Last week Obama addressed the country with his first ideas for the new world, “CHANGE!” and all the other great exclamation trumpeting the arrival of America’s best liberal poster boy since Kennedy. He presented ideas of corporate responsibility. He presented ideas of creating a sustainable economy with exploration of new fuels to create a new fuel infrastructure but the one thing I wanted to hear him say is the one thing he could not because saying it would destroy every business wisdom that has been preached to us since the Depression. I have a simple idea for what America needs to do but with our bourgeois hatred for getting our own hands clean this would never fly for corporate America. Our problem isn’t necessarily corporate irresponsibility, though that is certainly a symptom. Our problem is our corporations; moreover, our problem is that our country, once the great provider of all that was good and new in this backwards old world, has become a middle man and, well, it’s always very easy to cut out the middle man.
The middle man does not provide goods, he provides a service. Like anybody knows if they’ve ever tried to sell their own house, their own car, or even something as small as an Xbox, it may take a bit more hassle but normally the buyer and the seller are better off without the middle man. The thing is, we’re also the buyers, though, so we’re 2 sides of the equation – the two weakest sides. Without the product we’re nothing. A producer can survive without a middle man; a middle man cannot survive without a producer. The middle man is like a remora or a leach, the food can survive without him but he can’t survive without the food, simple Darwinian economics, man. But how did this whole flawed middle man system come about and what kind of idiots would train a whole age group to aspire towards being little more than snake-oil salesmen without the gumption to make their own snake-oil? People who realized that when you’re smart, you can make a lot of money as a salesman – provided, that is, that not everybody else wants to be one too. If that happens, the ship is sunk.
I was fortunate enough to have grown up alongside people considered by the great judge to be the best and brightest, young Americans who would excel at almost anything they would do. Most of my high school friends are in finance (read: making money off buying and selling other people’s products) or real estate (read: making money off buying and selling other people’s homes or land). Some are DJ’s but while that is a product, there is a question as to how effective and necessary such a thing is; art will always be a commodity and unless you’re big enough to be reproduced in high enough numbers to be cheap enough that the masses can buy you, you may be obsolete in a world that no longer throws as lavish of parties. Most of my college friends have gone into real estate. Some are in the military and a few have gone into engineering or electronics but the general adage that has been pounded into my generation is that if you want to be somebody, you have to sell something. Not make something – sell it. We’ve become so enthralled with fast-talking Italians in designer suits wearing Rolexes and bragging to their buddies at the martini bars about how they closed 80 deals this past month and in all of them came out on top that we stopped thinking about what the fuck we’re selling. And even more, how sustainable it is to continue selling these things. Arthur Miller was wrong; the salesman never died; he’s alive and well in every little kid who watches BOILER ROOM with a tightened fist going white because watching Vin Diesel sell fake stock is beautiful. But that little bastard misses the whole point. Or maybe he just gets it inherently, subconsciously, and has too limited a view way to comprehend what it really means. Wake up kid. BOILER ROOM is America. And it ends poorly.
We’ve been paying so much attention to the shine we forgot to worry about what we were shining and just now, as we’re getting called on it, we’ve realized that we were selling nothing. Just semantics, numbers without hard material to back them up. America went off the gold standard a long time ago; so too has our way of doing business and it will be interesting to see how this whole thing turns out when we realize we went from being a bunch of producers with real products to a bunch of talkers holding an empty sack when the very producers we set up decide to go elsewhere to sell their products for a better cut.
Look at these goddamned banks. What the fuck is a bank? It used to be a simple tool, a facilitator of the greater society. Now it’s trying to paint itself AS the society and what these bastards will never admit is that they’ve made what should be a social institution into a goddamn industry. That would be like milk cartons becoming a drink. Think about it – milk cartons were invented to hold milk. That’s their whole purpose. But let’s just say one day the milk cartons began to feel so self-important they began bulking themselves up and fancying themselves and trying to make themselves seem more amazing, more individual than they really are. Someone needs to tell them that the milk is what’s important and they’re just an afterthought. Because without the milk, they’re fucking nothing.
So what’s the solution? Let’s start by castrating all these assholes who have the audacity to demand their $50 million dollar jets and $10 million dollar bonuses after laying off 500 people who all made about $50 k a year. These corporate criminals are like rapists, looking for any opportunity to dip their proboscis into the innocent just because they like how it feels going in and more importantly they like proving that they can. It makes them feel like men. More often than not, they know their position is tenuous. They’re smart enough to know they’re selling bullshit without anything to back it up. That’s why they demand so much money up front – because if anybody figured out they didn’t have any real product behind them but an uncanny and soulless ability to spin words and peddle pink elephants, they’d be out. Like is happening now and yet still these assholes have managed to bamboozle us into letting them keep their ivory towers, all grinning at us because they know we’re fucked but they’ll be okay; that while we suffer for their lies, they thrive. Is it comical to anybody else that we let these assholes run around waving the “free-market economy flag” and then they turn to the government when things get bad? They’re like that kid who makes more than enough to support himself, brags about how his parents can’t tell him what to do, but then spends it all on blow and expensive nights at Teddy’s so he has to borrow money from Daddy. Only in this case, Daddy is funded by that bastard’s less fortunate younger siblings who have to work all day to keep from losing the farm.
Next stop, bring back all the call centers from India and all the factories from China. If any goddamn bleeding heart says that’ll crush their economies I’d tell them to take a long hard look at their own company. Yes, I saw SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and life’s tough in India but times are tough here too. Everyday I find a new article about Mexicans living in tunnels because they can’t find work and I read about some new middle-class murder suicide by somebody in the Valley because they’ve completely let their family down buying into an “American dream” that was never real in the first place. We need to get back to making things, to building a strong exporting economy. Our strongest export now is culture and art, movies, and even that’s weakening as people elsewhere catch on to the scheme.
So now we’re producing it hear and sure, it’ll make shit cost a little more but that’s what we need. There has to be a serious cost-benefit analysis undertaken where we figure out that having less shit of higher quality is much better than having more junk that may give our kids lead poisoning and will definitely break within a year. We have to realize that our computers may cost a little more but at least when we have a question we won’t have to wrestle with somebody looking up English words in the dictionary while trying to help us with a product they’ve never seen. Plus it’ll bring jobs back to the U.S., money back in our pockets, and create a future surplus. Sure it’ll mean getting our hands dirty again, less bastards in fine Gucci linens and more men and women in foreman’s gear. It’ll also mean a return to the pride we used to take in hard work, the American way, all that.
Finally, we need to start moving towards building infrastructure instead of immediate wealth. There was once a time when people understood building something that benefited a society and getting wealthy off that. The railroads, a newspaper, a city, something that served a long-term purpose. Nobody wants to do that anymore. Everybody looks for the short-term now – God forbid a company takes a short-term hit for a long-term gain, the board of trustees and stock-owners will eat them alive. At the same time, when a company lies or covers things up or makes things good for the short-term, almost always at the detriment of the long term, it punches the stock up a few points and they get lauded by the pundits. Serves the bastards right that it should come back around to bite them in the ass – maybe then investors will realize that the short-term straightjackets they put on publicly-traded companies are stifling long-term growth and ruining everything. And while there are still real estate developers who are honestly trying to build infratructure, it’s about a half and half split as to why they’re building it. Some build things because they serve a purpose, the right reason and the best way to ensure profits. The rest build just to make money and as we’ve seen, building for the purpose of profit without thinking if it’s something anybody needs is backfiring on us and leaving overpriced homes and office spaces empty, real estate companies scrambling to give out handies in bathroom stalls to senators in exchange for taxpayer money because their free-market policies, well, just didn’t work.
So where does that leave us? What’s next for the American public to do – not Obama, us. He can create policies and reprimands for the companies that are fucking everything up but we’re gonna need to do some serious thinking, a paradigm-shift to use everybody’s favorite silent-G buzzword, and adopt a new view of our role as members of the great state and our roles as producers, consumers, and investors.
First, it is not our right to consume to our heart’s content, and certainly not to consume disproportionately to our production. Some may say that’s being communist, that consuming is good but it isn’t when what we’re consuming comes from elsewhere. If anything, it’s the most un-American thing to do because it’s actually putting our money into the coffers of other countries, none of whom are us. The only Americans we’re helping are the middlemen, the slimy bastards who skim their money off the top while peddling another country’s products, similar to a coke-dealer or a smuggler of Thai hookers. Consuming can be addictive, a drug that satisfies in the short term and in the long-term leaves us empty. That movie, CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC, is like TRAFFIC but in pink with a goddamned designer lace dress wrapped around it. It’s not funny, it’s hideous and it’s that attitude of never-ending consumption that has labeled us the overweight gold-chain-draped South Beach papi of the world. It’s also what has caused everybody to overextend themselves for German automobiles, Italian bags, Scottish booze, and Chinese electronics. These aren’t inherently bad – but eventually, when we’re sending all of our money over there it’s emptying our banks over here and while those banks keep touting themselves as great institutions with massive overhead and absurd fanfare they’ll be investing less of the money that’s already dwindling out of them.
These purchases do show something, though – people still desire quality. And people can obviously make themselves afford it. So if you can afford a G for a bag, you should be able to spend that same amount for a computer which can help you at their job, your education, your home management, whatever. So maybe instead of Dell farming out their customer service to Mumbai, they can bring it back home here and price their computers a bit higher. Yes, it will cost us more, in the short-term. But in the long-term, it will lead to more jobs here so more money flowing into our local infrastructure and, through basic trickle-down economics, this will improve our whole economy. So the lesson is this – over-consumption is bad. Healthy consumption of necessities and a few frivolities is good, but only if it is mostly American-made goods. Not American-mediated. American-made.
Might doesn’t make right. Just because you’re in charge of a company doesn’t mean you can boost your own salary at the pain of all those below you – and even more, when your company runs out of money, use the taxpayers to cover your salary. Take a fucking paycut and move the factory from China to Flint, Michigan. Then maybe you’ll be able to sleep at night without two packets of Zanex and a big black bodyguard whose job it is to protect you from your disenfranchised workers and an increasingly-impoverished American public. Teach your kids this - the Elephantine Business philosophy of “if it’s not illegal, it’s okay” is akin to business nihilism and in the end can only lead to what we’ve got now. Teach them that to be rich and “successful” are not the same thing – and even more importantly, getting the most points isn’t everything and sometimes can be worse than getting less because your overabundance which makes your life ust a little better makes the lives of thousands much worse. Teach them that in real life winning isn’t measured in who has the most points but also who plays with the most fairness. This may not be true but the only way we’ll be able to improve our society is by embracing this ideal – otherwise, it’s the way of the Romans, the most successful society to fall victim to its own decadence, depravity and self-importance, for us. And teach them that the middle man is expendable – if you want to be valuable to society, make something, something real and something valuable to society. And make it because it will serve a good purpose, not just because it will make you rich. And teach them the value of getting your hands dirty – that’s what America was founded on.
The greatest thing about America is that we can always re-invent ourselves. We can always become better, always fix our wrongs, and we have enough minds and hearts here to actually try and figure out what we need to do. We’ve recovered from many financial disasters before. Everybody remembers the Depression – well maybe not remembers but has heard about it – and watched the WIZARD OF OZ, the great analogy for how we rusted when we first forgot about industry and lost our heart, boasted our strength when we were really becoming cowardly because of our comfort, left farming because it was brainless and, to us, unimportant, and eventually found our way back by following the hard strength of gold. In the 70’s, a slowed economy coupled with double-digit inflation coined the term Stagflation. It was the result of years of prosperity (leading to complacency and corruption as regulations loosened) and, for the first time, the oil companies wielding their power. The 80’s had a Republican named Ronald Reagan, another regular cowboy whose policies of creating tax loopholes for the wealthy including capital gains fucked over the average American. While unemployment dropped, the economy grew even slower than in the 70’s, our national debt and trade deficits ballooned, and the number of people below the poverty line increased for the whole of the 80’s. What did it take to fix all the financial issues of the 70’s and 80’s which specifically affected the lower and middle-class “Average” Americans? A smart Democrat who actually cared about his people and wanted to use the government as a tool for improving the lives of his constituents, not as a piggy bank to hook up his friends from neighborhood cotillions and deb balls.
So it’s time to rally. It’s time to
sacrifice some of our bad habits, our lack of willingness to get our hands
dirty and our disdain for the word “moderation”. Let’s show that America is
something more than a bunch of assholes who fill up the emptiness in our lives
with expensive goods as the foreign producers laugh at how well we funded their
economies. We’re the laughing joke of the business world. Let’s try, once
again, to show that we do have what it takes to be the best goddamned country
in the world. America!










