When I read recent remarks on financial policy by top Obama administration officials, I feel as if I’ve entered a time warp — as if it’s still 2005, Alan Greenspan is still the Maestro, and bankers are still heroes of capitalism.
“We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system,” says Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary — as he prepares to put taxpayers on the hook for that system’s immense losses.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post report based on administration sources says that Mr. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, “think governments make poor bank managers” — as opposed, presumably, to the private-sector geniuses who managed to lose more than a trillion dollars in the space of a few years.
But I must quote myself from my October 30 2008 post, all the money in the world. Since that post has proven to be totally correct. I'd brag about being a prophet, except millions and millions of poor people just like me saw the same thing. You had to be an economist to believe the bullshit:
"As I said in my vulture of doom post about the bailout, there is not enough money in all the world to successfully bail out the system. The managers of the great Popping sound (the sound of 100,000 hedge funder penises exploding all at once) have established a nice rhythm for the deathfuck: they come up with a solution and for a month, a relative calm prevails, and then another shoe drops. From last week to this week, the new idea is that the worst is behind us. So the markets go happily upward. But do we have any reason whatsoever to think that counterparties are now protected from the almost sure consequence of housing prices dipping another ten percent? I don’t think so. The write downs have been so many stabs in the dark. Meanwhile, every developed nation has put its government money on the line – a unique event! – to stop the oncoming tide of losing bets. All the money in the world, in other words, is on the line, because more than all the money in the world has been bet. Eventually, many of those bets will simply have to be canceled. Sorry charlie! And as the players don't even know they made the bets - charming megachurch x in San Diego, the school system in Xville, Minnesota, the Icelandic Tuna Fisherman's pension fund, and so on - this will not be happy. As every fan of cheap sadomasochistic entertainment knows, surrender is a long process, but game by game one gets to that final, liquid moment of mutual pain and cumming. It isn’t Wall Street, among the cheesy films of the eighties, that describes the current situation. It is 9 ½ weeks."
Amie, I think you can only see the zona if you are poor - I mean really see it, in all its force and splendor. Some parts of it have an awesome beauty. Some parts are funny. For instance, watching the economists scurry from one failing model to another is a reminder that Swift was a genius - this is Island of Laputa stuff, big time. Watching one part of the U.S. government - the Fed - go from loaning the banks money at two percent to taking trillions of dollars of potential debt off their hands, while another part of the government, the court system, pushes people through the sewer who have to pay back their 19 percent credit card loans - that is awesome in its own way too. Like a horror novie. Reminiscent of Georg Foster's caterpillar factory, with the butterlies drugging the caterpillars.
ReplyDeleteYet we all sit here. Some of us sit with our hands clutched to the chair, wating for the knock of the landlord at the door. Others - for instance, a guy I rode past on my bike yesterday - lay their cardboard sheet beds out by the the creeks that now serve, conveniently, as sewers. I'm fucking scared that that man will be me.
But I know in a sense that is a delusion. Generated in the artificial paradise to keep us in line. It isn't my daydream. I want back my daydreams.
The great thing about the zona is that it both is and it isn't. It is as if that sci fi motif, where a man projects his reality from his brain, were half true. Half of the zona is delusion, based on the swallowing of an almost infinite amount of fictitous cash. And half of it is true - that fictitious cash bought drinks in manhattan and houses in the hamptons and congressmen in d.c. and mayors in Provence and all kinds of worldly stuff. And in this hologram, all the movements were made, the economies reconfigured, factories closed, countries torn apart like rotten fruit. Mexico devolves into a dirty war and the emerging markets guys report that Mexico is stable as a rock. Etc.
But, however bad the zona is, the last eight years have been worse. Much worse. The fictitious money bought way too much bloodshed. They butchered our third lives and tired out our first lives. They poisoned fucking, drinking, and breathing. They turned democracy into a con game for suckers, run by imbeciles. We have a long way to go before we can wash the dirt of that out. That's the debt I'm worried about.
AQ 594 = FINDING PARTICLES IN THE PHASE SPACE (AQ-2832 THUS HE STRESSED THE PROBABILITY OF FINDING PARTICLES IN THE PHASE SPACE, EACH STATE HAVING VOLUME H³, AND DISCARDING THE DISTINCT POSITION AND MOMENTUM OF THE PARTICLES) = NUMERICAL VALUE OF THE WORD SHABBAT (AQ-2520) = THE BLACK-WHITE RIGOR OF FRENCH LOGIC = THE SEVEN NAMES, TOGETHER WITH YaH = THE UNKNOWN GOD OF CHOKMAH IN LIBER 418 = THE ZONA IS IN CONTROL HERE, PEOPLE.
ReplyDeleteAQ 1466 = THE ZONA IS IN CONTROL HERE, PEOPLE. I AM MERELY ITS SCRUFFY LITTLE PISSANT PROPHET = ANALOGOUS TO BEING AT THE BOTTOM OF A SMALL VALLEY WHEN THERE IS A DEEPER VALLEY CLOSE BY = THE BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY ACQUIRED THE DIAMOND THROUGH THE THIRD ANGLO-MARATHA WAR = THE FUTURE OF INTELLIGENCE CROSSLINKS WITH CHANGES IN THE INTENSIVE NATURE OF TIME (AQ-328 TIME-COMPRESSION :: Whilst ubiquitous, these real trend curves prove intractable to mathematical models presupposing a metric time-dimension, necessitating sporadic arbitrary rectifications. Extensive accelerations described by positive exponentials, or doubling-periods are unable to capture intensive compressions, in which time itself mutates through negative exponentials of time-halving trends. Beyond the domain of extensive speeds and relative velocities lie the occult zones of true time-compression, in which the future of intelligence crosslinks with changes in the intensive nature of time).
AQ 2520 = [NOW TAKE THE EXPANSIONS OF THE SEVEN NAMES, TOGETHER WITH YAH.] THE SUM OF ALL EIGHT NAMES IS [702, WHICH IS THE NUMERICAL VALUE OF THE WORD] SHABBAT (שַׁבָת), THE SABBATH (AQ-356 MEDITATION AND KABBALAH {p217}) = THE MEXICANS CALL THE FATHER OF THEIR TRINITY YZONA, THE SON BACAB, AND THE HOLY GHOST ECHVAH, "AND SAY THEY RECEIVED IT (THE DOCTRINE) FROM THEIR ANCESTORS".
AQ 702 = ELECTRO-OCCULT HYPERSTITION ENTITY (AQ-277 SYZYGY:DEMON).
ReplyDeleteAQ 6527 = LURGO · DUODDOD · DOOGU · IXIX · IXIGOOL · KRAKO · SUKUGOOL · SKOODU · SKARKIX · TOKHATTO · TUKKAMU · KUTTADID · TIKKITIX · KATAK · TCHU · DJUNGO · DJUDDHA · DJYNXX · TCHAKKI · TCHATTUK · PUPPO · BUBBAMU · ODDUBB · PABBAKIS · ABABBATOK · PAPATAKOO · BOBOBJA · MINOMMO · MURRUMUR · NAMMAMAD · MUMMUMIX · NUMKO · MUNTUK · MOMMOLJO · MOMBBO · UTTUNUL · TUTAGOOL · UNNUNDDO · UNUNUTTIX · UNUNAK · TUKUTU · UNNUTCHI · NUTTUBAB · UMMNU = PHILITAS' DEMETER… WHICH TOLD THE STORY OF THE GODDESS' VISIT TO PHILITAS' OWN ISLAND OF COS WHILE SEARCHING FOR HER DAUGHTER AND WHICH WAS CLEARLY REPLETE WITH COAN LEGENDS AND ANTIQUITIES, CONTAINED AN ELABORATE DESCRIPTION OF A LOCUS AMOENUS, OF WHICH ECHOES MAY BE FOUND IN THE POETRY OF THEOCRITUS AND CALLIMACHUS HIMSELF (PERHAPS INDEED IN THE GROVE (καλον αλσος) OF THE CALLIMACHEAN HYMN TO DEMETER, VV. 25-30) (AQ-321 DE MONTE SORORUM, AQ-424 THE SHADOW OF CALLIMACHUS).