7th International

A NOT SHORT ENOUGH HISTORY OF ECONOMICS YOU DON'T NEED A MATHEMATICIAN TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE PISS IS FLOWING You don’t have to live on the streets to know that Economics is the Depressing Science. I studied the subject academically awhile, until resisting the draft interfered. It was more of a curiosity to me as I went thru the “Great” Economists. As a major in Straight Philosophy, perched high on cloud coocoo land, I was more amused at how simple (minded) these “Greats” were. The math never impressed me. It was just another version of Latin for a new priesthood, cackling among themselves. “Hoc est corpus meum: - this is my body, said the priest. “Hocus pocus” translated the cynics. If it works for Latin, math is even better - for those who consider science a religion and economics a science. Recently an Amherst graduate student actually did the math for a couple of “trickle down” Harvard economists and found that they were cooking the books to make their theory work to prove the impossible, that trickle down works for the benefit of all,. The math that works for me starts at 1% and finishes off at 99. How about an example from history. Inheriting a shamanistic tradition, the aristocratic Russian 1% set the standard when – after imbibing a native psychedelic - generously gave the peasants their piss to drink. The original trickle down. In America, the 99% - even those of us in the Marijuana bubble - are finding the trickle down hard to swal-low. RECOVERING THE TRUTH ABOUT DEVELOPMENT So much for academic Economics – which began more truthfully as Political Economy. Adam Smith’s science was effectively a wish list for a new crew of would be aristocrats who needed political clout to destroy the rural craft and agricultural economy that Smith so despised. Welcome to an early example of what we will meet later as the strategy of“ "Development”. but which had for centuries in merry old England been known as Enclosure. . Using state power Enclosure drove peasants off the village commons, replacing them with sheep for the lucrative export of wool. This global economy morphed into the steam driven machine economy. A new breed of would-be aristocrats needed the force of the state to evict what was left of the peasantry and destroy the rural craft economy that Adam Smith had declared worthless. The peasants found out quick that the New Money One Percenters didn’t need all of the 99%. The unused portion of the 99% could languish in London’s urban sewers. The record is graphically illustrated in Hogarth's prints of life of the discarded in the eighteenth century.. . Once all the land had been taken from the Native American inhabitants, enclosure in America was a more accelerated process It didn't take long for the corporate machine economy to turn a land of small proprietors and farmers with very self-sufficient families into isolated employees, utilizing young women and children when pos-sible and ultimately putting the family itself at risk with parents working at several subsistence jobs. My personal economic experience started in the American forties. That was the time when “America” real-ized, all of a sudden, that it was rich and the rest of the world was poor. Development was the name of this new enclosure movement. Strange that the lot of the third world poor never got better, despite the pleasant theories of post war liberal trickle-downers. It didn’t take long for this newly discovered global poor to realize that Russian aristocratic urine was a taste treat compared to the crocodile tears of the global developers. . Worse yet, it was discovered by the liberal trickle-downers that it wasn’t just the rest of the world that was filled with delectably exploitable poor people. Poor Americans were everywhere, particularly in central city urban slums who could be driven – this time literally – out into urban renewal projects or – with good luck – sub-urban resettlements. The great economic discovery that the poor were the greatest financial bonanza since the Indians rested on the same principle – when you drive them off the land, the land value rises exponentially. It was this discovery that ended the usefulness of the slum lord and started people on the street to homelessness. So there it is: in England, sheep replaced the peasants; in America’s inner cities the car was used instead of sheep. In America the eviction process was accelerated. The sub-urban housing boom – good-by redwood forests – provided the ticky-tack housing for the car commuters. Enormous beehive urban projects were touted as “end-ing poverty” for the poorer displaced urbanites, ending instead the culture of neighborhoods.. THE PERSONAL IS THE ECONOMIC TOO My dad – employed in food through the depression and the war – was the second person to get a car on our block after the war, a Henry J. To shorten a longer story, he was able – literally, repeat, literally - able to ride the first wave into suburban Minneapolis, escaping the ethnic backwaters of urban Pitts-burgh. Pittsburgh where I begin my lessons in economics was an industrial giant. That means that the snow turned black from soot the day after it fell. Both my grandfathers worked where the soot came from - the steel mills down by the river, one of them punching his time card well into his seventies. My dad did his own wildcat strike when he walked off his mill job after five days. He went into the produce yards where he parlayed his eighth grade education with nights in the library into a broker’s job – sending the carloads of wholesale fruits and veggies onto the counters of retail grocers. Safe in sub-urban St. Louis Park, my family was atomized now – free of the roots of the broader family. We had cut loose and to prove the immortal words of Frank Lloyd Wright that, “when you tilted the US, everything loose would roll into California”, we rolled into Southern California. Family still had some power, the black sheep kind anyhow, and we headed for one of those packed little courts in L.A., next door to my horse playing uncles and aunt who had escaped Pittsburgh earlier. We were launched into the fabulous Fifties. The Golden Age of America in the Golden State. The Age of More Than Enough for the Nation that ruled the world. The era of I like Ike Eisenhower and nu-clear brinksman Dulles. Oppose us and we flicked you into the garbage heap – Iran, Guatemala, it was all so easy. Take our loans and its easy street. My family was stuffed into a one bedroom apartment where my room was the space behind the couch. The couch was my sister's room. But no matter. The fifties were spectacular and all absorbing. Big fin autos and immense refrigerators. Housewives and (M)Admen. General Electric defined the Good Life. Along came the Men in the Grey Flannel Suits. 10 free TV channels, Roller Derby, Wrestling and late night movies, movies, movies. Breakfast all day. And my family hadn’t really lost any ground mov-ing from sub-urban Minneapolis to L.A. because L. A. had no city, it was all suburbs. But the beatniks on speed relentlessly darted through the underbelly, the highways, the railroad yards, the greyhound buses on the run from the fifties and looking for the sixties. It happened. The US left the fat fifties and plunged into the the schizo sixties. There was even a starting gun when JFK died for our sins. Where then was the economy? The history of economics for most of the 99% could be summed up in 3 letters: Jay Oh Bee. Job. For most of us that’s all she wrote. A few percent got into college prep which meant more zeros for your annual income. .This group at most represented roughly the 5 or 6 % from each high school that the 1% required to handle the so called 99% who were on the High School "get a job" track. (But math aside the number was more like 80% rather than 99.). I think 80% is still a good read, though, for the cereal boxes of the Consumer State. It is a number, democratically speaking, that translates as overwhelming. Competitive at least to the fabulous rush that you get from the solidarity of “99%!” All that of course ignores the uncomfortable detail that the 1% has the allegiance, tepid or otherwise, of about half of the 80%, the good students always desperately seeking the right answers that still only got them a Job - except after one of those periodic crashes. Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift. . BACK TO THE HOUSEHOLD So, to get back to my private history of economics and that of my fellow proles, the need for a job was all the economics I could afford to pay attention to. I wasn’t looking for a business or professional career, far from it. A beneficiary of the GI bill mentality, college was cheap for proles, but in my case spoiled me for serious interest in the standard economics. I recognized the Military-Industrial Complex was all that was out there and I wanted just enough income needed to support a financially unambitious bottom feeder like myself. There is little to be ashamed of here. In every tribal, peasant, village economy - aside from our own West-ern variant - “economics” stays true to the Greek's original meaning. ECO was "household" as in household man-agement. It was the life sustaining day-to-day enterprise carried on by women, servants and slaves while the free men hung out downtown, or went off to sea to trade with or loot others. The University had offered me a private agenda. I started as a liberal arts major which in 1955 had a sort of prestige as monetarily useless. A pioneer drop out, I rejected success in the rat race, as it was affectionately called at the time, in favor of serious study outside the Ivory Tower. Dropping into a beatnik style that fit my lit-erary and philosophical un-ambitions. This kind of private agenda is not that unusual. It was normal for the many to seek alternatives (like intense family life) to monetary success to give a value to their lives that work did not. I eventually got the knack of getting a job. The shreds of family imported to the west coast proved helpful in introducing me to my most productive job in used books. Family is the one important economic factor that is not exclusively available to the higher percentiles. Certainly orphans and foster children, abused children, lacked even that advantage. Many of these were already on the street though Reaganites had not established the word Homeless as the stigma of choice. HOMELESS IS AN ECONOMIC INDICATOR - OR, THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL So it has been trickling down all over the globe for 50 years. And inequality has been what has de-veloped inexorably. A few Billionaires have the control of wealth that equals billions of people. As money is sucked increasingly into the hands of the few, there is nothing left for much of the population, Nothing. In our society for these possessors of zeros who have been hopefully called the homeless. In the logic of money, if you have no money you shouldn't exist. These homeless are internal immigrants, competing with global homeless who are called refugees. The Italians and Europe in gen-eral are trying to solve the problem by sinking boats. In the US we have internment camps, run for profit, which handle immigrants from countries our policies disrupt. Yet people continue stubbornly to exist. In the US, the people reduced to ashes continue to walk about and haunt the societies they are in. Currently in the US the bulk of the 80% desperately gulp down the trickling urine of the rich, offered the false hope that the more rich the more urine. Meanwhile, the homeless stubbornly prove that they can continue to exist though they have been thrown into the alleys where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. What does this prove? That there is no such thing as homeless humans.. Humans are a nesting animal and have to be flushed out by police power and have their habitats destroyed over and over again. But they don’t go extinct. For one, their populations are fed by rivers of the freshly rejected and by those who cannot or will not conform to the naked dollar. Guitars slung over their packs, their pock-ets stuffed with substances that take you out of the ugly world, dependent on each other for intimacy, solidarity and pleasure, a gypsy culture thrives. Their way offers an alternative consciousness not de-pendent on the availability of the success money can buy. It was this sort of inspiration that powered the revolution of the sixties. The inability to dissolve those outside the money culture presents us with a vertical invasion of native and natural people once more. The failure to extirpate our own homeless resonates in the rebel-lion of the rest of the globe by people who will not submit their value systems to corrections by those who serve only the bottom line. This failure calls in question all that the World Bank started in motion in the early forties. The bankers’ failure foretells the impotence of the trade agreements from NAFTA to the TeePees like TPP and TPA that would make the world safe for Billionaires. The strategy of the Developers has been to monetize, monetize, monetize. But the discovery has been spreading, like a hundredth monkey, that money doesn’t solve problems, it creates them. The trick of creating scarcity through predation and then claiming that scarcity is a law of nature has outlived its power to cloud our minds. It isn’t that we will be saved by an insurrection of the homeless. We will be liberated by the realization that poverty is just a concept and that the reality is living life in solidarity and community with the natural world of which we all are part. This is and was the way of life before the West forced upon the globe its perverted money culture, scheming to re-invent colonialism through a con job called development. Challenged by the intrinsic toxicity of our military-industrial-political party system, we are being converted now to this renewal. PAUL ENCIMER