This is not a disquisition on the origin of the terms “bear” and "bull” markets. If you're interested in that topic, please see www.merriam-webster.com/… The below story is about the alienating, carnivorous nature of a society focused on the interests of the stock market.
Jon Stewart’s valid point notwithstanding, even when they're right the Wall Street bears get far too much societal attention—as do the Wall Street bulls for that matter. Bear markets are a daily unspoken tragedy to many regular people struggling and generally failing in local “entrepreneurship." The year-round hardship and worry of Mom and Pop do not wait on the mediagenic bear markets of Wall Street to manifest. In fact, by design the vicious bears seeking sustenance on Main Street daily prowl forth from the protected habitat of Wall Street. But television personalities do not talk about that predation.
The real life picture of Mom and Pop working hard, playing by the rules, getting diabetes and ulcers, popping pain and anti-anxiety pills, and ultimately likely being rewarded by going broke is not as exciting as tycoons, institutions, and passive investors sometimes losing a large portion of their portfolios in the world’s biggest stock market. Both, however, are key complimentary parts of the myth that we call the American dream. The episodic suffering and loss of those participating in the speculative stock exchanges are acknowledged and feared. The chronic suffering and loss of local truly small business operators facing competition from and eventually succumbing to large carniverous firms sold on those same exchanges is celebrated.
Even bear hugs are now being nationally uber-fied. Caregivers like massage therapists are feeling the national corporate squeeze on their already puny profits. It is only “natural” that a large corporation willing to incorporate massage into its business culture would hire another large corporation to wring cost-savings from the persons actually doing the work. (www.incorporatemassage.com/...)
This is the true, banal, and culturally-acceptable “American carnage.” To Papa Bear and his kabuki nemesis Wall Street, its dancing bear time. Most of the negative focus must be placed elsewhere, as triumphalism prevails.
RECORD HIGH FOR S & P 500!(Trump Tweet, 9/29/17, mobile.twitter.com/...)
In his inaugural address, Donald Trump promised to save America from a hellish wave of crime and disorder. “The crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential,” said the president. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
There’s a small problem with this image. It’s a fantasy. And it’s a fantasy that serves a particular purpose: to demonize groups and protest movements organized around police reform. The evidence is the White House page on law enforcement, updated after Trump’s inauguration. “Our job is not to make life more comfortable for the rioter, the looter, or the violent disrupter,” writes the administration on a page titled “Standing Up for Our Law Enforcement Community.” But this isn’t demonization for its own sake; it’s central to the president’s larger political vision, a white identity politics that looks with skepticism and hostility toward claims of racial injustice.
On the other hand, leaving aside neuroses, if real or even imaginary bears, wolves, and other dangerous beasties, even old tired ones, still manage to track us, maybe we’re closer to life worth living than we think.
It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It looked and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, huge, red-eyed, not malevolent but just big—too big for the dogs which tried to bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the bullets they fired into it, too big for the very country which was its constricting scope. He seemed to see it entire with a child’s complete divination before he ever laid eyes on either—the doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with axes and plows who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, through which ran not even a mortal animal but an anachronism, indomitable and invincible, out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life at which the puny humans swarmed and hacked in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant: the old bear solitary, indomitable and alone, widowered, childless, and absolved of mortality—old Priam reft of his old wife and having outlived all his sons.
This intersection of conflicting beastly imageries, one accepting of an imposed oppressive economic system, the other liberating, wild, and often retrospective of life and nature squandered, is a competing superstructure above a dehumanizing economic base, where alienated Mom and Pop are gradually eaten up to produce corporate profits and capital accumulation. As we grow up, most of us are taught to fear the first only and to quickly forget as irrelevant the second, although domesticated pets may consciously or unconsciously fill a substitutionary role, albeit one largely divorced from nature.
As children we are sometimes allowed to fear beasties in a good way, although it doesn't always work out so well if we get nightmares—or wet ourselves. In my own experience in Faulknerian central Mississippi in the mid-1960’s, the segregated elementary school’s Halloween extravaganza was cause for great excitement to me and the other first graders. Half-Hispanic, the darkest kid in a constitutionally illegal “whites only” public school, I was given the assignment of doing a somersault on stage in a wolf costume purchased for $5 at great sacrifice by my own alienated mom and pop. Had it been a bear costume this anecdote would have been better, but we go to blog with what we have.
Back stage before my big moment, I desperately needed to go to the bathroom. Unfortunately, I was shy, the costume was tied from the back, and I was needed on stage. I thoroughly wet myself, but the body of the outfit was made of black polyester material, hiding the massive flow within. My big moment ruined, I began to silently cry, but no one could see my tears beneath the rubber wolf mask. I soon took the stage, smelly but dutifully putting heels over head, sliding, playing my tiny role with as much ferocious, soaking, rolling dignity as I could. It was all over so fast that the outfit seemed like an utter waste of much needed money. Mom washed it, I wore it again many times trick-or-treating, and I kept it for years in my toy box, a uniquely expensive memory of what might have been.
I have metaphorically put on my childhood wolf costume of late, turning its imaginary powers on Wall Street. I have made socialist popcorn quite a bit over the last couple months waiting for the nearly bursting U.S. stock market to piss all over itself and be “corrected” like a school child. (www.dailykos.com/...) A would-be left wing inversion of CNBC’s blowhard Cramer, I have suggested that even a full-on crash could come soon. (www.dailykos.com/...) I was particularly proud to make the dialectical connection between Trump raising the curtain on a debt ceiling extension and the possibly existential threat to his tenure that could arise from Wall Street chaos. (www.dailykos.com/...)
Like Stewart chastising Cramer, however, I myself was missing the larger bearish picture. Our real concern should be with the routine impact of the mad money political-economic game on Main Street, down the unnamed alleys where the uncounted and unemployed engage in coping strategies, and on the dwindling small farms beside forgotten country roads outside of town, now excellent places for cooking meth. When times are good to the people that really count with Trump, those at the top, the rest of us are still dependent upon trickle down, only now, unlike the Reagan era, we are expected to feel lucky when we get to go on ourselves.
We are more likely to see the rumored golden shower video than Mom and Pop are to enjoy material success in their working years from their dying small businesses. The bears of big profit-maximizing business are constantly on the prowl for “inefficient” slackers. Traditional Mom and Pop urban businesses, which can actually be satisfying places to work, constantly are being squeezed out for the benefit of profiteering. Many are gradually going the way of most small family farms, which have been crushed for generations and now face innovative carnivores called REITs and even bigger institutional investors (www.cnbc.com/...).
The eating of Mom and Pop for breakfast is usually irrelevant to the national business press or praised as creative destruction. The recent pushback on the “Bodega” startup is an exception, perhaps because the small businesses, long a fixture in major metropolitan areas, found sympathy online against a patently insensitive company.
Folks weren't happy that Bodega appeared to be taking aim at mom-and-pop shops run by hardworking immigrants, while simultaneously misappropriating immigrant culture and celebrating gentrification.***The company, founded by Paul McDonald and Ashwath Rajan, was profiled in a Fast Company article titled "Two Ex-Googlers Want To Make Bodegas And Mom-And-Pop Corner Stores Obsolete" that quickly went viral on Wednesday.***"Weird that they're calling this heinous vending machine 'Bodega' and not 'Gentrification Box,'"tweeted one person.
Must we simply concede to Wall Street's dreams? Or if we try to hold on to a small business, must we live lives of desperation and increasing alienation from the simple things that are most joyous to us? Certainly Wall Street and most of the rest of the country should not reasonably have the same dream.
Half of Americans do not even have the slightest token of a Wall Street investment to cash in and invest in postulated brighter personal or family tomorrows. But even if we have no skin in the game, or are being actively skinned in the game, as with stock price-motivated automation and layoffs, we are supposed to celebrate the lifestyles of the rich and famous like on Saturday night in the living rooms of yore watching a very bad TV show we older losers wish we’d erased from our memories.
[T]here's something jarring about Trump's stock market talk as he promises his commitment to the middle class and laments the poverty level: Those stock market gains will overwhelmingly benefit the richest Americans.
America's massively unequal stock ownership
Ignore for a second that stock index milestones like Dow 21K are inherently rather arbitrary. The broader point is that stock indexes have recovered nicely since the Great Recession — the S&P 500 (a more comprehensive look at the stock market than the Dow) has more than tripled from its trough in 2009.
However, stock ownership has slipped during that same period. According to Gallup, 52 percent of U.S. adults owned stock in 2016. Since Gallup started measuring this in 1998, that's only the second time ownership has been this low. These figures include ownership of an individual stock, a stock mutual fund or a self-directed 401(k) or IRA.
Even if we manage to have some skin in the Wall Street game, it is likely not very much: "the top 20 percent of Americans owned 92 percent of the stocks in 2013.” (Id.)
Just like Wall Street sells us its own myth of accessible luxury for all, we may still buy into a corollary myth of entrepreneurial magic potion. Most Mom and Pop businesses are indeed going the way of the small American farm, their profitable functions overtaken or consolidated by economically powerful entities. (www.dailykos.com/...) No amount of belief in magic will make most of us successful small business people much less strike it rich.
We too will not one day have towers named after us, even if we manage to qualify for a few bankruptcies. No, we are not comforted by the fact that lack of business longevity is actually the norm.
[A]round half of all businesses no longer exist after five years. Only one-third make it past their 10th anniversary. These statistics have been remarkably consistent through the years. Interestingly, major economic downturns don't seem to affect the survival rates for new businesses.
So folks, if we’re understanding this American dream thing correctly …, it behooves us to cash out the 401(k)s or IRAs we maybe don't have to invest in businesses that probably won't last! Of course, we may not have much of a choice, coping strategies and what not. There are only so many aluminum cans to collect on the dusty sides of the roads near us.
In alienated desperation we are forced to entrepreneur all over ourselves and other workers. The humiliating golden showers of our less than glamorous lives may, we are told, turn out golden after all if we have the right Midas touch.
Our fear should not be the fear of the ruling class any more than its American dream should be our dream. The bear we should naturally fear but respect has long been shot. Costumed and alienated from our essential selves, we are told to forget that the land is a wild place to be held in common with the wild things.
Inside somewhere, in our courageous child selves, we refuse to forget the truth of what we once experienced outside. Faulkner unfortunately wrote of this in the narrow masculine, and some will find the hunting ethos offensive, but he at least managed to capture a spirit of wildness.
He would hear it, not talking himself, but listening—the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it or Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey. It was of the men, not white nor black nor red, but men, hunters with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bear and deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest by the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter, the voices quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exact remembering, while he squatted in the blazing firelight as Tennie’s Jim squatted, who stirred only to put more wood on the fire and to pass the bottle from one glass to another.
Our so-called liberty and freedom to strive to get rich is not the same as the old bear’s liberty and freedom. The bear for which we should care cares not for markets.
There was an old bear, fierce and ruthless, not merely just to stay alive, but with the fierce pride of liberty and freedom, proud enough of the liberty and freedom to see it threatened without fear or even alarm; nay, who at times even seemed deliberately to put that freedom and liberty in jeopardy in order to savor them, to remind his old strong bones and flesh to keep supple and quick to defend and preserve them.
(Id.)
We put our true selves in jeopardy when, in a delusion of freedom, we accept the assigned soul-destroying, solidarity-gutting, money-grubbing roles, minor or major, Wall Street and its auxiliaries would have us to play. Of course, to make a living in an unjust system, sometimes we have no choice but to accept the desperation and alienation imposed upon us. But we must never cease to imagine an adventurous world of liberating friendship. And we can look for ways to fight back in solidarity against the Wall Street profiteering that increasingly runs most of our lives.
As present or potential members of the mass army of the unemployed, we have more in common with "superfluous" real or imaginary beasts than with the fatuous buyers and sellers posing as masters of the universe.
While alienated Mom and Pop may in their suffering sometimes be beasts themselves, neglecting the kids and self-indulgent, inside they are dying children too, long ago cut off from sensible reflection by a mass culture in denial about the system it supports. Rather than harshly judging alienated Mom and Pop, if we really want to be honest about our society we should objectively look for the source of their alienation. Alienated Mom and Pop generally are not to blame any more than they made me wet myself back stage in the first grade. To think otherwise is itself grossly immature.
In the face of the economic horrors, intercommunal strife and environmental perils confronting us, we could do with less solipsistic emoting and more sensible reflection.