The Invisible Hand

I spent the first three days of 2017 writhing in my own sweat. A year of impotent rage physically manifesting itself as hot infected gunk in my lungs. In my thoughts I mulled over the bile drenched shouting match that the global soap opera has become. In my fever dreams I found a voice to add to the cacophony.

This is missive: critical #1: The Invisible Hand.

What do we need today? Housing, food, healthcare, a job? What do we need tomorrow? Some schmuck who’ll take care of most of that for us while our job becomes: dying with a shred of dignity. Why? Because for the time being we’re still a bunch of disease-ridden meat bags, unreliable at best, with a tendency to stink up the place long before we actually check out.

So everything’s great until it’s not, and to cover our asses we save some of the fruits of our labor for later. Call them pensions, 401K, what have you, all the same basic idea. That’s our society in a nutshell. We build institutions to take care of us so we won’t have to put our kids though the trauma of wiping our asses until we keel over and die on ’em. We keep these institutions funded by everyone chipping in and by not being morons with poor impulse control.

The collective good: a giant bag of public money; and wherever there’s a giant bag of money there’s sociopathic ultra-rich vulture types thinking: “I have a giant bag of money, therefore I deserve to have this other giant bag of money too! After all, it’s a dog eat dog world out there!” By and large these ultra-rich vulture types were given both their giant bags of money and their reprehensible ethics by previous generations of ultra-rich vulture types. Those with the biggest bags don’t generally have any great vision for the world beyond making their bags of money the largest and rubbing everyone else’s face in it. We call these people morally bankrupt douchebags, or more commonly: investment bankers, hedge funds, and private equity firms.

So these morally bankrupt douchebags call up your elected government representatives and put their giant bags of money to work:

“Let us invest some of your giant bag of public money, there’s little risk and we’ll all make money!” they’ll say, as your representative gorges himself on lobster lunches. “The Invisible Hand of the Market guarantees growth!” (Ed: The Invisible Hand of the Market is the predominant religion among morally bankrupt douchebags.)

“But what if the market crashes?” Your representative will ask (vaguely remembering something Roosevelt may have said once).

“Why, then it’s people’s own responsibility!” The vultures say, “The Invisible Hand makes money, only people can lose it. Besides, how much do these people contribute to your elections?”

“You make a good point,” your representative will say, because his constituents keep telling him they hate taxes, and he would also like to be paid.

And so the vultures pick away at the rotting corpses of the regulations protecting our giant bags of money, hoping that over time they can create a financial system so deregulated that we won’t notice they took all the money before it’s too late to do anything about it.

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Let me stop here for a second to say: I’m up to my fucking eyeballs in debt just from having a roof over my head. So are most of the other plebs I surround myself with, and from what I can tell, so is most of the world. Bailouts, quantitative easing, and corporate subsidies are vacuuming up public bags of money all over the place, and offering scraps in return. Governments are either too poor, or don’t give enough of a shit to even pay a PR firm to rebrand this fiasco (who the hell signed off on calling it “Austerity”, seriously? Can you imagine how that would’ve gone down during the Cold War?) How did it come to this? Story time!

Once upon a time some rich vulture type douchebags cunningly opened up their giant bags of money and let us dig in, presenting it as a gift from their God: the Invisible Hand of the Market. Eagerly we converted and grabbed what we could, and soon all the rich vulture type douchebags showered the world in money and we all spent it left and right! But, as there was more and more money, prices went up too. “That’s ok,” said the Invisible Hand God as he put on his latex glove, “as long as the prices go up we can keep paying off the debt when we refinance!” and so all was good. Until it wasn’t. The rich vulture type douchebags closed their bags, and as we all owed them lots of money, they lowered our wages, kicked us out of our houses, privatized our industries, killed our unions, corrupted our politicians, and bought up their competitors. “Sit and spin.” said the Invisible Hand God, as he shoved his fist firmly up our collective asses.

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There you have it. Your bank doesn’t give a flying fuck about you or your debt. You’re nothing to them. They just need your debt so they look like they’re too big to fail. You’re their sniveling real world pity party. Their tear jerking, lifetime movie leverage when the shit hits the fan. If you think that mortgage of yours, or the mortgages of your whole town for that matter, somehow puts them on hook you’re sorely mistaken. Half a second after you signed, that debt was insured with a credit default swap, packaged up, and used as collateral for some quick investment cash from the repo market, or put into any of a thousand ‘complex financial products’ invented to con the world into believing it’s not just some giant game of hot potato in which a million rich douchebags across the world pass their toxic assets to the closest sucker they can find, knowing full well that person gets fucked two ways from Sunday when the music stops. Those suckers, by the way, tend to be pensions, ’cause when we’re strapped for cash we kick the can down the road.

So why do banks not give a fuck if you pay up? Because the easiest money is that juicy bailout money, quantitative eased right up into the vein. Whenever shit hits the fan, banks pick up the phone and tell the fed how many sniveling plebs like you they’ll put out on the street if they don’t get their bonus money this year. Politicians aren’t big on having their names attached to crises, so the fed is told to write the check, straight out of your taxes. Your suffering, their leverage. Your taxes, their private jets. It’s that goddamn simple.

The Goldman Sachs’ of the world have been working at this kind of shit for hundreds of years, and they’re better at it than ever. The old aristocracies and robber barons would’ve jizzed their collective pants at a system as corrupt as this. The whole world is their ATM and we made it that way. Presidency by presidency, a supreme court decision here, a revolving door there, a great fucking recession later they’ve gotten every rule changed and run every regulator. The cancer has metastasized and we’ve got their pestilent growths all over the fucking world now. They call it “creating market liquidity” It’s financial fucking cholera.

How does it end? Let’s look at Greece. A country stripped and sold for parts. Pensions, healthcare, housing, airports, harbors, even the fucking water. Millions living in poverty or fleeing into Europe, ten thousand suicides, because it doesn’t matter whether you arrived on a boat from the middle east or were born to a middle class family in Athens. Previous governments sold everyone out equally. When they ask for help they’re called lazy fucking slobs, because it was their own fucking responsibility to stop their government from taking the predatory loans forced upon them by the banks and the EU. As if the fucking voters had any say in that.

And so it goes. Everything public will become private, civil rights will be gone. Not because they’re repealed, but because rich douchebags only pay for enforcement of their own rights and interests. Your institutions can be too broke to serve the needs of the people, but they’ll never be too broke to bail out rich douchebags. Long after healthcare and social security are erased, there will still be a fed. Sound familiar?

But hey! Enough with the horror stories and pity parties! It’s your own fucking fault. You bought all this liberal — every man for himself — ridiculousness hook, line, and sinker. The American dream never told you to get ahead by fucking over everyone else. Globalization didn’t need to become a cancer. You took such a long victory lap after beating the commies you didn’t fucking realize you were robbed of everything that let you win in the first place. Now you’re so ashamed to admit it you’d rather blame the Mexicans and poor people standing in line with you at the job center.

You’ve hated on taxes, mistrusted your officials, and downsized your government for decades. Is it any surprise they get their funding from lobbyists, their research from think tanks and made their elections a public circus? Your politics are like an episode of bumfights: rabid psychopaths tearing each other apart for the next shot of Goldman Smack. Tell me, who wins?

And now, after all this, you’re seriously going to believe them when they say social security is a failing and bankrupt system in desperate need of privatization? Good fucking luck with that my friends. I hope your kids like cleaning shit.

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