The failure of "Original Sin"

As good times roar back for corporate America, it’s bad enough that CEOs are collectively sitting on some $1.9 trillion in cash—much of it parked out of the IRS’s reach overseas—instead of hiring. (How many jobs can you buy for $1.9 trillion? America’s total expenditure on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars over a decade has been $1.3 trillion.) But what’s most galling is how many of these executives are sore winners, crying all the way to Palm Beach while raking in record profits and paying some of the lowest tax rates over the past 50 years.

- Frank Rich, "Obama’s Original Sin" (link: http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/obama-economy/presidents-failure/)

Staggering. I sure wish I knew the source of these data. Remove the parentheses and those sentences of Rich's make for a perfect paragraph.

If only we might add in an examination of how these "sore winners" as Rich described them cried their way through Palm Beach into the networks of the strangest of bedfellows, the Tea Partiers, the loosely organized people who pumped twitter tags like #tsot and #tcot full of viral Fox falsehoods. If only we might look at how that digital multimedia mess transformed into midterm takeovers of all levels of government. What was disguised as a rebellion against "Obamacare" and "Big Government" was possibly but one of the many faces of the consolidation of financial power in government. This is exactly where Frank's discourse nods off, by yawningly suggesting that Obama could have any power, much less enough power for re-election, without Wall Street.

If you want to catch but a tiny glimpse of what I mean, just look at who replaced Rahm Emanuel as the White House Chief of Staff: the only guy more Chicago than Rahm who was also Big Finance gilded by JPM (that JP Morgan) in the form of Bill Daley. Everyone old is new again, and richer this time around. Last time he entered a democratic administration the administration turned hard to starboard (re: Right). And that was well before he made buckets of millions from Wall Street. He's so effective he's barely there. When's the last time the media scrutinized Bill Daley?

But consider exactly how Daley entered the White House and consider the terms in which we might choose to express this political event. Did Obama choose Daley or did the very real circumstances of contemporary power necessitate Daley as Chief of Staff? In saying yes to the former, that Obama could have been that mythical self-made man-into-man-making-country, that the personal-choice narrative has true (has *any*) explanatory force, you end up ignoring many sociotechnical realities that far exceed the powers of individuals, particularly individuals not drenched in that holiest of Money Rivers, the digital one that runs through Wall Street and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and in and out of the distributed exchanges of the world.

One of those ignored sociotechnical realities is the raw muscle illustrated in those aforementioned perfect four sentences Frank Rich wrote: that fighting the C-level $1.9 trillion pool plus the other many trillions moving through the global financialized flows is not merely upstream swimming. It is possibly equivalent to choosing to rock climb up Niagara Falls. You're not going to make it. And there's no spawning to be had anyway unless it takes you to heaven that is. I don't think Obama is choosing to lay down and die.

The majority of American people have no understanding of what Wall Street has done and have no tools to make choices nor are they being given any. Our "big government" did a study on us and found 40% of us are functionally illiterate. And that was 10 years ago. The American people could surely possess the tools to contribute to challenging financial powers but that would need to be engineered. I don't see too many people working on it and I don't see too many dollars heading their way.

Those dark pools of trillions demand tax cuts that continue to decimate education and everything else that cannot feed them. That demand isn't just choice: it's being programmed into the desires of people who can only lose from expressing such desires at the voting booth. How can that happen? Those tranched trillions when not streaming financial transactions are streaming media full of complete bullshit into the eyes of that majority suffering from this undereducation snapping under the terrifying weight of well-engineered and easily digested lies. And investing by the billions into developing more efficient means of making those messages digestible and effective choice-makers.

I wait to hear from someone who can actually articulate a way for someone to serve meaningfully as President of the United States, an effective POTUS, and overcome the Scorched Globe Machinery of Financialization. How might a US President make meaningful political change in any arena in 2011? Surely not by choosing to Just Say No to Wall Street, not alone as the solitary self-made-man-solely-making-America at least. Just Say No was dumb enough when Nancy Reagan suggested that as a way to counter widespread drug addiction. (It was just code for Just Say Now anyway.)

We can cling naively to these mythical leader narratives just as DC, which now stands for Disaster Capitalism, poises itself in the form of massive networks of algorithm-determined trading platforms and jacked-in fund managers to cash in on sinking the US Treasury. While hedging itself, of course, just in case the US Treasury doesn't go down. And, heck, we can take the original story of Adam and Eve's original sin as literal truth. And pump it into US schools just after the tax cuts permanently maim them.