Mr. President, Where Are We Going?

by Sam Osborne

Nelson D. Schwartz, in Sunday's New York Times, wrote that job losses pose a threat to worldwide stability, and we in the United States are not exempt from the problem.  Neither we nor other nations of the world have considered what it is all of us common folks are expected to do to make a living.  How do WE THE PEOPLE engage in personally meaningful, financially rewarding, and culturally beneficial work?

The stimulus package that has just passed and will soon be signed into law, did not query the matter; it is a shoot-first-ask-later answer.  At best, it may be enough to start towing the remains of a dying economic system off to the junkyard of things that have run their course, and to attempt to get the nation moving on into a sustainable American Dream that starts with learning, moves to working, and ends up in a place where we enjoy a quality of life that is worth living – this in place of the cancerously destructive mass consumption of people and resources in the production of landfill-destined things and in the squirreling of ill-gotten gains into Swiss bank accounts.

An emerging means for making a better and more fulfilling living is not your father’s economy, that of Adam Smith, or more of the Republicans' version of either.

Everything under the sun changes, economies included, and into history have gone food gathering and hunting, camping and trading, serfdom and servitude, mercantilism and craft/agrarian production, and industrial capitalism and the mass labor movement.  Now fading into the past goes the current top-down, mass-consumption market that has ravenously eaten itself alive and discards onto the bone heap of waste no-repair appliances, the latest gadget and other junk, working people and various business owners, and now investors whose nest eggs have disappeared.

These savers are regularly discarded by means of a Ponzi scheme that used to be thought of as the financial market – a house of cards now full of ever improved financial “instruments” that gobble up loot, even that of government, and poop prolific piles of profitless paper.

To our rescue has come a man that knows how to get out in front of the parade, President Barack Obama.  The march is well underway, the music is stirring, masses of people have left the curb and joined in the procession, and it may not be too long until someone yells from back of the line, Mr. President, where are we going?

Sam
Osborne, former editorial writer and Opinion Page Editor,
Iowa City Press-Citizen; former college professor and Business Department chair,
Ellsworth Community College; and currently out to pasture drinking too much
coffee.  His commentary, The Obstructed View,  will appear on these blog pages weekly, more or less.