Now Age Minute - 4.28.09
The Stress Test
The latest victim of stress of American capitalism was found hanging dead in his basement last week. According to a story from the NY Times:
"The acting chief financial officer of the troubled mortgage giant Freddie Mac was found dead Wednesday morning at his home in Northern Virginia, the police said.
The executive, David B. Kellermann, who had been with Freddie Mac for 16 years, apparently committed suicide by hanging himself, according to people with knowledge of the investigation."
A few weeks back, I was discussing the Mexican Drug War with my fourteen year-old daughter. We were talking about American's appetite for drugs as the driver, and I asked her why she thought so many Americans need to alter their state of mind. She was quick with an answer. "That's easy. In Italian class, my teacher said that life in Italy is based more around the family and less on work, as opposed to America, where life is based around work, making life in Italy less stressful than in America", she explained. Then she added, "Everyone knows life in America is stressful".
That conversation got me thinking, again, as to why in America, the "land of the free, and home of the brave', does everyone appear to be checking out, in one way or another? I have some thoughts.
Despite warnings from Jefferson in 1802, and Lincoln in 1846 (quotes below), with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the industrial/banking elite thought they had successfully extinguished the American experiment of self-determination, through freedom and democracy, by wrenching control of the American money supply from the people. But, soon after, the Great Depression arrived, only to be remedied by the war economy of World War II, and FDR's New Deal programs which created a social safety net, and planted the seeds for a middle class.
The New Deal was more than the corporate/money masters (Republicans) could handle, however. A government created middle class smelled too socialistic for their hyper-capitalistic cult. So, they employed their media marketing magicians to seed a belief that posits capitalism as the system for courageously competitive Americans, and socialism for sissy Europeans. Government helping people, in their view, was just bad. Conversely, today government helping banks and corporations is in the public interest. Despite our free press, access to information, and advanced system of education, how did Americans fall for such a scam? It came with the promise of a free toaster.
Over the last generation, America has become the hotbed for quantitative living. Through manipulation of media-delivered product marketing, we've become trained to evaluate life by the numbers, where a better life means, more, bigger, faster, and so on. We traded the qualitative values of freedom and democracy, and traded them for the Golden Calf of capitalism and consumerism. All this has turned America into a greenhouse for addictive behavior, where enough is never enough.
Add to this our "tough guy" self-reliant, American image, where only wimps would reveal the level of stress and anxiety they are experiencing to live the American Dream, and you have a society where David Kellermann is found by his wife, hanging dead by exercise equipment in his basement.
The "Stress Tests" that the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are currently putting the big banks through is most illustrative of the times we live in, where focus is on the health of the institutions that caused our financial hell, rather than on the quality of life of the victims (regular people). Where's my stress test?
Despite the Obama administration's best intentions (I'll give them the benefit of the doubt), a continuation down this path of throwing piles of public money at big banks, while people continue to lose their jobs, their homes, and their retirement plans turn from 401-K to 401-K-Y, will only result in more stress, more anxiety, and more drugs to ease the pain of just being an American. A new toaster is no longer enough.
I see what's happening now as a sort of Advanced Darwinism, where "dog eats dog" has become "people eats people", and "survival of the fittest" has become "survival of the most devious". Call me French, if you like, but the stress of living day-to-day just to feed the American Capitalist Beast is more than I want from my life. To borrow a line from a great songwriter, "Does anybody else in here feel the way I do?"
Craig Gordon
Power to the People,
Power to the People.
Power to the People,
Power to the People,
Right on!
- John Lennon
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers
conquered."
- Thomas Jefferson, 1802
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
