Big business is so much bigger than business now, that the few economic models that ever made sense are all distorted. For instance, if there was a ceasefire imposed on just one of the ongoing foreign massacres (and there are at least three at any give moment), the "economy" would be in real trouble. But if people are homeless, unemployed, destitute and starving, the market doesn't even notice.

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When I realized the other day that I had just paid ten dollars for a small box of Cheerios, it started a train of thought that has finally chuffed to the end of the line. Like my Daddy's train from Work, when I was two.

Imagine a quiet, shady pond in the woods. Fine silt covers the bottom, blanketing rocks, rotting leaves and twigs, maybe a beer can, under uniform brown fuzz. A breeze perturbs the surface, clouding the bottom for a moment, but leaves no sign on the silt carpet. Raindrops start to make ripple-targets, but below the stillness remains. A small puff of silt-dust rises as some tiny creature withdraws hastily into the muck. The occasional bubble breaking the surface is the only sign that Time is still in effect.

Then I'm yanked back to Modernity! In my off-the-rails steaming brain the image morphs into the global economy. Economic news, stock prices rising and falling, billionaires created and destroyed, whole nations clinging to plummeting credit ratings, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund leaning on the more helpless to impose "austerity" and sink them under impossible loads of un-money. Astronomical sums trading robotic hands at the behest of AI at lightspeed in miniscule fractions of pennies a thousand trillion times a minute...the inconceivable scale of the thing!

It's an ecosystem for sure, artificial though it be, a self-regulating, self-perpetuating, uncontrollable niche-environment, on which we mere people now depend for our daily bread. Those of us who still qualify for bread. Not the hundred million or more who have now hit the hard road with only the rags on their backs, great-grandparents, mothers, aunties, babies and all.

As wealth disparity increases, more and more of the general population gets sifted to the economic bottom like fine silt, partaking less and less in the upper strata. But a pond is just a pond; there is no pretense about it. There are sometimes snapping turtles waiting for ducklings or pink toes to come within range. Or if you're very small, dragonfly nymphs with their extensible alien-movie-monster fangs. But there is no narrative in which individual denizens of this rich aquatic paradise, with pluck and luck, can improve their station in life, like rising entrepreneurs in our financial ecosystem playing to win. Or even survive. Here, a newt is just a newt, end of story.

In light of this alluringly peaceful vision, I surmise that the normal, everyday exchange of goods and services, what we used to call "the economy," has left town.

Supply and demand, which once-upon-a-time was how groceries appeared at the local market, is so Twentieth Century. It no longer applies where we work, or do our shopping. And now I think I know why: "Growth," the Holy Grail, is not about the economy growing, not about a bigger pie. It's about Scale. And this kind of growth has finally made us all economically obsolete because of what grew: the minimum scale at which an enterprise remains viable.

"Consumers" can't keep up, they're no longer part of this anyway. Not when the "product" is (for just one small example) a million rounds of "depleted" uranium weapons, or a million tons of Bunker-Buster bombs under contract to the weapons industry, previously to the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, last week to Israel, or the US Army. Not when it's a new fleet of nuclear missile-carrying submarines bound for Australia, or hundreds of leaking F-35 nuclear-capable fighter jets bound for Ukraine, or Taiwan, or the next sacrificial nation being hooked up for "austerity." Somewhat like a mortician hooking up a trocar to drain a cadaver.

"Consumer spending, or personal consumption expenditures (PCE)"* no longer reflects economic activity, much less health. If it ever did. International arms/drug/oil/land/"security" deals do that now. It has been announced repeatedly by politicians and administration officials that spending for foreign aid and munitions shipments mainly goes to American contractors. A big "win" for "job creators" back home!

All that "spending" now moves between massive financial structures on a scale that renders the normal exchange of goods and services smaller than a silt-particle in comparison. Supply and demand at this level is only related to my breakfast cereal by rumor. A change in the configuration of silt won't make prices spike, or tank, anymore. Like if Vermont went on a Cheerios-free diet (suspecting child labor somewhere in the supply chain, or finding out Cheerios makes excellent pellet stove fuel or cow fodder).

The belief-system in which we, the people, still have bargaining power, that the market will cushion the excesses of monopolies on life-saving medicines, corporate malfeasance, price gouging, offshore sweatshop child labor, persists despite the obvious indifference of the soul-crushing economic ecosystem. Fixtures and forces in motion carom off one another untouched by human hands (or minds). The ramifications are beyond calculation. With billiard balls the highest number of predictable collisions and resultant vectors is eight.

Big business is so much bigger than business now, that the few economic models that ever made sense are all distorted. For instance, if there was a ceasefire imposed on just one of the ongoing foreign massacres (and there are at least three at any give moment), the "economy" would be in real trouble. But if people are homeless, unemployed, destitute and starving, the market doesn't even notice.

In fact, if everyone were well fed and comfortably housed, that too would be a serious economic downturn. In other words, the system relies on poverty and hunger as well as wholesale murder to function at all.

This mega- or meta-economic activity, far beyond "too big to fail," both accompanies and determines the distribution of wealth. Also of militaries, mass migrations, mass unemployment malnutrition, and misery. Profits for a few giant monopolies such as energy, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, banking and munitions are what determines policy. Not retail goods and services ordinary people need. The price of breakfast cereal will just whip around in the backwash.

So go ahead, recycle the nearly-impervious, adult-proof packaging that protects your microwave-safe meal. Compost poor old Uncle Charlie. Or even buy an electric car. About as impactful as a grain of silt settling into the ooze. That car wouldn't pay for two uranium-tipped anti-tank rounds.

*Bureau of Economic Analysis, (.bea.gov/data/consumer-spending/main)

Authors Website: https://attentionage.com

Authors Bio:

I'm an old Pogo fan. For some unknown reason I persist in outrage at Feudalism, as if human beings can do much better than this. Our old ways of life are obsolete and are killing us. Will the human race wake up in time? Stay tuned...