Welcome to Buenos Aires!

With the passage of bankruptcy reform, Americans will begin to feel the heat that much of the world has suffered under since the advent of Free Trade, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund.

In a morbid duplication of the process that all but exterminated the family farmer as a viable economic enterprise, the bankers and financial institutions initiated the process by shamelessly promoting the concept of debt accumulation as a means to maintaining a modern living standard. Even as the nation shuddered under the collective trauma of 911, we were encouraged by our leaders to continue shopping. Even as our wages declined, as high paying jobs disappeared, as the stock market tumbled on scandal after scandal, as corporations declared bankruptcy to avoid paying pensions, as credit card companies exploited the concept of the null agreement (agreement by failure to withhold consent) and wrote evermore conditions into ever finer print, we were assured that all would be well as long as we kept spending.

In the parlance of the street hustler, that was the hook. Once the hook is in and the consumer is buried under a mountain of debt, the rules of the game are changed. The friendly banker, who counseled and encouraged our debtor ways, is suddenly obstinate and the only way out from under is the slow bleeding known to the third world as The Austerity Program.

Those who are placed in the program will not only lose their assets (or in the case of nations, their natural resources), they will also lose the alternative of opting out. They will lose all means of recovery and all methods of easing the pain. Single mothers will lose their children. Middle class families will become impoverished and the poor will become the homeless. Moreover, adding insult to injury, the clients will be required to pay for a financial counselor who will (a) chastise them for being so gullible as to believe the peddlers of credit to begin with, (b) advise them that there is no possibility of redemption, and (c) hold their hands on the way to the financial executioner’s door.

Welcome to Buenos Aires!

If there is any virtue in this latest assault on the working poor and the indebted middle class, it is that a growing number of Americans will begin to appreciate first hand what compassionate conservatism really is. Like debt itself, there is a limit to the amount of degradation, neglect and insult we will suffer in silence. In 2003, a group of twenty nations representing over half the world’s population, rose in opposition to the policies of the World Trade Organization. They did not succeed in stopping the process of exploitation but they slowed the juggernaut and the issue is not yet settled.

When will the growing legions of the working poor and the declining middle class finally rise in opposition to the policies of this administration? When will we realize that the leaders of both parties no longer have our interests in sight, no less in heart? When we will understand that we have mortgaged our children’s future and the American dream is no longer our own?

Perhaps we can be comforted by the maxims of eastern philosophies and the laws of physics: What comes around goes around and every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

What happens when the gorillas in the world economic jungle call in their chips? Just as homeowners are not the owners of their homes (mortgage companies are), just as third world nations are not the owners of their own resources (wealthy nations and their corporate monoliths are), so America in the global economy is not the owner of its own economy: Japan and China are.

When America is asked to submit to its own Austerity Program, we may discover that we already have, that the only ones with anything left to give are the corporations, who will promptly declare their home bases anywhere but here.

Welcome to Port-au-Prince!

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS).