Push has come to shove, the bubble burst not because of easy credit or action by the Federal reserve, or mortgage lenders but by the strangulation of the American working class. The pinprick of reality the one time wealthiest consumer in the world now steals food from Wal-Mart, where one income was once enough now it takes three or more.
There is a cynical guilty pleasure in watching the smart boys struggle to swim against the current, trying to handle the crisis. I know it’s wrong, but for so many years they had all the answers and spoke of the working class in their academic abstractions of lowered expectations and short term economic pain. Eat some of your own lowered expectations and short term economic pain fellas it’s called humble pie. Maybe the wife can get a job, I hear Wal-Mart’s hiring or maybe if you work more hours or live in a smaller house this will all go away.
But it won’t go away, last week the experts called it a correction yesterday the used the word bank failure. Last week Country Wide mortgage said they had $187 billion in reserves but the reserves are in those same depreciated dollars that force Americans to steal food from Wal-Mart. The weakness isn’t at the top, it’s at the bottom, a con perpetrated on the American people to pay for wars and tax cuts when they didn’t need either.
We seem to need to relearn the lesson every few generations, that the top of the economy is supported by the bottom. That wealth comes from the bottom up that there has never been an economy where the working class has done well that has collapsed. The wreckage from economies manipulated to move wealth to the top of societies litter history books pages. Maybe now we can go back to business building products rather than stock prices and making money by making things. And by paying decent wages to the people so they can buy those products.
If your answer is that can’t be done, then start swimming. Capitalism is finished.
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