Have you ever given much thought about money? It seems to be taking on a mystical, magical, otherworldly mystique. Where does it come from? It used to be pretty simple. I had a crop of apples and you had a bunch of grapes. So we traded. Wealth was physical, sensual. You knew what you had and what you didn't have. You knew what your neighbor had. And you even knew your enemy: that was the guy with the weapons that could simply come in and plunder your wealth in an act of physical violence and brutal intimidation.
Today it's all more subtle. Weird, actually. It's all in electronic digits. The whole system is maintained through an ideology that assumes that those who control the weapons can be trusted to keep account of our digits and give us this day our daily bread and wine. But the digits aren't reflective of any "thing." You can't see my apples and I can't see your grapes. All we have is digits on a printout, and the debt certificates we carry in our pocketbooks that themselves are rooted in the mysterious, magical digital economy of financial speculation.
I mean, what keeps the system from erasing my digital wealth tomorrow? What keeps the system from saying that my $100 is now worth two cents? Why is it that we simply couldn't contemplate the possibility of national health care but suddenly conjured up hundreds of billions for bankers? That's what I mean by weird. Does anyone really have a handle on this stuff?
I keep glancing at the stock market and notice how my pension goes up and down, as I awaken to the reality that whatever money I'm socking away might or might not be there when I come of age. I keep thinking about the unemployment rate, and I hear the president talk about reviving an export economy but then it dawns on me: export what?
It's not like America produces stuff. All we do is serve hamburgers from cows raised in South America and butchered in Mexico. All we do is create designs for other nations to use as they build things. Indeed, basically most of what we export is information, which has a certain value but a very limited labor base. No wonder so many are unemployed; we've got no apples to sell to each other right here in the neighborhood.
Of course, we do have surplus bodies for use by military corporations and imperial plundering. That's our role in the magical digital global economy. We're the muscle. This means we've become the pirates, the bad guys, the ones everyone else hates. Such a rep is good for business but pretty devastating for family and community, and all that which makes life good. But who can afford goodness in an economy made worthless by the rule of money?