The Big
Lie That Is Our Economy
Two decades ago (as of this posting)
there was a mega-corporation that was so huge and so powerful, it didn’t just
have an undue influence on national politics (which, by
now, is pretty much commonplace anyway), but it could and did help
orchestrate the ouster of a sitting state governor as well as engineer the
election of his replacement.
That big mega-corporation was Enron.
A corporation that was considered too-big-too-fail but failed
anyway. And when it did fail, it
affected a huge segment of the population.
You see, a supposedly “powerful” and “successful” mega-corporation was
actually a failing house of cards, and underneath that “power” and “money” was
actually a lot of debt. Normally that
debt would swallow a business. But Enron’s
supposed “smartest guys in the
room” were able to shuffle that debt into “new ventures” and then claim a
profit off the transaction.
It was a corporation built on lies and sustained by more lies. That included getting the complicity of one
of the prestigious accounting firms at the time, so they would lie to sustain
even more lies. It was perfect so along
as they could create new “businesses” to transfer their debts and transform
them into “profits” that existed on paper only.
And when it all inevitably fell, they tried to hide the truth by
destroying the documents so they would be able to shrug and say “We just don’t know how this could
have happened.” Yet
another lie that would try to bury all the other lies. Except that they got caught.
But today we are able to look back at that mega-corporate house of lies
and see just how and where they failed.
And then... we would lie to ourselves one more time and say that it was
just an aberrant fluke. A failure of
watchdogs to do what they were supposed to do.
The corruption of a system of checks and balances that would not happen
again... until it did just a few years later with the Great Recession.
We continue to lie to ourselves about these things, because history has
shown that every safeguard that we put up to prevent the “next financial
disaster” has failed. Every single one
of them, every single time.
They fail because America’s economy is also a huge house of cards
sustained by big stinking lies. And
every lie that is exposed collapses just a little bit of our economic house of
cards and threatens to topple it all.
One of the biggest lies perpetrated is the myth that Wall Street is
reflective of Main Street. That good
fortune in Wall Street and a strong market run is indicative of a healthy
economy for everyone.
That is a lie.
We saw first-hand during and after the Great Recession that even though
Wall Street and the rest of Big Corporate were rebounding at record speed, the
economy overall wasn’t. Jobs were not
returning so fast, and, when they were, they were nothing like they were before
the fall. Even today, with Wall Street
breaking records, workers wages have remained stagnant and have even lost
ground.
So if Wall Street and Big Corporate have been doing great, why isn’t the
rest of the country? Why isn’t Main
Street seeing these gains? Why isn’t
your street or even my street seeing those gains?
That’s because Wall Street is not a measurement of the economy, and it
certainly is not a measurement of Main Street or your street. Wall Street is a financial crack house, with
highs and lows that are more the reflexive actions of drug addicts instead of the
sober and measured decisions of sage advisors.
Another big lie spun in the past decade is to call rich people “job
creators”; based on the myth that only the wealthy create jobs, and that it is
the reason why they have that wealth.
Have I seen a “poor” person create jobs?
Yes. I have. I have seen people who call themselves “poor”
create jobs. I’ve seen people who
consider themselves “middle class” create jobs as well. But just because people or groups with money
“can” create jobs, that does not make them “job creators” any more than calling
someone a “porn star” just because they “could” appear in a porn movie.
Again, the Great Recession showed that record profits and tax cuts do not
translate into job creations. All it did
was make the rich even more rich.
If you actually create jobs, *then* you can call yourself a “job creator”.
Otherwise, you’re just a greedy miser, and you are lying to yourself and to the
whole world if you think otherwise.
We lie about capitalism and free markets.
We pretend that businesses thrive in competition. The truth is that the business world does not
like competition. It hates competition. It does not want a free marketplace. It hates free marketplaces. It wants monopolies. It is always striving for monopolies. One business, one customer base, and no other
choice or alternatives. That is what
they strive for.
Look at healthcare in America.
Look at insurance companies. Look
at Big Pharma. Look at Alphabet and
Facebook. Look at AT&T and Comcast
and Disney. You don’t see
competition. You see mergers and
acquisitions. You see a handful of really
big corporations buying out everything they can so they can try to be that one
universal business. Competition? No such thing.
We even lie about the number of people out of work in America. We measure the number of people who get
unemployment compensation from the government versus the number of people
employed and we call that the “unemployment rate”. But that compensation doesn’t go on indefinitely. When it runs out, that person is removed from
the rolls. We lie and say that they “stopped
looking”. It is a malicious and slanderous
lie, but one that is allowed to continue because it hides an unpleasant truth
and makes the business world “look good”.
President Obama’s “unemployment record” was full of lies, because the
decrease in the unemployment rate came from millions of Americans who ran out of
benefits, not because they “started working” or that they “gave up”. That same record that Narcissist President Trump
is trying to claim as his own came from those same lies. Millions of Americans who no longer were
counted as unemployed simply because their benefits expired, or because they
were considered ineligible.
Speaking of Narcissist Trump, I would be remiss if I did not point out
that he is the very epitome of yet another lie that we have that says that a “businessman”
would somehow be superior in governing than anyone else. Narcissist Trump, a self-promoting clown act
who lies with wanton abandon and zero accountability, who has – according
to a certain newspaper – lost over a billion dollars in other peoples’
money in the late 1980’s to early 90’s, and then reportedly turned around and claimed
it was a million-dollar gain by
using the same “winning” tactics by Enron.
I wish we could say that was simply “old news”, but we can’t find out if
he did something different or better since then because
of his intentional blocking of any access to his tax returns.
We have been told so many lies over the years. Americans were lied to about being able to
afford the house they live in. Americans
were lied to about being able to afford the payments on that new or used
car. Americans were lied to about
affording that college education, believing that whatever cost would be paid
for by the new money from that hypothetical new job or promotion that would be
waiting for them. Americans were told
they could afford to go on that vacation or buy that new outfit or get the
latest TV by putting it on credit.
Americans were told they could afford healthcare and that new drug that
they see on TV that would make their life better.
And then, when those lies were exposed, and that part of the house of
cards come down, the liars craft a new lie to pretend they never knew this was
a lie and that they never told the lies in the first place. “What? You mean you
really couldn’t afford that second mortgage?
We didn’t know this! What sort of
idiot gets a mortgage that they couldn’t afford?” Well, grifter, you know precisely what kind
because you were the one that sold it to them!
Just like the executives at Enron, our other liars want to pretend that
they didn’t know how these things could happen so they could remain “ignorant”
and thus “blameless”.
Topping off this potential colossal mega-disaster is the lack of viable solutions. Regulations and legislation are only as good
as the people enforcing them. We have a
so-called “Consumer Protection” agency that has been intentionally
and systematically gutted at the behest of Narcissist Trump and transformed
into a doublespeak agency that protects the corporations and not the consumers. We have regulations and legislation that are
currently being gutted, repealed, voided, and even outright
ignored because the people currently in charge were put there to do just
that.
And I’ll remind you all that every so-called “safeguard” that was set up following
every previous economic collapse were proven to be useless to prevent the next
collapse from happening. Every single
one.
Increasing the minimum wage? Mandatory
minimum income? Free healthcare and college? These all sound nice. They’re great political gimmicks. They are digestible notions that can be both
easily propped up and easily condemned. They
are political fast food. But they don’t
solve the problem of income inequality or fix a predatory system that is
designed to force the 90.1% of Americans into endless suffering, misery, and debt,
while at the same time keeping the
upper 9.9% where they are on the food chain. That requires a completely different and
total change of mindsets that will never be addressed simply because it would
upset the status quo.
Let’s get brutally honest here... America’s whole economy is just a colossal
version of Enron, with lies on top of lies sustaining debt and burdens that we’re
just trying to keep from falling on us.
Yes, we are lied to and we buy those lies and we get burned by those lies
and then we buy into the lie that shifts the blame from the lies to ourselves
because... well, because we don’t know any better. Or because we can’t fathom a system that would
treat us fairly. Or because we believe
that this is just how things are. Or
maybe even because we feel we deserve it.
Whatever the rationale, we are collectively the reason why things are the
way that they are; because it all depends on us, the great unwashed, to keep
this Nation-Enron going. If we decide to
not play their games, if we decide to not buy that new home, or go on that
vacation, or buy that new TV, or get that new education; if we decide to hold
on to our money like the upper 9.9% do, then that affects the economy. And then it all comes down on us.
Enron failed because the supposed “smartest guys in the room” believed
that they could keep their economic house of cards going indefinitely. They thought they had created a system that would
turn loss into gains, negatives into positives.
All they were really doing was delaying the inevitable fall for as long
as they could. So too is America’s
economic system just doing everything to keep that inevitable fall from
happening. The only difference is that
our great fall would be so much more devastating if we don’t truly fix it.
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