On Yahoo today, I noticed two adjacent items in the section they laughingly describe as "news." The first noted the slowest growth in economic activity in a year - well under the 2% forecast. The other celebrated the Dow-Jones average going over 13,000. It looks like the folks who have to work for a living aren't doing nearly as well as the folks who have money to invest. The L.A. Times described it like this:
"Bad news is good news these days. This isn’t a new concept for traders and stock investors. The more bad news that pours into the stock market, the more investors begin to anticipate that central banks around the world – including the Federal Reserve in the U.S. – are going to act."
It's all so plain......
In line with the "bad news is good news" philosophy, we see that learning the poverty rate in the United States is at an all-time high isn't really so bad. You see, if enough people are starving, the government will have to step up and open some food kitchens like they did in the 1930's. Maybe if enough people get their homes foreclosed, the government will have to put up more tents like they do in the case of tornadoes or hurricanes. Anyway, the stock market doesn't have to worry. If higher taxes are needed to feed or house the poor, you can bet the people at the top won't pay for it. Read the news.
Occupy Wall Street hasn't even scratched the surface of the cancer that's eating the country. The failing isn't just the greed that drives "the market" it's the market itself. The failure of our economic system is systemic. Capitalism in its present form is designed to fail. This is not just a win-lose society, it's a lose-lose. If the super-wealthy get super-wealthier, they're going to find there's nothing left for them to buy because nobody will have a job. In the race to the bottom, when jobs go to China, then to South Korea, then to India and Bangladesh, sooner or later we'll get to a place where labor is so cheap, nobody will have the technological skill to make anything. If you think that any moron should be able to figure that out, you've badly underestimated the number and net worth of a lot of morons.
The stock market is not a measure of the common good unless it goes down. When the market crashes, stores close and people get thrown out of work. When the market goes up, however, this may only mean speculators are waiting for some European government to fold, some currency to get manipulated or some billionaire's toenail to fall off. A rising stock market does not mean more factories or more jobs, fewer kids with not enough to eat or more intact families sitting around the dining room table. That's because just as banks are too big to fail, people are getting too small to matter.
So let's pause before we ceebrate the big 13,000. It doesn't mean a thing. Let's celebrate if and when our government stops subsidizing companies who move jobs overseas, quits giving tax breaks to those who need it least and starts remembering why they're where they are.