History ripe for rewriting

[mqbush]

Contributors to the current state of business and the economy:

1) In the 1960s it looked like an entire generation was rejecting consumerism and capitalism, which scared business and left them feeling that the mutual social contract was being reneged upon by the public.

2) Europe and Japan recovered from the war and became industrial powerhouses, wrecking the new US business model that required unreasonable rates of growth. Again business was scared. Note that European and Japanese workers were well-paid, so US workers were never in danger of having to work for less to be competitive. The story of the overpaid American worker was invented later.

3) Reagan pushed the wish-list of the deposed Robber Barons. He has to take some blame here, because he INTENDED to hurt the working class for the sake of higher corporate profits.

4) Years of neo-liberal philosophy deliberately tried to send US business overseas for obscure, arcane reasons no amount of explanation has ever made clear to me. Every kind of tax incentive made corporations an offer they couldn't refuse. We curse the corporations for this, but the devils in this case were neo-liberal ideologues in Congress. (NB: neo-liberalism is NOT liberalism.)

5) Businesses that used to make money selling products found they could make even more money making loans to workers whose wages had flattened, or whose jobs had vanished (GMAC, for example). Banks found a lucrative market in second mortgages as struggling homeowners found they could put off, for a little longer, facing the reality that they were ruined, as they sank even deeper into debt.

6) Computers increased worker productivity so much that legions of workers had to be laid off. This destroyed any remaining sense of corporate compassion for workers. Only the callous could be CEOs. It didn't hurt that these CEOs got bonuses the more workers they fired.

7) Many work-averse investors eschewed the complex process of building factories, hiring a workforce, etc, and figured it was soooo smart to just play with "financial instruments" instead, making money while producing nothing, driving the economy while leaving absolutely nothing behind that could be used by manufacturers, nothing that was demanded by consumers, nothing that can be machined or cooked or riveted or spread on roads or flown to the moon or implanted into a sick person's heart. Nothing. Their useless activity, that had no concern for purpose or utility or ethics or consequences, moved enough dollars around that it falsely made it appear our economy was alive and well.

8) And of course NAFTA, GATT, IMF.

I have to revisit my excoriation of Reagan, to say that he may have been a dupe, a rather stupid man who came into a position of such power that his co-opting by dark forces affected much of the world in ways we're only starting to sense as cold sweat and sick dread.