Abolish the Stock Market!

If 2020 has revealed anything, it’s the glaring disparities in our society. Gender disparities. Racial disparities. Economic disparities. We’re making slow strides on correcting the first two, despite pushback from the dolt-white establishment, but what about the latter? What can be done about the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and the methodical decimation of anything in between?

As monetary comptroller for Thee Tourettes and general financial genius I have to wonder how so many otherwise rational (okay, maybe that’s too high a bar; how about “vertical”) humans can swallow the myth that the economy is healthy simply because the stock market is soaring. Could there be a better illustration of financial disconnect than a record-breaking bull market shoveling gelt into the pockets of rich investors at the same time that an infectious plague of unemployment engulfs families in poverty and starvation?

Liars, thieves, and politicians (redundant, I know) insist the economy is booming, that the wealth of the country is expanding. And it is, if you work on Wall Street. Otherwise, that flushing sound you hear is the middle class circling the bowl.

Once upon a time, the stock market intimately reflected the state of the nation. And when the confidence of that nation was rocked, the market tumbled into a Great Depression. Everyone suffered, from dustbowl farmers to destitute stockbrokers who swan-dived memorably from skyscraper windows.

Well, that’s no model for crony capitalism, thought the captains of industry, and with the complicity of government they set about rebuilding the system with new checks and balances and protections to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. And we’re not talking about preventing another depression, mind you; they couldn’t give a fart about that. Let the proletariat starve. But the way it impacted the wealthy, now that’s true tragedy. This they effectively manipulated away. They reinvented the stock market and the banking system behind an economic firewall from the general populace. They installed governmental “leaders” willing to serve corporate masters by deregulating extensively, abolishing or minimizing taxes, and, if the worst case scenario occurred (as it did in 2008), deliver dump trucks full of bailout money to the doors of the wealthy to make up for any losses, while enforcing foreclosures and evictions on those lacking silver-spoon pacifiers.

We reside now inside a monetary vacuum chamber, where all the dollars in the country are sucked directly upwards to the top of the pyramid, leaving the masses to scramble and scratch for corn kernels in the dirt. This is what decades of refinement in the economic system have produced, with no end in sight. Washington officials huff and puff for the cameras to show their empathy for the common man, then strap on their knee-pads and unzip the pants of big business to suck on the forked dong of graft and arrogance.

But you knew all that. What you didn’t know was that there’s a simple and obvious solution. A way to turn off the vacuum so the money rains back down to the huddled masses yearning to be free of debt. Pray tell, I hear you say, what is this simple and obvious solution, O wise and humble Pinky Tourette?

Well, next time read the damn blog title. That’s right: abolish the stock market! There’s no need to go overboard and actually shoot the brokers (although admittedly it would be a hoot); they’ll probably shoot themselves. Or – and you’ll need to really stretch your imagination for this one – they’ll get real jobs. Doing something useful. Producing something other than graphs and charts representing money moving in a direct and steady line from the working class to the elite.

Companies will no longer change value based on the chatter of networked computer programs artificially inflating prices by the microsecond. People and property will no longer gain or lose profits as a result of arbitrary trends and squalls on the floor of the stock exchange. A sense of order and value will be restored and the worth of a business will once again be directly aligned with its concrete usefulness to the general public, rather than remotely determined in distant corporate towers of Oz. Companies will be successful if and only if the blue-, white-, and dirty-collared wage-earners of this country are themselves successful and decide to support that business. That’s when you’ll see the REAL economy finally begin to build back better.

And then we can get to work on the insurance salesmen.