Posts Tagged ‘economy’

My ‘day job’ has me traveling today. I am in rural MA, but I could be anywhere. Looking at this hotel and the surrounding…um…civilisation, I am actually nowhere. That has nothing to do with the city, though. It has everything to do with the effect this economy is having on the people.

N'en déplaise à ces fous nommés sages de Grèce,
En ce monde il n'est point de parfaite sagesse;
Tous les hommes sont fous, et malgré tous leurs soîns
Ne diffèrent entre eux que du plus ou du moins.
- BOILEAU

Whatever these crazy appointed sages of Greece,
In this world there is no perfect wisdom;
All men are mad, and despite all their care
Differ among themselves as more or less.

So reads the somewhat cynical inscription to Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written in 1841 by Charles Mackay. It was a book about bubbles. The first two chapters are about financial bubbles.

"The only good union is a dead union!" Osama bin Laden stated in prepared remarks today.

DATELINE MUSCAT, OMAN: Another shocking revelation of anti-Union plotting and scheming today, but this time it was not CEO’s of TARP Bailout recipient banks.  The attendees?  Senior Al Qaeda management, including Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and over two dozen more senior managers.  It marked a historic first time for so many senior managers from Al Qaeda to be in one place at the same time. Under normal circumstances and for security reasons, Al Qaeda leaders are not allowed within 50 miles of each other but desperate times call for desperate measures.

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We are being farmed. We are encouraged to breed in large numbers. Cows on a farm are bred to make beef, leather and fertilizer. We are bred to spend money, lots and lots of money.

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We are in The Matrix, except we are not farmed by machines but by other humans.

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The recent upheaval of the world economic markets has been as confusing as it has been severe. Massive amounts of money, debt and uncertainty flood the markets and the lives of us all. People turn to “experts” from many fields such as economics, finance, politics, defense, sociology and others. We want to know how this happened and how it will end. The problem is that these experts are not much help. As Chris Hedges describes in his brilliant post, The Idiots Who Rule America, the experts are a product of the broken system and can no more fix it that a flat tire can change itself.

Since the experts have yet to prove themselves useful, I have decided to look elsewhere for answers. I went to the people that know nothing about economics. People like you and me. I went to the water cooler at my office, in the break room and interviewed people there.

The question is everywhere: “How did all of this happen?” The economy. The endless war. The National Debt. All of it. Some people ask the question differently: “What were we thinking?” “Who’s responsible?”

I think that we have two problems. First, we don’t like bad news. Especially the really big, awful bad news that depresses us when we are confronted with big problems. War, poverty, disease, famine, economics etc. The general population has no idea how to manage global or national problems. Most of us are not skilled in these issues. So, when confronted by these issues, we “stick our heads in the sand” and try to forget.