W all Street is only one of several financial roach motels in what has
become a giant slum of a global economy. Notional “money” scuttles in for
safety and nourishment, but may never get out alive. Tom Friedman of The
New York Times really put one over on the soft-headed American public
when he declared in a string of books that the global economy was a permanent
installation in the human condition. What we’re seeing “out there” these days
is the basic operating system of that economy trying to shake itself to
pieces.
The reason it has to try so hard is that the various players in the global
economy game have constructed an armature of falsehood to hold it in place —
for instance the pipeline of central bank “liquidity” creation that pretends
to be capital propping up markets. It would be most accurate to call it fake
wealth. It is not liquid at all but rather gaseous, and that is why it tends
to blow “bubbles” in the places to which it flows. When the bubbles pop, the
gas will tend to escape quickly and dramatically, and the ground will be
littered with the pathetic broken balloons of so many hopes and dreams.
All of this mighty, tragic effort to prop up a matrix of lies might have
gone into a set of activities aimed at preserving the project of remaining
civilized. But that would have required the dismantling of rackets such as
agri-business, big-box commerce, the medical-hostage game, the Happy Motoring
channel-stuffing scam, the suburban sprawl “industry,” and the higher ed loan
swindle. All of these evil systems have to go and must be replaced by more
straightforward and honest endeavors aimed at growing food, doing trade,
healing people, traveling, building places worth living in, and learning
useful things.
All of those endeavors have to become smaller, less complex, more local,
and reality-based — rather than based, as now, on overgrown and sinister
intermediaries creaming off layers of value, leaving nothing behind but a
thin entropic gruel of waste. All of this inescapable reform is being held up
by the intransigence of a banking system that can’t admit that it has entered
the stage of criticality. It sustains itself on its sheer faith in perpetual
levitation. It is reasonable to believe that upsetting that faith might lead
to war. After all, a number of places organized as nation-states will be full
of angry, distressed citizens clamoring for sustenance and easy answers — and
quite a bit of their remaining real capital is stored in the form of things
that blow up.
There is an awful lot that President Barack Obama has to answer for after
all this time. But there is almost no public chatter (let alone true debate)
about his failure to discipline the banking system. He should have commenced
to restructure the biggest banks in January of 2009. He should have proposed
through his congressional proxies the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall
act. Almost nobody besides Bill Black has remarked on the remarkable record
of the SEC under Obama in making no criminal referrals to the Department of
Justice, not to mention the stupendous dereliction of Attorney General Eric
Holder.
Of course, Barack Obama is not the only eminent office holder in the land.
The behavior of all the others the past decade represents such a titanic failure
of nerve and action that the younger generation must think that only
revolution can avail. I believe they’ll get their chance. Everything on the
horizon — most particularly the idiotic chorus of financial “bulls” — points
to an ever more harrowing outcome of the orchestrated pretense that governs
money matters in this moment of history.
More of the moment is the anxious decision of the Ferguson, Missouri,
grand jury in the matter of Michael Brown’s death. The race hustlers so
prominently showcased on CNN want to put over the story that there is only
one possible just decision. If it doesn’t work out the way they like, this
will be a bloody holiday and perhaps the beginning of something much bigger.
