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   You know you are in trouble when the germ of a good idea comes from a fellow named Jello Biafra.

I found Biafra, famous for something I assume, during a quick check-in on the Green Party convention on C-Span. Considering the sparse crowd and the charismatically challenged (though thorough honorable) nominee, the Greens still look more like a protest vote than a force.

Actually, the truly pathetic thing about this presidential election year is that if you take away tree-hugging (which I like, by the way), there's not much difference between the fringe candidate on the left (Ralph Nader) and the fringe candidate on the right (Pat Buchanan).
   The two most dominant motivating factors nowadays, according to the psychobabblists, are money and sex.

   Interesting then, that society accepts limits on sex, limits including prohibiitions on rape and relations with minors. There can be strict sanctions on cheating, up to and including somebody killing a cheating spouse and being able to get away with it in a court of law.

   Money, on the other hand, is now seen in amoral terms -- bidness is bidness. People can be sacrificed to the great god Profit and that's just the way it works; it's like the free market is as natural as Darwinian evolution, which it most certainly is not. Capitalism is an invention, not a discovery; there's no law of gravity in economics. Money doesn't need sunlight to grow.

   Considering the malaise of the '70s, the Greed is Good 80s looked pretty good (until the inevitable greed-based stock market collapse hit). In the early 90s, there was plenty of press outrage about downsizing, but guess what? According to a column by Jim Hightower, more people will be downsized this year than back when it was considered a crisis.

   More proof that people need to pay attention. And more proof that outrage should be a commodity.
   According to a really excellent article in Slate, this column on economics could help me in my impossible dream of a MacArthur Grant. Every June I see people with the same ideas I have (hay bale houses) win a grant because they run in all the right circles.

   What's fabulous about the genius grants is that they aren't about money, they are about time. Freedom from money is the greatest freedom of all. It's the freedom to think.

   Forget the minimum wage, what about a maximum wage? Just how much is too much in an age where the rich get richer faster than ever? Isn't it a public policy question if Michael Eisner can still make $300 million in a year -- and then convert his other $100 million of salary into $1,000 raise for every other Disney employee?

   The Wall Street Journal reports that executives no longer feel a social stigma in making a salary 200 times that of the average employee. Stockholders don't seem to mind either (especially when markets keep going up and up and up). And surely it's just a coincidence that as the percentage of union members goes down, the wealth of upper managers skyrockets.

   The problem with these worsening income disparities, and the solutions to them, do not involve law or government or some sort of idealistic socialist society. They involve psychology.

   We have met the enemy and it's us -- our attitudes, our education, our devolution from citizens to consumers.

   The truth is out there.

   Capitalism is not what it's cracked up to be.

   ***

   History really could not be more clear on two economic points.

   First, free enterprise capitalism grows in its abuses until checked by government, including child labor, health and safety, a 40-hour week, a minimum wage, and environmental protection. When you hear Republican politicians declare the government needs to steer clear of business, take it with a grain of salt. It's like a fish repudiating water.

   Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, nothing gets done, nothing, nothing at all, unless somebody makes money off it. The greatest industrial explosion of the century (the US in WWII) came about because FDR knew this fact, guaranteed 10 percent profits, and created an environment where the more you worked, the more you made.

   This is capitalism as I learned it in the hay fields of Ohio. Forget overtime or time and a half -- the more you worked, the more you made. Could not be more simple. It wasn't until many years later that I found out there was an entire caste of people who let their money make their money, and later still that I learned the elite's way of doing things was favored under law and taxes and government regulations.

   Unfortunately for the liberal do-gooders of the world, the rich are petulant in their ways, and every attempt at confiscatory taxes, or luxury taxes, or whatever, has not worked -- and has in fact, led to their discomfort trickling down (to laid-off yacht builders, for instance). Wealth trickles down in prosperity, as Reagan swore it would; hard times (as in inflation, as nothing is worse to the rich than having the value of their wealth go down) trickles down, too.

   What makes this recent economic boom so interesting is the fact prosperity isn't trickling down like it used to. But don't get nostalgic for the good old days of Reagan; economists say for the bottom 20 percent, incomes haven't improved since Nixon.

   ***

   Americans at the bottom of the economic pecking order haven't received a raw deal as much as simple old sales job. Working together for common gain sounds communistic or, down here in the South, downright union-like. Be a cowboy capitalist -- make your own deal. Be your own free agent. Cling to the opportunity of greater reward; it's the same sales pitch that worked so well for Christianity.

   Now to liberals, the great equalizer is education. This must be considered one of the greatest crocks of all time, considering education is based on property taxes, which means wealthy areas will always have better schools.

   Any discussion of economic disparity nowadays always carries a racial component, but I go back to two lines from Warren Beatty's "Bulworth," a movie that I loved but that was to hip-hop for mainsteam white America.

   First, poor white folks have more in common with black folks than rich white folks. Secondly, blacks moved from the rural south to inner cities for jobs. They weren't great jobs, but they were at least jobs, and black families and black society held together while those jobs were available. Those jobs evaporated; that problems followed is hardly a surprise. The folks making the economic decisions don't live in the areas where the consequences occur; safe in their gated communities, they continue to make more money and continue to complain about the people who aren't.

   Final story to sum all this up. On the Delmarva peninsula, it's hard to find a job worse than being a chicken catcher (the folks who have to round up the escapees from trucks and make sure they make it to the executioner processing line). These people, making barely more than minimum wage, are trying to form a union.

   You can probably guess the response from Frank Perdue, famous for his slogan "it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken." Replace the chicken catchers with machines. Instead of paying employees something closer to a living wage, he'd rather pay (and I'm not making this up) nearly $1 million per machine.

   Think about that the next time you buy a chicken. If you let the rich get away with petulance, in terms of voting with your dollars, you'll get what you deserve.

   Money has replaced votes in the political arena, which means we need to move our votes into the monetary arena. Something the rich has known for a long time also works for the poor.

   Money talks.

   ***

   G.L. Marshall does indeed believe that money talks. It says goodbye.
   Many, many trends begin in California, so recent (July 2000) hospital worker strikes in San Francisco deserve our attention. At the epicenter of the dot-com boom, an average two-bedroom house can run $500,000 . How the hell do you afford to live in that climate when the folks driving up the prices are making $125 an hour and you're carrying hospital pans at the national average wage of $13.41 per hour?

   The general thinking has always been that wide income disparities breed social unrest and violence, and that enlightened wealthy classes always throw a bone or two (bread and circuses, anyone?) to prevent things from getting out of hand.

   I don't expect any such bones any time soon, partly because the hell holes of the world remain hell holes, and partly because here, incomes have been stagnant at the bottom, but thanks to the wonders of the global economy and mega-retailers such as Sprawl Mart, a lot of life enhancing trinkets (ie sound equipment) have actually gotten cheaper. As someone who lives a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity, I'm fully aware there are people on welfare who own more things than I do. That's okay with me. I was born without a shopping gene.
   Ask yourself sometime if you know anybody who actually builds something (as opposed to performing a service). Ask yourself sometime how many people you know work only a 40-hour week. Ask yourself if this is progress.
   Never forget that the '80s economic recovery was financed with borrowed money and that we still spend about 15 cents out of every federal dollar paying off Reagan's $1.5 trillion debt. And don't forget that much of today's economic boom is financed with personal credit cards. If an economy is based on hyper-consumerism, it will slow down whenever people start saving money again.

 
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G.L. Marshall, a Richmond, Virginia web designer specializing in download optimization, site creation and information architecture, also runs a monthly magazine.

In addition to updated content when he's not helping clients with affordable web design, the content provider writes essays. The monthly on-line magazine, when he's not building web sites or being a freelance writer, is called gl the mag. In his magazine, previous topics have ranged from dating tips and relationships and news analysis to quick rants on all things web.

The G.L. stands for Gary Lee, and Marshall spends his daytime hours as a websmith, a freelance web site creator and designer who's an expert in making sites load faster and read better. His catchphrase is "a better speedbump on the infobahn" and www.glmarshall.com is home to a business site, a monthly magazine and Escape From Heaven, an on-line novel.