I've been laying in bed this morning pondering the looming US default -- if it doesn't happen this week it'll happen after the extension, in January or February or just before the elections in 2014 or 2016. It is inevitable I now believe.
I've been wondering what the Koch brothers hope to get out of a default.
Which led me to wonder what the great industrialists of the late 19th/early 20th Century, the so-called Gilded Age -- Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Astor -- what they got out of the Great Depression. Was it, like a dog with fleas, an attempt to shed themselves of social obligations which had been accumulating during the good times?
Somehow I don't think so. These men built institutions, they created foundations, they left buildings and universities. They built infrastructure. They did not build entitlement programs, programs that redistributed wealth from the wealthy to the poor. No, those entitlements -- Social Security, Medicare, a progressive tax code -- those entitlements came about AFTER the depression, largely as a result of the Depression.
If the Depression was engineered, it was a huge failure for the robber barons.
Koch Industries is privately held, so David and Charles may care a whole lot less than those of us whose retirements depend on the stock market what the Dow Jones Index is. Still, they cannot be totally isolated from the effects of blowing up the economy. Their businesses, of oil and gas, will still be required during the Second Great Depression but demand will be greatly diminished, greatly diminishing their rapacious profits.
And if the past is any guide, widespread suffering among the poor and middle class will EXPAND not contract the obligations of the wealthy toward us.
I honestly cannot fathom what they hope to gain.
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