Take an Amtrak train on the NEC like I used to twice a week btwn DC and NYC and you'll see the Lower Trenton Bridge lit up with its (kinda) famous slogan.

Dunno what goes on in Trenton, but this isn't true of America. The world makes, the US takes. /

Taking, though, isn't so easy either. Not only do we have to do the empire and war thing, we also have to figure out what to do with all that booty.

What the US economy really is, at least a huge portion of it, is a political competition over who gets to consume and how much.

The finance sector is one of the arenas this competition takes place in. The best analogy is the simplest: a giant game of Monopoly. It is where ownership rights are traded, which determines the future allocation of wealth subject to risk events (rolling dice, COVID, whatever).

The game is administered by the government/state, through its operating subsidiaries known as 'banks.' Banks, what do you need to know about them?

Banks are the gradient between what we consider the 'private' and 'public' sector.

They turn public state power into private money, and channel it through a network of big and small banks and everything in between to fuel the money-based, casino-like competition over consumption. Everything runs on money.

The bank is best analogized to the 'bank' of the casino which is funny because the casino 'bank' is an analogy to an actual bank.

But the casino provides an easier to understand model. Inside the 'house' (the state) the 'chips' rule everything and they all go through the 'bank.'

The tables are private games, but the money is all provided and initially distributed by the bank. Either you already have assets with you, or you can get a voucher on the bus, maybe you can borrow some, wash some dishes, whatever.

But money is just American casino chips.

Money does grow on trees, it's literally worthless except by fiat of the house. That's why we print 'In God We Trust' on the dollar, to overcompensate for the essential worthlessness of the greenback.

This money is essential to the American economy which again is a constant battle or competition -- often through the financial system but also many other ways -- for chips, which can be used to buy future claims on production.

The economy is made up of a few very rich, very powerful players, underneath which is a larger contingent of faithful corporate and state-employed lieutenants known as the Professional Middle Class, who act essentially like a giant court for these players.

That is about 10% of the population in total. The absolute tip of the top, and then 10% layer of lieutenants and officers, controlling huge piles of money which are placed all over the market (the board, or table) waiting for risk events to determine future allocations.

This is what we mean by a 'financialized' economy. It is an economy dominated by huge private piles of money that are used to just make bets on financial assets -- ownership claims on future production.

That is the M(oney)-C(apital)-M(oney) cycle of Marxist capital flow.

Anyway that is the view of the economy from the financial sector in which I spent a good number of years of my life both on the bank side and the government side.

Here's the thing: most people within the system have no idea wtf is going on, they just have a job description.

They're not even sure what their job is, how to do it, or why it needs to be done. They know only one thing for sure: who their bosses are, and that they are to never, ever leave an email from them unread.

I had a very honest boss once who would hold team meetings and say the quiet part out loud.

He would say, "My job is to make my boss look good. Your job is to make me look good. Nothing else matters more than this. To the interns, if you learn anything this summer, learn this."

He was the perfect example of what our financialized economic system is producing at the lieutenant ranks. Socially performative people with deep-seated class anxieties.

As I wrestled with my own sense of unrootedness, I started to understand that this was not a bug but a feature. And that it is framing our personal consciousness, our politics, and our personalities. Who we are, basically. We are performative and insecure b/c we don't understand.

We believe the economy is this magnificently complicated machine that has a million different buttons and switches and it needs us to push them in this or that order and that our bosses have special knowledge on how to do this correctly so we devote our lives to this, for money.

Esp in the 10%, it's not enough to just get paid, we have to believe in what we're doing. The reality though is that almost all of it -- not all, but almost all -- is totally unnecessary. The work is as pointless as it feels.

There can be a rational explanation for its necessity but the poles on which that is hung, they are bullshit too. Usually some corporate or govt regulation of questionable value but to which adherence is an absolute.

One strategy is to tune out all this need to understand or care, and become cynical, unambitious, but highly defensive over territory. You own your process, but you don't want ANY change. Especially not a promotion. All energies are diverted to personal non-professional life.

This, imho, leads to people who live 70% of waking hours in a deeply unconscious and resentful cycnicism - with maybe a 1 hour break - and 30% of hours with an almost religious devotion to something else.

As economic life becomes ever more illegible to the shrinking middle classes, their human emotions and hope becomes more and more concentrated, and usually into the next generation. Their kids.

Imo - apologies - they become parasitic to the lives of their own children.

You see this everywhere in the professional world, not just in America, but everywhere. An intense, unbounded devotion to seeing that their children are as well prepared as possible for a better position in this illegible economy.

But since the economy is illegible, they just throw everything at the wall in hopes something will be the key difference btwn their outcome and their children's future. So, dance, piano, swimming, Mandarin, drawing, whatever just do it one of those must be the key!

And that's the more selfless, hopeful version. The other version is I just want to have all my human experiences with my children and nobody else because nothing else makes sense.

That's even scarier imo but again that's just an opinion. Therapy will be a growth industry.

Anyway, you're all caught up! That's where I'm currently at in my quest to understand what exactly the fuck is going on here.