The Meltdown Festival

I read with some degree of surprise, but to be honest, not that big a degree of surprise, Naomi Wolf's article on how close the Bush Administration were to declaring martial law in America if the bail-out bill had not passed. You can read it here

Naomi Wolf is not a wingnut. She is a lefty yes, but she definitely not your paranoid conspiracy freak. I'm not sure that I buy her diagnosis that the country has already undergone a coup d’état but I don't find it hard to imagine that if the wheels of the economy really had come to a screeching halt because the banks didn't get their ransom money there would have been rioting on the streets.

You are never as far away from martial law as you think you are. Take that as you will.

I am starting to sound like John Laurie in Dad's Army: "We're doomed, I tell ye!", but I do find it slightly amazing that most people are so complacent that they think everything will go back to being the same after all this dust settles.

Nothing is going to be the same. The political map has already been redrawn. The Republican Party, the champions of deregulation, are nationalizing banks faster than Fidel Castro. The Democrats can hardly believe their luck and all Barak Obama has to do now is avoid getting shot by some rightwing hate monger.

Iceland has gone from being rated #1 place in the world to live to national bankruptcy in the space of a year. The only reason America has not joined it is because it still holds some of the levers of the financial system. If the IMF and World Bank were primarily Chinese institutions we would already be finished. Unfortunately it seems we will be taking a lot of people with us.

I keep reading articles in the paper comparing this crash to the 1929 crash. I am scepticle as to how accurate these comparisons can be. In 1929 there was not internet, no instant trading of stocls, no globalized economy, none of the same strong connections that countries have now. This is going to be new.

My biggest hope for the whole mess is that things will get a little fairer for the poor of the world by the time this all settles down. The gap between rich and poor is as big now as it ever has been, its ironic that the gap will be narrowed by the rich being brought down a peg. Maybe it will breed some humility. One can only hope so.

The Plane is Going Down! Bail Out!!!! Bail Out!!!

Well it seems like I just don't have the time to write like I used to, what with being the parent of a 2-year old and with the meltdown of free-market capitalism, my days are a little TOO eventful.

This week the US Government passed a bill that will bail out the banks who have been hit in the credit crisis to the tune of $700 billion dollars. You can buy a lot of jelly beans with 700 billion dollars.

For years I've been saying that America was pretty damn close to maxing out all its credit cards and now that time is here. I have to add that it couldn't have happened to a nicer country and a nicer president. He added economic bankruptcy to the moral one.

"Well done George. You done broke it!"

It's just a shame that everyone else has to suffer for the greediness of a few, and not even just everyone else in America, I mean everyone else in the world that has anything to do with America.

It's been interesting to watch how fast the politicians in this country got off their asses when the people who bankroll them told them to. If this bill had been about say... universal health care or increased spending for education it would have been going back and forth in the Senate for months. Since it was about saving the people who REALLY run the country, it was drawn up, voted on and signed into law in under a week.

Now, I am a homeowner in the middle of this mess. I obviously have a vested interest in seeing things stabilize and I'd like to obviously sell my house for more money than I paid for it 3 years ago. With that said, I have very mixed feelings about all this legislation and I'll tell you why.

For a start, bailing out banks is morally wrong. These same banks that are crying that they are going out of business are the same banks that have been making massive profits for YEARS.

They claimed that the credit market will dry up if this bill is not passed, and as we all know America runs on credit. The problem I have with this idea is that the banks used the credit excuse to basically blackmail people into getting this bill through.

Year after year the banks posted profits in the billions then all of a sudden they don't make as many billions in profit as they did the year before.

"Oh shit profits are down $30 billion this year".

Yes, that may well be true but to me the important word when they say something like that is "profit".

Just because you did not make as much money as you did last year does not mean you made a loss. You still made a profit. Of course this kind of thinking is way too logical and humanist for the modern paper tiger economy.

It seems to me that people have forgotten that we live in a very privileged place in the West, we take things like retirement and having a roof over your head for granted. We need to realize that those things are not a god given right and the majority of the people on this planet probably do not enjoy those luxuries.

Like I said, I have a vested interest, I DO own a home and I would like to see that home go up in value. However, there is a Buddhist saying that will I paraphrase that says: "When your home becomes your most prized possession it also becomes your prison".

That's the way I think of my home now. I will strive to make it a really nice and safe place to live over the years but I will be thankful for having a roof over my head and not give a fuck about how much I can sell it for. Having your family be safe and warm is much more important and is something that should be a human right for everyone not just people on Wall St.