The Financial Crisis

As you may have heard, last week Somali pirates attempted to capture a merchant vessel registered in the United States. Unable to maintain control of the container ship, they absconded in a lifeboat with the captain as a prisoner. In the end, the pirates were all killed or captured and the captain was freed.

Few in the US ever really thought about Somali piracy before this incident. As usual, the news services dedicated lots of time to tearful reunions, masturbatory whooping, and self-righteous fulminations on the scourge of piracy. Obviously, they failed to spend much time on the context. Piracy is a major source of income for communities in the depressed and forgotten coastal areas of northern Somalia. The public probably has an image of flamboyantly dressed, dashing ne'er-do-wells taking what they want while they bathe in rum and generally enjoy themselves. This is fantasy. The region is known for ethnic strife, poverty, and war, and the lack of a stable government means they have no representation on the global stage. The pirates not only bring goods and currency into the area, but act as a makeshift militia and sometime advocacy organization.

In the last several months, Wall Street investment banks and other financial institutions attempted to justify losing billions of dollars by betting on an inflated housing market and bad debt. Unable to maintain the confidence of investors, they went belly-up and were forced to seek assistance from the government. Deemed too big to fail, most of them received the capital they required to survive.

Few in the US ever really thought about these underhanded business practices before the sudden collapse of Bear Stearns. The media then boned up and informed us about hedge funds and subprime mortgages and credit default swaps while they entertained us with outraged politicians and really, really awkward congressional hearings. However, I feel that no one ever adequately explained why we needed to prop up these failing institutions. There is an entire class which lives by buying promises and selling dreams and they exist in a nether-world between our elected officials' complicity and their ignorance. As a whole, the public is trained to imagine Beyond Thunderdome whenever anyone suggests a little creative destruction. This is fantasy. The system does not function to maintain fairness, it exists to turn the toil, suffering, and hardship of the many into the yachts, cocaine, and Dom Pérignon of the few.

To begin the parade of tortured metaphors which I think are extremely clever and am forced to use because they put a linguistic spin on what is essentially a math problem and math make me head hurt, I'd like you to imagine an ancient city in the desert, lost to history. Within this ruin, it is said, lies the knowledge of the ancients. We know it's there, we just can't find it because it's buried under the sand.

One day a massive sandstorm sweeps through and in its wake, the ancient city of special truths is revealed. Well, that's what the crisis has done. We all knew -- or at least those of us who cared enough to think about it knew -- that our culture was rotten, our institutions corrupt, and our way of life unsustainable. It was easy not to think about it because... you know, Xbox.

This time, we're looking right at it. It's not happening to faceless foreigners or baby seals now. There is no logic, no foundation, no real and honest value to the society we've created and we can no longer deny or ignore this simple fact.

But we will.

The bulk of the outrage has already been deftly deflected by our political institutions. The Republicans blame the Democrats, The Democrats blame the Republicans, and Glenn Beck blames his last tie to reality, cuts it, and drifts off into the ether on a updraft of xenophobic bald eagle farts.

The anger that remains cannot be used constructively. It belongs to the paranoid extremists. Those who recognized something was wrong, but found it far easier to name it Black, Jew, or Mexican. They have their own part to play in this sad drama. They become the figureheads for all who would step out of line. Every tragedy they perpetrate associates dissent with atrocity and further insulates the system.

Don't murder unless you're got a good publicist.

I think our leaders have convinced most of the rest of us that we can return to the America of yore. The 1950s post war America. Picket fences, cars with outrageous fins, and unlimited growth. We believe that if we elect the right person or give our money to the right corporations, we can be that society again. We want to be guiltless like we were -- pastel colors, living in the suburbs, cigarette smoking guiltless.

That cannot happen. The tangible work of our global economy is now done elsewhere and the United States has become the world's country club. We're all either swimming in the pool or we're cleaning it. With the poor countries who make our junk modernizing and our own institutions crumbling, the "service economy" I remember my middle school social studies textbooks proudly touting is revealed as the circle jerk that it is.

I have an idea. Why don't we try to actually be the inventive, hard-working people we claim we are and come up with something better? And I'm not talking about putting our noses to the same old grindstone and making more widgets. The events of the economic crisis have made it pretty clear that when the shit goes down, the real perpetrators get parachutes while the rest of us will be lucky to receive a backpack filled with kitchen utensils and good comedic timing. We need to treat this as an opportunity to turn a critical eye to the inner workings of our economic system while they are laid bare. We should use this as a learning experience and take steps to make our way of life sustainable and sane.

Unfortunately, it's an opportunity we seem hell-bent on squandering. We'll probably just move the debt around, consolidate some corporations, and sweep the mess under the rug. Then the next time the market sneezes, we'll go through the whole thing all over again.

I'm not saying the Somali pirates are nice guys, because I'm sure they're not. They are, however, smart enough to know when the deck is stacked and inventive enough to change the game in response. The hedge funds and investment banks took advantage of their status and legal limbo the enrich themselves and now they're blackmailing us with economic collapse if we don't give them more. How about that? Our financial institutions are starting to look more like pirates than actual pirates.

They used to hang pirates, did they not?