't figured out quite how to get away with it. The gap between the richest people and the rest of us has grown every year, and the "great economy" touted by Bushco isn't so great for those of us toiling away at the bottom of the ladder.

Greed is not good. As Molly Ivins argues in her July 11 column, the capitalist system will not be destroyed by "communists" or any other outside force -- it will destroy itself through its own self-consuming greed.

An economy is really nothing more the value of the goods and services that are in motion within it. What is beyond me is who these new post-industrialist Robber Barons think that they are going to peddle those goods and services to if the people creating them are being paid slave wages, with only enough cash for food and shelter.

Henry Ford, for all his faults (anti-Semitism, anti-unionism, etc), instinctively "got it" -- he doubled the pay of his factory workers, on the theory that a man who was building his cars ought to be able to afford to own one.

Today's corporate execs, in a race to the bottom when it comes to the wages, hours and working conditions of their employees, patently don't "get it". I don't know what it will take before they get it, but if we can survive long enough to avoid World War III, we'll have to figure out a way to make them get it.

In the words of Chairman Mao, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun".

It doesn't have to come to that. Our only hope now is to put back into power the party of The People. The Democrats, in the meantime, have to come up with some non-nuanced sound bites that will get the attention of the Moron-American voting bloc and stop allowing the Repugs to run on their tried-and-true good ole boy "god, guns and gays" platform, convincing people to vote against their own economic self-interest.