On The Wing

Editors note: What seemed a certainty less than a week ago, Bernanke’s confirmation to a second term as Fed Chairman, is a bit cloudy and muddy today given the uh-oh deer-in-the-headlight-eyes of some Dems up for mid-term elections come November. Needing someone to deflect blame upon for losing Kennedy’s Senate seat, Benji may be just the ticket for cowards like Boxer and her ilk. Our pal Robert Crisman has something to say about the whole de-reg mess that got us into the financial apocalypse in the first place. Can’t say we shouldn’t have seen it coming…

THE DEREG BAMBOOZLE? IT DIDN’T START THERE…

By Robert Crisman

Okay, here’s how it went: the sharpies pushed dereg to make credit easy so folks would get out there and buy. If capitalist gongos can’t sell their shit, the economy sinks like a stone.

But credit means debt. And, turned out last fall, a whole lot of people were short when it came time to pay.

All those banks, choked with shit markers. The economy sank like a stone.

Now, to revive it, those same fucking sharpies are saying we’ve got to get credit rolling again.

Talk about damned if you do…

Anyway, some history, for those who think the bill won’t come due one once again:

The whole story starts way back before plastic…

Remember old Marx, the guy you all thought went down for the count when Gorbachev bought it? Turns out he’s alive and kicking the lights out. Why not? This is the guy who had kapital covered, all the way down to the dime.

Okay, like I said, folks have to buy buy buy buy. Marx said that’s because a capitalist has to keep churning shit out, to fill up his share of the market, or some other gongo will step in take it, and he’ll wind up eating in dumpsters.

He called it overproduction—glutting the market till no one needs nothin’—which signals the kickoff from feast to capitalist famine. If no one needs nothin’, they ain’t gonna buy. If they ain’t gonna buy, then, crash, bam, boom, bam…

That’s where all this shit, dereg, etc., has its roots.

Economists these days would have you believe what Marx said is dinosaur shit. The gongos, they say, have found a way past that roadblock: ads, obsolescence, and credit up the yazoo.

First off, the ads, on TV and everywhere else in the world, 24-7 attacks on our frontals that tell us we’d all better brush, floss, and perfume our pits, then suck up the Bud and go test drive a Beamer, or we can forget getting laid for the rest of our miserable lives.

You think I’m joking? Everyone wants to get laid, except maybe Cheney who’d rather eat babies, and this has enabled the hucksters to turn us all into buy-or-die junkies for stuff. They spew it out, we suck it up. We shop till we drop as a matter of fact—and, all the more since a lot of shit that they sell us wears out or breaks in a hot New York minute, and we’ve got to hop down to WalMart or Target to stock up some more if we want to stay in the game.

Now—bear with me here—this ad slamma-jamma kicked off in the ‘20s, when we as a nation crammed into the cities. There we all were, yokels fresh out of the woods, without the first fucking clue how to make our way through the jungle. Ma, Pa, and the kids, who’d milked cows on the farm, had to learn a new game, i.e., go to work for The Man and buy all the stuff that they used to make for themselves. They’d grown their own food, for Chrissake! And now it came canned from Delmonte or something and they had to rustle up shekels to get it.

In ten fucking years, the ad guys turned Pa into Dagwood and Ma into Blondie, and Cookie and Al into,,,Dagwood and Blondie, the Next Generation. The old gods these folks had relied on to guide them had stayed in the woods or died off, which let the ad guys conjure up new ones, who spewed out their wisdom in magazine ads, and on radio and billboards—and then delivered the goods! Food, clothing, cars, the latest in gadgets, all sorts of cute trinkets—any damn thing you could think of!

These gods promised heaven on Earth for no money down with five easy payments, and you could get laid, starting now…

But get this: if you didn’t buy slices of heaven, well then, fuck you. You were one lame cocksucker. Your breath and pits reeked and you stole all your clothes off some dopefiend asleep in a doorway. They’d bury your ass in a landfill somewhere and forget that you’d stunk up the breezeway.

People bought shit like never before in the ‘20s. On credit. Their paychecks didn’t quite cover the spread. Businesses looking to wrap up the world paid later as well so they could grow bigger a whole lot more quickly.

Debt piled sky-high—and then the crash came at the end of the decade. Some big player didn’t get paid on a Tuesday, and couldn’t cover his bets on a Wednesday, and left guys he owed in the lurch and—Friday dawned with a whole line of corporate dominos sprawled on the ground like dead winos.

Came the ‘30s. It sure looked like rain. No one had jobs. The market was toast. The hucksters were eating those ads off the billboards so they’d keep from starving. Production of goods lay dead in the water. It looked like…The End…

Then John Maynard Keynes came along. A man with a plan! He told the government to print up some money, whole tons of money, albeit backed by nothing, to give to the gongos who kicked out the goods, so they could keep floating till people could buy stuff again.

Fuck the depression, Keynes said. We’ll paper it over with corporate welfare and the Big Boys’ll get this thing moving again!

Well, er, ah, not quite… We stayed in the hole. The market was hasta la vista. Caps have to sell and—who the fuck was there to sell to? Folks had no jobs and couldn’t buy squat—so why hire guys to churn the shit out?

Conundrum city! But hey, what the fuck. The war came along and spending to kick out the bullets and bombs put folks to work in a hurry. And after the war, the caps kept on churning out bullets and bombs, which kept people working—which gave caps a market once more, and thereby the chance to rev up civilian production and get fat as blowfish.

The Fabulous ‘50s! The ads, on TV now, told folks, buy buy buy buy, or lay down and die, alone and unmourned like a skunk by the side of the road.

Same psych as before. Folks bought, fed the monkey, and fell into the red zone like that.

See, as before, they didn’t have much cash. Inflation outstripped the wage gains like always. So the hucksters just mailed them plastic and turned them loose in the malls.

Buy now and pay pay pay later…

A seemingly infinite market was born! A sort of permanent overproduction took hold. Glut city for sure, but this was now a throwaway world—planned obsolescence!—filled up with buy-or-die junkies with plastic.

The glutters kept glutting and racking up bank and debt reached the moon. They all had to scramble to stay in the game but, hey, no prob, right? They just skipped abroad where labor comes cheaper so they could rake more bank—ensuring that junkies they’d downsized could not pay their debts and—

Those banks stuffed with shit markers…

The whole fucking world kept betting the check’s in the mail. It’d be here tomorrow…

In 2008, tomorrow showed up a day or a year or forever too late and—look at that, sports fans!

Bear Sterns, over a cliff, tattered and broke-dick like Wile E. Coyote!

All those ads, obsolesecne, the credit up the yazoo—all the shit that the gongos have so far come up with to end-around overproduction and—hey, what’s that sound?

Bones breaking on rocks down below.

And now they want to run the same movie.

My stockbroker told me last week, “The first chance you get, buy a parachute, man. Better yet, stay way away from high places….”

HHH