Political power, wrote Mao Tse-tung, grows out of the barrel of a gun.
At times it does. Most times, here in America, it grows first out of a wallet - yours, industry's, the government's. Seldom is the exercise of power more complicated than when the wallets turn out to be empty.
Our own Continental Congress financed the earliest days of this country, for example, by confiscating the private property of the colonists who had been on the wrong side " King George's " and using it as collateral to borrow from Europe. The capitalist dream of America was built on debt.
Today the banks confiscate the houses of Americans who cannot pay for them. It's legal, but the principle is just as slippery.
The thing to keep our eye on is what's at work here: That wealth dressed as "credit" and "debt" is the same thing as the power to govern. And power changed hands in 2008.
Our Constitution in fact has been rewritten, on the faces of our country's currency, its trust deeds, its bonds and stocks and credit cards, all the way out to "toxic" pieces of paper like synthetic collateralized debt obligations, subprime securities and credit default swaps.
Recession is what we call it when debt becomes itself the bullet that hits the bone. That's the impact when credit goes bad, the impact everyone feels a little when they overdraw their checking accounts or pay the bills late. Hurts, but usually the wound heals.
But now it's not healing. Now banks live or die at the pleasure of the Fed, people keep or lose their homes at the pleasure of the Treasury, and Detroit will go on or vanish at the pleasure of the White House. What has the power of credit and debt become on a national scale, while we weren't looking?
- Millions of people will lose their houses.
- Millions more will lose their jobs.
- Hundreds of thousands of businesses are closing.
- International trade is shriveling.
- Health insurance and health care will recede even further from the reach of more
and more of us and our children.
- College education is or will become unattainable.
- Dreams of a cottage by the lake, even a timeshare near Disneyland, have
evaporated.
- No more new pair of boots every winter; a lot less steak to barbecue each summer.
- Fewer days, fewer destinations for vacations.
- Dwindling job promotions, fewer or no pay raises.
- Less minutes on the cell phone, less purchases on the Internet, less gas in the tank.
- A growing shadow of inflation.
- Less confidence in the future, less security against disaster.
Without signing our names to anything more than a dishonored bank draft, we've lost power over our lives.
And about our communities, read the headlines: The federal government's own policies and goals are changed, restricted, redirected, endangered. The state's and community's services and social contracts are becoming impossible to honor.
An accident of history? No. It's happened because those to whom America entrusted the faith in the intangible value of our dollars, our earnings, our solemn bonds within society, have redirected the wealth-making powers of the economy to enrich themselves and their associates.
While our guardians all relaxed their guard. While too many of us employed the power given us to indebt ourselves without honoring the accompanying responsibilities.
We trusted in the store of our consumer riches, and the willingness of the world to finance them, and the intentions of our financiers and our government institutions, the same way we trust in God. By simply making assumptions, that things would go on forever.
It may not be the same as yielding up our power as citizens at the point of a gun.
We've surrendered that power just as certainly nonetheless. And the terrible truth is that we may never be the same ever-improving, ever-promising, ever-hopeful society again.
- Robert Cutts is a career journalist who has been a news reporter, magazine writer and editor, author of two nonfiction books and a college journalism teacher. He lives in Gardnerville and Japan.