Dependently Wealthy

My brother-in-law's answer, when I queried him about his job security in these 'tough economic times', was "nuclear-proof." I think the same of my job, because I actually produce something. Ha! U.S. jobs that produce something! What a novel concept! These sorts of jobs have been in decline since 1958, ever since we decided it was better to exploit cheap foreign labor to save a few dollars on plastic lawnmower wheels and cheap silverware.

During my luncheon today I read about all those teary-eyed just-terminated Lehman Bros. employees...they never expected bankruptcy, they said. No one saw this coming, it was overheard. No...the Fed didn't bail them out. Their $260k/year jobs have vanished overnight...apparently Hurricane Ike made landfall not over Houston but over Nassau St. this weekend.

Making a quarter-mil plus in lower Manhattan is nothing these days. Apparently, these financial sector workaholics are dependently wealthy...dependent on the sweat equity of all our our evaporating manufacturing jobs that actually produce something of value in this nation. And as these jobs evaporate off to Vietnam, off to East Pakistan, these financiers are discovering that this information- and financial- economy they depend on can't function without a productive floor.

The thing is, you often hear someone describe themselves as 'independently wealthy', but you never hear them describe themselves as 'dependently wealthy.' I'm here to tell you, folks, that the U.S. is dependently wealthy. Well, to be honest, what the U.S. has is hallucinated wealth. We hallucinated our productive wealth, then our tech wealth, then our commodities wealth, then our housing wealth, and now our banking wealth. What's next?

This entire nation is dependently wealthy...dependent on cheap Asian imports, dependent on cheap Canadian and Mexican hydrocarbons, dependent on China not purging their dollar reserves, bus mostly, dependent on hallucinations...hallucinations that we are somehow exempt from ecology, that we are entitled to perpetual motoring, that we can continue to pave over our prime farmland with strip-malls and exurban housing developments, that sprawl is our economy.