Like drunken lemmings we shuffle closer to the cliff edge, following not triumphant leaders but leaders whose ideas have failed us generation after generation. Lucky lemmings, as you move closer to the edge of economic oblivion, don’t expect to find your shiny new leaders fixing to make the drop with you.

I witnessed the picture perfect parties with sadness, this inaugural week. I tried to wrench off my economist’s cap and replace it with a party hat. The party hat wouldn’t fit. My dismal science cap seemed glued to my skull as firmly as Dick Cheney seemed glued to his wheelchair. Poetic justice?

Despite the hoopla and best intentions, personified by President Obama, we are not receiving a silk purse. The economy and society of the United States remains a sow’s ear, from which a silk purse cannot be made, according the dictum of Jonathan Swift.

Certainly today’s electoral system in the U.S., in overcoming its outrageous segregationist history, is to be noted with relief. Certainly President Obama is ready and qualified for his task and represents the possibility of intelligent and humane government. It is to be hoped that he can withstand the destructive and regressive forces within his country. Beyond that positive and progressive result, little can change while the country insists its citizens must serve its economy rather than devising an economy that serves the citizens.

We are told the sky has fallen. There’s no money for the banks to lend. There’s no money for employers to pay to workers. There’s no money for affordable housing etc. etc. Don’t believe it!! Remember the basics. Wealth comes from control of land and labour. Humane and intelligent use of these resources produces what is needed for societal survival. Surpluses come from adding value. Added value, when properly distributed, progresses society.

In America’s world, theft of land, labour and resources has been de rigueur. Theft of these assets from non-Americans - from Borneo to Bahrain to British Columbia -  has enabled the US to exploit much of the rest of world, consuming natural resources and utterly failing to meaningfully redistribute the benefits and values to anywhere but Wall Street. But, the global Golden Goose has stopped laying and the U.S. suddenly finds it’s forgotten how to legitimately add value.

Its expertise at global theft and domestic bank robbery is no longer useful – the globe has turned pear shaped and there’s no money left in the banks! What to do?

Despite today’s fuss and angst many things in the U.S. and the developed world remain the same. Land masses, resources and potentials remain and await intelligent use. Equally, and not so intelligently, the same societal constructs, bosses and leaders are still in place. Those leaders still own and control the wealth of the nation.
The recent U.S. election didn’t change these facts. What has changed is, the consuming populace believes it can no longer afford to consume the products and natural resources that the leaders would like to sell.

The tried and true solution of the leaders, if the profit enjoyed from the sale of products and natural resources is not to be reduced, is to diminish, further, the cost of labour. This has been a tricky tactic to employ since slavery was officially banned. However, in the recent decades a cunning plan has evolved to reintroduce the equivalent of slavery in the U.S., and in many other ‘developed’ and ‘progressive’ countries.

The populace was initially force fed shiny consumer products and lifestyles with offers that could not be refused. We knew something was wrong but the consequences of declining the offers effectively exiled consumption rebels from suburbia’s familiar habitat – no house, no job, no family, no support.

So we consumed. Soon we were being sold not just discretionary baubles; soon, from the same vendors, we were being sold the very staples of life – air, water, modest shelter, simple food, basic healthcare etc. – at prices that might soon make Bernie Madoff blink.

We didn’t have to pay cash up front, of course. Just run a tab. We all know how this worked. Just understand basic banking, mortgages and consumer credit – what!!! We haven’t yet invented a computer powerful enough to decipher the logic of those ‘services’. What we do know is that some ‘invisible force’ has now determined that we’ve all now got to pay the bill for consuming what was force fed to us.

We must pay the vendor for stolen products that we really would like to have chosen not to purchase, except that eventually many of the products were essential to life - literally. We had no choice. We weren’t really greedy. We just didn’t see that we were buying a pig in a poke. We didn’t notice what all economic history teaches: Private profit, unregulated, must tend to ever larger capital groupings, to the disadvantage of civilized society.
Choice, the watchword of democracies, is diminished and eliminated.

So we look at a world of greed. The greed of unregulated pigs.

But you and I are not the greedy ones. And not all pigs are bad. Actually they are smart animals but much maligned.
To borrow from George Orwell, we’re now being addressed by the progeny of Napoleonic pigs. It is Napoleon’s pigs that now tell us that we must work for nothing for generations untold in order to pay our debt to society for our profligate borrowings: Work for nothing to pay back borrowings!! That’s slavery!!

Oh no, piglets. To do so will simply serve to preserve the capital accumulations of the Alpha pigs. Labouring for free under the snouts of pigs is not an option or an answer to anything. There are answers to today’s problems which will become clear when the correct questions are asked. What we hear, today, is the squeal of manufactured panic, echoed to convince that the sky has fallen and that we must follow the leader for our fitting of hair shirts and gruel diet.

If ever there was a time for labour solidarity, it is now. We must not submit to a land led by Napoleonic pigs, yoked as disenfranchised lemmings, until we reach the steps of the bankruptcy court. Today’s American solutions will never offer even a pigskin purse from the sow’s ear that is the modern U.S. economy and society.

For the moment only the overwhelming force of organized labour will produce something useful from this sow’s ear.