I've read that in a casino, money is referred to as "product." That concept, that money is a product, the product, permeates our economy, and is at the core of the current "troubles." That's right, the American economy is being managed like a casino. The house is the only player that always wins, and we're not the house.
Any calculation of what we owe, what we pay and how our income and wealth has changed necessarily lowballs our obligations, overstating the financial health of most Americans. Even someone with no mortgage and no credit debt of their own pays debt service all the time, to over-leveraged utilities and other companies. More ominously, as real income stagnated or fell, the housing market seemed to shore up homeowners' wealth. Middle class workers were given credit instead of pay.
What happened? What characterizes the transformation of our economy is that it is designed now to concentrate wealth and then remove it from meaningful circulation, not to produce goods and services, and not to support the well-being of those who do. Deregulation first of natural resource extraction, then of media ownership, then of utilities, and finally of banking and insurance and all things financial gave these groups license to sell nothing for something.
First, we define a corporation's fiduciary responsibility as being owed only to the shareholders. Then, the Ken Lays of the world combine greed with duty to do whatever it takes to maximize their take.
This isn't a new concept. It's colonialism with computers. It's what colonizers did every time they conquered and occupied a land and people. It's an extraction economy, but the resource being extracted is the wealth of the middle class instead of natural resources.
In the Northwest in the '70s and '80s timber companies colonized us when they figured out that they could make more money by shutting down our mills while continuing to clearcut our forests, and then by shipping the raw logs elsewhere to be finished and sold.
Then, realizing that the way to make big money was to sell nothing for something, Enron colonized us, because they could extract more money by selling less electricity. And they exploited tax and rate regulation loopholes to ship even more "product" to Texas. We are colonized by Walmart, coming to our cities and towns to extract "product" and ship it back to Bentonville. And the oil companies know they have us over a barrel. They make more money selling less oil. They want more leases not to drill for more oil but to list them as assets, to both inflate their stock prices and to generate more "product" by borrowing against those assets.
Bankers figured out how to sell essentially fictional funds, making the whole financial system into a pyramid scheme.
Insurance companies figured out that they were in the business of making money, not providing protection. If they could collect premiums, play around in the games the banking industry invented, and deny claims, they could generate lots of "product."
Media? Media "consolidation" was funded by borrowing. That led to cost cutting as every outlet had to pay debt service. This led to the death, or at least morbidity, of local news.
And then there's government money. They see those big pots of "product" in public funds and they want to get some. Let's privatize schools, the military, prisons, roads and anything else we can think of. Then, when we get inferior service for the cost, we can blame the invisible hand of the market.
The Wisdom of the Market was preached like a religion. Seriously, like a religion. No evidence, but you have to believe.
The tax system increasingly rewarded ("incentivized?") investment more than work. As corporations and investors paid a smaller share of taxes, ordinary workers picked up the slack or saw the benefits that taxes buy deteriorate or, usually, both.
Along the way usury, once a sin, became a virtue as credit became central to the economy. Stockbrokers made the economy "vibrant" while teachers and school custodians "fed at the public trough." No, the monetary rewards of exploiting this economy were not enough. Gordon Gecko had to claim to be a saint, too, morally better than us shmos who don't have what it takes to play in his league.
And now we're looking at "bailouts." The common good wasn't being looted fast enough by a war built for profiteers. It wasn't being looted fast enough by usury. Not fast enough by looting our health. It wasn't enough to privatize funds the government already had. No, now the plan is to shore up this Ponzi scheme with invented/borrowed money.
Privatize and concentrate wealth and gain, and socialize obligation and loss. What the hell does that have to do with democracy?