We all know, by now, that we live in a nation that has an industrial platform that is like the island of atlantis...on its way to the bottom.

Once the home of a mighty factory system, the envy of all the world, we now live off Asian-sourced industrial imports, and worse yet we purchase them with what amounts to trade credits .

these days...we're on the worlds tab ...

and to think the reward for this ..this what ???...this .. post industrial process is the grim protracted spectacle
of 10 million decent paying manufacturing jobs
simply rolling off the left coast cliff of north america into the Pacific ocean, to wash up --manned by fiddle dee diddled
"low wage substitutes " on the far shores of asia .

well My fellow Americans, welcome to the world .....
that James Earl Carter, the Wotan of the peanut belt, brought us.

Yes, 'twas during the watch of a Democrat the fatal blow was struck -- a member of the very same party that brought us the new deal
the party that rescued America's production system
from its own financial toxins and way way back when ...in the days
our Johnny "air pirate" McCain was still shitting his short pants.

genesis:

Recall the one piece we still collectively retain from back in those jimmy carter years -- at least what's still in our mainstream media's living memory -- it was an age of homolitic sweaters and well ....wild, raging, highball expressing inflation.

in fact By the midterm fraggulation election of '78 it was very very clear to all prudent Dembots that "something had to be done about this " and done quickly before we turned nto ....what....maybe a size 60 argentina ....

and as is only to be expected from a frugal fundy type guy
jimmy turned to the age old Conventional wisdom for his remedy :

apply the credit brakes, and apply em hard baby and long ...

and sure enough folks ...the credit brakes were duly applied.

But did we really really need to? could we have gone another route ??? instead of summarily crushing the production system
with a sharp financial inflow contraction
could we have engineered a serious formal reconfiguration
... a novel breakthrough in social design ?

Instead of the heavy dose of good old cod liver oil we got,
could we have actually instead
morphed the system, sublated the bidness world as we knew it,
and headed off toward a far far better place and time?

In any case, we didn't.

instead of perpetual prosperity
instead of the yellow brick road ...
We got the Volckerdaemmerung

and the rest is but a gathering misery.

here's the story ....

the ur tale :

Deepsighted as usual, Father Smiff dubbed our hero Fafner, the giant co-builder of Valhalla, and eventual dragonic keeper of the golden Ring.

Indeed the tale of our hero one paul double x Volcker has a Wagnerian similitude to it
-- not like that long-measure, open-measure,
Rhine-flows-on theme at the beginning
of Das Rheingold.
More like the the ring
of ten thousand sledges
or whatever it is in this case(*),
blamming away at industrial America,
hammering it into a million shivers
-- but I digress.

leave it at this for now.... My real point is quite anti-Wagnerian.

dramatis personae :

hero

At left, that's our hero , tall Paul, the master of the pythonic credit hold, right there in a group shot of hi-fi outlaw regulators taken not too long ago.
He's the big one in the middle, next to Alan of Green Bubbles.

Take a moment to savor his oafish countenance.
This bastard put our credit system
into the most vicious figure 4 submission hold
since george marshall saved all the free institutions
in western europe from george orwell

anti hero :

We at the same time had a shrewd dwarf,one Abba Lerner,
shown left, a very small woody allen of a man
with a very big and probably complete answer to our inflation fevers

If Jimmy C had only listened to abba,
instead of allowing that jumbo Princetonian dolt
to crush the credit dynamo
indeed it was driving
the wage/profit spiral
causing it to wind its way ever higher up
the infinite price pole

if only that good souled well intened god fearing man jimmy
had said "no not this time no slaughter of the innocence ..this time
this time we'll not slam the economy into a hell of a time out
nope ...the age-old way is not my way... not the human rights way
....premeditated mass jobicide is a crime against humanity too
this time no credit constrictor
golly if i listen to this banker's ivy league buffle bag here
and let him have his head ...why he'll squeeze the system so tight it'll knock the pips out of tumbling dice in Las Vegas

but he didn't say that or think that or dream that
no jimmy did it paul's way and brought on, with the inevitablity of a Teutonic curse, and by the very intricate concatenations of its own internal workings....
the doom of American manufacturing.

and to think the very different and renewing "market " design modifications ...the novel alternative mechanism
was there ready to rock and roll...as complete at birth as minerva herself
ripe for immediate full force implementaion

right off the old dwarf's drafting board

let me repeat myself ..its a lammentation after all

Instead of destroying industrial America
in order to save what is ultimately
nothing but a spontaneously generated
functionally parasitic elaboration
we could have said "devil ...take the hind most"
to our "cutting edge" private hi fi wired corporate system
and listened to the shrewd little immigrant keynesian economist
and rigged up a new-model industrial economy

-- and in short,fairly cheap order, too --

one able to chug along in substance much as before
but without what the wild untamed only contained price level and all the conflicts we've coward b4 all these years
--- that is up until now * ----

ever since the Volckerdaemmerung its been
a miserable dispensation for the wage class a dispensation
full of technical moth-holes and periodic policy-driven brownouts and, most of all, just what the shrewd dwarf most wanted to end, our chronic underutilization of existing productive capacity -- a state of affairs so costly in lost output, it puts off our planet's return to Eden for generations ....

The alleged antagonist of this opera
but in fact its godot is one lord NIARU master of the "non-inflation-accelerating rate of unemployment
a barrier to incresaed output beyond which lies the rampant stallions of inflation
the barrier sometimes get called
the "natural" rate of unemployment for short
well citizens there's nothing fuckin' natural about it at all

We can't even see it It's spectral,
apart from the Fed's fearful fingerpointing into the void ahead
its a nullity
beyod the merlins' doomstruck cry of "Watch out! we're nearing the barrier
Unemployment is getting too low! Wages are about to take off
the barrier will be burst inflations herd free to stampede...unless we ......

Crunch goes the credit pump !

Year in and year out this unemployed reserve capacity sits idle -- like its a pit of shit under the job tree -- its there
producing a drag on output 24/7
-- a block to any broader based prosperity.

Dare I say it -- for the majority of us,
it's a ball an chain slowing our pursuit of happiness itself.

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The system supposedly demands this of us all, in order to curb its own inherent tendency toward a wage/profit spiral, a sudden cobra out of the basket act, waiting just beyond X% of unemployment. For the avoidance of this, we accept serious "secular production slack" -- millions of idle hands and thousands of idle machines -- as if it were a technical limitation of any flexible innovative production system.

But if Jimmy'd listened to dwarf Abba back then ---- we coulda ended all that, and even more wonderfully, ended all the episodic doses of RJD (rapid job destruction) required to curb the wagery appetite for a "real " raise beyond the reach of the presently possible

"Natural rate of unemployment!" indeed

One time in the late 90's, skipper Greenglue actually took us down below the taboo limit. Why didn't we see it as the moment a weird corporate-imposed self-serving superstition burst apart right before our eyes?
No, unstead ...it was treated as a flukey miracle, later explained by the merlins of wall street by the vagaries of this spectre's shifting taboo zone.

It wasn't a parting of the Red Sea,but it was the clinton second term miracle prolly telling us we had reached another cataract ...but that's another story

ps
It's quite amazing to me how most of the time we don't even notice the waste of it all ...all this non-production that might have been
all the jobs all the ...security
and why ???
well we this missed output must be sacrificed.... to protect and preserve...the integrity of "the corporate system".

And it's even more astounding to me that on the few occasions when we the people are forced to stop and to notice---when we're thrown into RJD mode by the fed ---- we act like a 60-year-old man suddenly noticing the effects of his chronic fatigue syndrome and calling it "just my age".

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*That would be the Nibelungs' leitmotif on the descent to Nibelheim, Owen. See below. -- Ed.