THEY DON’T CALL IT CLASS WAR
Our elected and unelected leaders, from government and business, lie to our faces. And these storytellers never fabricate more ferociously than when they’re talking about money. This is so because money, banking, and finance are themselves a kind of fiction, and so it’s nearly impossible to speak about them without a great deal of untruth. So skilled and practised are the lie-makers, in fact, that they never fail to be entirely accurate, while simultaneously never ever telling the truth. And what makes the whole thing particularly noxious is that, because they’re so intensely immune to reality, they feel they are also immune to being wrong or, as a result, accountable.
What am I talking about? Well, so unstable is the whole economics mirage that even in the midst of what is a clear and monumental recession they cannot help but tell us daily that we’re climbing to new unforeseen highs. Unemployment is forever evaporating – crashing down one, two, five percent, month after month, year after year – or so we are asked to believe. Meanwhile, real employment numbers never seem to move noticeably in the opposite direction. So what’s with that? We are told by our national media, “the unemployment rate dropped to 6.8 per cent, to the lowest rate since December 2008, as the economy added 74,000 jobs...” While perfectly accurate, what they leave out of this equation is what makes it profoundly misleading. You don’t have to be an economist or even pay much attention to the news to have noted the total aggregate decline in job numbers since the start of the financial collapse. And you don’t actually need the numbers either: if you’re a woman, a minority, or under forty you’ve likely felt it. But if you’re uninterested in personal experience or just want the real data you can head over to Stats Canada. There you’ll find that the number of temporary workers and those on term or contract work has doubled in the last twenty years. You’ll also discover that the number of involuntary part-time workers (people who are on a part-time contract who would rather be working full-time) is higher than it was a decade ago and hasn’t moved at all since 2008. In fact, if you look at the numbers, employment today is actually in line with October 2009 numbers – the lowest point employment reached during the worst of the crash. (So this is not merely the Minister of Finance or Labour, chief financial officers or business news reporters, sporting rose-coloured glasses. Instead, they’ve reversed the sewage outflow; they’re dying the sour slush pink, and they’re pumping it straight back into people’s homes – all the while claiming a massive reduction of pollution in our waterways.)
And if this situation is bad in the Americas, given our economic embeddedness we can be sure elsewhere in the West things are just as absurd. And when I go looking, sure enough, I find that workers in the United Kingdom are suffering the longest and most severe decline in real earnings in history. Ya, like EVER. (And you’ll note this situation has only been exacerbated by the austerity measures established, or so we are told, to alleviate mass suffering.) A new analysis explains that, “In 1865 the U.K. economy took a nosedive following reckless financial speculation and the collapse of a major bank, not dissimilar from the events of 2008, but although pay fell in real terms in that slump, the squeeze that hit Victorian workers only lasted two years.” Other notable declines in real wages occurred during the global depression of 1874-78, the austerity period of 1921-23, and during the recession recovery of 1976-77. Yet, as you can see, these declines never lasted longer than four years. Compare this with the seven year (and counting) decline they’re currently suffering. What’s more, the present pay drop is twice as bad as the worst historical slump: real wages have plummeted 8.2% compared with a 4% fall in the early 1920s. And, of course, this all takes place amid daily news reports of “strong recovery” and forecasts of “positive growth.” So what the hell is going on?
What’s most telling is the picture that seems to come into focus when we pair the financial suffering of the many, including whole national economies, with a much larger trend. A recent report from Oxfam, revealed that the number of people with ten-figure wealth, the billionaires out there, has doubled since 2008. Along with this, digging around for more numbers, I kept bumping into figure exposing the dramatic explosive growth of CEO pay. In 1980 major U.K. companies had a ratio of CEO pay to average employee pay of 15:1. By 1998 this ratio jumped to 47:1, and in 2014 the number had vaulted, catapulted, up to 183:1. In the United States that same year, 2014, typical CEO pay for companies on the S&P 500 was 373:1. (Because of course the heads of corporations today, when compared to the bean-counters under them, are 8,000% more productive and valuable to a company than they were in 1980.)
So with the simultaneous axing of jobs and slow redistribution of wealth, and the accompanying careful misinformation, it starts to feel like a class war been ongoing for a generation. And then in this light the most recent economic collapse in 2008 – with its rapid and dramatic redistribution – begins to feels less like an accident and more like an outright act of economic terrorism. Am I being ridiculous? Surely the billionaire bankers and financial schemers (inspired by their selective misreading of Adam Smith) can be seen to have strapped homemade improvised financial devices to themselves and the whole global financial system, and then run screaming into the streets, with the President on the phone, threatening to detonate the whole rigged shebang if the public didn’t hand over not just the keys to the vault but those to the castle too. No? (Please, do frame this for me in another light.)
When the system is “working”, bankers, CEOs, and economists tell us they’re all brilliant scientists and that they must be handsomely rewarded for their remarkable mastery of an exquisite system they themselves meticulously handcrafted; which, after all, benefits everyone. But when the whole thing collapses under the weight of their own malfeasance they argue that nobody saw it coming (nor could anyone), that there was nothing to be done once they did see a problem (nothing, that is, other than the federal government writing them blank cheques), and they then shift all accountability onto their victims. They do so while claiming political, legal, and financial immunity while mysteriously being rewarded with greater market-share, increased compensation packages, and bonuses to top it all off – bonuses so outlandish that even an ancient deity would be too humble to accept.
No, they cannot all be geniuses (the best of the best, with PhDs in Physics, Engineering, and Economics from only the best schools spending billions on sophisticated algorithms, risk assessment and management, government lobbying as well as legal and regulatory “reform” – and at the very same time be unwitting, innocent victims at the whims of a chaotic system that is beyond anyone’s understanding or control. It cannot be both, and there’s too much of a paper trail for anyone to pretend not to know who’s calling the shots and who is on which side of the firing line.
It is curious, as they say, that nobody calls it class warfare until the poor resist. Or maybe it’s not so strange at all.
Comments