OK. What In Hell Was THAT All In Aid Of?

Stock market up. Stock market down.  Stock market up. Down. Up. Down.

Not a single shoe did the Stock Market manufacture.  Not a bridge, a road.  It planted no crops, taught no child, ministered to no sick person.  It didn't build a single house, repair a single car, machine a single die, pour so much as one ingot of steel. 

It did absolutely nothing to rebuild America.  It has now even become uncoupled from "real value," "real businesses," "real things," and is simply a big casino for a tiny handful of The International Monied Class. The disconnect is dangerous for America because "real" people have bought into the notion that somehow they are part of the International Monied Class, that the market will affect their real life, that in pandering to Wall Street, Congress (a wholly owned subsidiary of both Wall Street & Multi-national corporations --Which, as Mitt Romney reminded an outraged senior citizen in Iowa, "are people," as in "Corporations are people."), is somehow going to "help" the average working stiff.  It won't. 

So decoupled has Wall Street become from reality, that stocks that used to be valued and traded based on  actual value, have now become disconnected algorithms -- meaningless bits of data moving at the speed of light, split second speculation based on . . .  split second speculation, pure gambling and gaming of the system, totally divorced from the real Wealth of Nations, a con game that enriches a few at the expense of everyone else.

Matt Taibbi is right: America has now become Griftopia, a nation of grifters, addicted to the blinking Big Spin, frantically buying lottery tickets, penny-ante day traders, eyes glued to the streaming stock numbers, dreaming of the big payday that will never come because in Griftopia, the Street is being run by and for the benefit of a handful of major players.  And as for the "real" people?  They're the mooks and marks.

Yowsa, yowsa.  Step right up.    

And Now, The Question

Ah, the stock market is dropping like a stone.  Guess who makes money when the stock market drops like a stone?  Guess who makes money buying up tons of blue-chip stocks cheap when the market drops like a stone, then waits for the market to return and thereby makes pots more money?

Working people?  Poor people? Middle class people who are out of work and underwater on their mortgages, their 401K's shreds?  Why, Nooooo.  Not them. They lose their jobs as multi-national companies dump them and move those salary-savings (and the jobs) offshore.  Speculators?  Really, really rich speculators?  Like Wall Streeters? 

Ah, yes. Lots of quick money to be made when economies crash.  Lots of money to be made by, uh, helping economies to crash, too. So, let's all give a big shout-out to the Tea Party who were instrumental in getting this Wall Street party started in the first place. Yippee! Yo, Michelle Bachman, you were right.  Claiming defaults and downgrades would be harmful to our economy were all a big Democratic lie. Rich people, who are the only ones that count, are gonna get richer and if regular people get hurt?  Talk to the hand.  

In America, "regular" people don't matter any more. They're not the demographic American business is looking for.  Brazilians are.  Brazilians, for example, are in an expanding economy, having lots of babies, setting up households.  Lots of money to be made by American companies who move their operations (and jobs) offshore to focus on their new customers and grow their new business.  And those new customers aren't Americans. Who are broke and so not buying what American companies produce any more. So the hell with them.

Unless, of course, Americans can be turned into non-union, cheap-wage sweatshop workers hired by multi-national American companies to produce products for, say, Brazilians. Hey, maybe the tag "Made in America" will once again mean something.  O.K., maybe that wouldn't quite mean what it used to mean, but heck.  In a third-world country like America, a sweat shop job is better than nothing. 

Meantime, happy days are here for the big cash-boys.  Mo' money, mo' money.  Let the good times roll and God bless the child. . .