Pants on Fire
Cutting through the Biggest Lies of Twenty-first-Century American Plutocracy
by
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Excerpts from Pants On Fire: The thesis of this book is that a plutocracy has taken over our lives. It has replaced democracy. It demands and gets what it wants from the system — it has become the system — at huge cost to the rest of us. This is what we are all so angry about, and should be, all of us who are not in on the grab. One of the most pervasive myths around is the one that asserts that the stock market and the real economy are connected in any meaningful way. Actually, the stock market is just the stock market. The U.S. economy today is just a very big GE or 3M — in layoff and liquidation mode. Management compensation, and stock options in particular, are part of the reason. In the emergency of the early 1930s, FDR declared bank holidays. By the time the banks reopened, the public knew which ones were sound. He passed the 1934 regulations forbidding deposit-taking banks from betting in the stock market, and he signed FDIC into law. The direct cost to the government of all this was zero, and it worked. What is different between then and now? Then, it was not part of the national agenda to serve and protect the people at the top. Today, it is the whole agenda. It is our task to hold two thoughts at the same time. They are in tension with each other, but we have to embrace them both together. One, the world is not fair. Two, the direction of history, the point of it, is toward greater fairness. Some years from now, we will look back at today and say, what in the world was that, what were we all thinking? We will see this time as a digression, an expensive one, from the path of our history.
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About the Book
Pants on Fire explores the lies that govern America—why people go along with them and what it costs to do so. It reveals the plutocracy that benefits and examines what needs to be done to bring back a true democracy.
It’s no secret: The wealthy demand—and get—what they want from the system at the expense of everyone else. Seven key lies advance their agenda:
- The way to grow the economy is to stimulate the people at the top.
- Loose money is another way to grow the economy.
- The stock market is the best investment and the best economic indicator.
- Executive compensation is tied to performance.
- Regulation is bad; deregulation is good.
- Bailing out Wall Street was necessary to preserve the system.
- The health care question is about who pays.
These claims are driving the biggest economic crisis in modern history, and producing a society ready to explode with anger. Provocative and sometimes funny, Pants on Fire looks past the individual problems to the eventual, necessary solution.
About the Author
Paul Christopherson, a native of Minneapolis, was formerly a Wall Street analyst at Kidder, Peabody & Co., and Bear Stearns. In 1992, he co-founded New Vernon Associates, an institutional equity research firm, leaving as chairman in 2008. He is also an ordained Episcopal priest.