Yes it is quite a mess isn’t it? The world’s largest banks on the brink of failure, industry collapsing, millions being thrown out of work. The Crash of 2008, barely six months into its dire unfolding is anything but fine and will likely get uglier still.
Media reports are not very encouraging but then have they ever been? Fear sells and it’s even affecting weather reports now; have you noticed? Normal winters are now killer storms that will blow us to oblivion. Can the media be trusted to provide us with accurate data? Olliver Hardy didn’t even say “fine mess”. He said “nice mess”. How did this get changed around?
There are a lot of questions.
One big question is just how worried should we be about this crisis in the Global financial system? Or is worry even the right word? Would concern be better? Can we do anything about it? Should we do anything about it?
What, Me Worry?
“ Down to the very last breath
Bartender what’s wrong with me
Why am I so out of breath
The captain said excuse me ma’am
This species has amused itself to death”
Rodger Waters, of Pink Floyd fame, wrote that in 1997 for his solo album Amused to Death. 1997 seems like a long time ago doesn’t it? Times were great then. We had lots of money and lots of amusement to spend it on. Eat, drink, and be merry, for … well it is tomorrow now isn’t it? Have we now succeeded in amusing ourselves to death on borrowed money? Being broke and out of work can sure make it seem that way. Not much to laugh about these days either. With every passing day the noise from the media has been relentlessly harsh and negative about our financial decline. It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous epitaph – an entire generation who’s prosperity was merely a mindless illusion.
Should we be worried? The word worry comes from the high German and originally meant “to strangle”. It refers to a state of “high mental distress”. If this is what worry means than it won’t help much. I heard a great line recently that went: “worry if you think it will help”. I love that. Of course most of the time worry won’t help so why bother. Now concern is another matter. It does appear that we should be concerned about what is happening at the very least. Concern means “to be a care” or a “trouble”. This sounds less drastic than worry and would be a more realistic approach to a very real problem. People we care about can be adversely affected by all of this. We can be affected too. We need to be concerned.
Getting to Now
Since the end of the American Civil War we have had numerous recessions and only two Depressions. Now this is true if you believe that some of the very deep downturns we have experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930”s were really recessions and not depressions. John Ralston Saul, an award winning Canadian essayist and novelist wrote in the mid 90’s that we went into a Depression after the Oil Shock in 1973 and had never come out of it. Remember all of that deficit spending by governments? The word “Depression” itself has become a grammatical pariah since the last war and our leaders will turn themselves inside out before they use that word. Ain’t language wonderful?
When I was a young man, newly wed but childless, we experienced the first of two great oil shocks. The world seemed like it was coming to an end. Gasoline shortages, especially in the United States, and no oil from OPEC. We all bought wood stoves and small cars and tried not to go over 55 miles per hour on our highways. Things were looking very dire indeed. When we patched things up with OPEC the economy sputtered to life and gradually our fears were diminished. Soon we didn’t think much about it anymore until it happened again towards the end of the 70’s. By 1981 re-emerging energy concerns (the second oil shock) and stagflation drove the economy into the ground again. This time I had a mortgage and a child. My wife and I were fortunate to have the mortgage locked in at a reasonable rate and we both kept our jobs throughout the recession. Inflation was very high and so were interest rates. It was troubling but it passed without much direct affect on us and on most of the people that we knew.
There were several downturns since those days including the Tech implosion of the late 90’s and the Asian meltdown. In 1973 I would definitely say we were worried. But it passed and the ensuing troubles didn’t affect us enough to be more than reasonably concerned. Since then I have always felt that we weren’t making the right decisions about energy and one day it would bite us big time. In spite of that underlying suspicion I sensed that things would be OK and they were. We all went back to buying things and otherwise simply enjoying the fruits of our labour. Big oil discoveries in The North Sea helped us to forget the lessons of 1973 – oil is limited. In a sense we went back to sleep while the icons of the financial system looked for ever more ways to increase earnings beyond rational sustainable limits. We started to build big trucks again.
Everything really took off with the neo-liberalism of Ronald Reagan. A free market became synonymous with personal freedom. Get government out of the picture and take off the regulating “shackles”. The Bushes and Clinton took it even further and soon modest income earners could, incredibly, owe tens of thousands on their credit cards. Mortgages were given to anyone who applied. The free market would provide nirvana for all. Sensible regulation was discontinued. In late 2008 everything came tumbling down. All of a sudden the world was broke.
Who can We Trust?
Reagan, famous for his way with words, summed it up pretty good - “A recession is when my neighbour loses his job. A depression is when I lose mine.” Are we in a depression now? Will we get the truth?
Who can we look to in these unprecedented times? Will a saviour emerge and lead us out of the wilderness. Enter Obama. Can he fix things? Will the Right make sure he can’t by maintaining an attitude of, as John Prine puts it, “we're gonna spite our noses right off of our faces” in his great CD In Spite of Ourselves. After virtually enabling the financial system to run everything into the ground can we trust government to get everything back on track? Even when it has a leader as highly regarded as Obama is at the moment?
How about the big corporations themselves? This isn’t the first time they’ve brought the system down and I’d bet it won’t be the last time either if things don’t change. If you want to get an insight on how the powerful corporations brought us to the brink read The Tyranny of Oil by Antonia Juhasz. You will not only learn a lot about the dangerous powers exercised by the oil companies you will also see how the rest of corporate America has benefited from using the exact same measures developed by the big oil companies to dominate their markets at the expense of every entity including this planet. Don’t kid yourself thinking that those guys standing in front of a Congressional Panel are sorry for what they have wrought. They aren’t sorry at all. They should all be in jail. Virginia Hammerness, the granddaughter of the man who founded Bank of America, recently called the bank’s current condition “totally repulsive” and blasted the bank’s management for being “idiots”. You shouldn’t trust an idiot.
Are the media any help at all during these stressful times? Seems to me that they are the cause of most of the stress. It’s very difficult for most people to be literally plagued day after day with overblown descriptions and explosive adjectives that are bound to wear people down. In a January issue The Medill News Service asks:
“Job cuts, depleted banks, mounting foreclosures – the media continue to churn out news on the country’s economic troubles. But is constant news coverage of the recession only making things worse?"
The article goes on to say that such negativity “causes a chain reaction that has a negative impact on retail and a negative impact on the economy.” And that “news organizations should report the facts, but that they should also bring in more optimistic perspectives when possible”.
And this from the Washington Post: “Unfortunately we now live in the cycle of 24-7 financial news coverage. One pundit’s idle chatter or a leader’s words taken out of context can create a storm of controversy that wipes out stock prices in a whole sector of the economy”.
An article in February 24th’s issue of The Globe and Mail asks the question: “Will Invoking the Great Depression Bring It On?” The really surprising nugget in this article is that while we have very good criteria available to determine when we are in a recession “there is no widely accepted, precise definition of depression”. Now that’s weird. So who calls it what? Should we be looking beyond the media? Where then? As I asked earlier, are we in a Depression now?
It’s hard to find an institution to trust these days.
What Can We Do About It?
There is one thing I think we should fully understand, especially in times like these. We should become aware that there are man made forces in motion on Earth that are simply beyond the control of ordinary people and even governments. If a big system like Capitalism is flaming out or imploding as Communism did in the late 80’s we can only patently wait for its demise to unfold. Many will deny that this is in fact happening but I believe that this is the case. Today, I’ve read, the most successful capitalist system is operating in Russia. It’s dominated by their version of the Mafia. They recruit the best IT graduates from their Technical schools to develop software that will allow them to clean out our bank accounts. This is what this system has evolved to - Russian Mafia and Bernie Madof.
I believe that we are going to evolve through a great paradigm shift of a Global nature over the next few years. We will never again attain the high levels of consumption that we have recklessly enjoyed for the past several decades. Times will be very hard on many people during this period. How hard times will be will depend on those whom we trust the least – Government, Corporations, the Media – regaining our trust and doing the right things. We will also have to be more conscious of what is going on around us and address wrongheadedness wherever it arises. We have to pay a Zen-like attention to everything that is happening around us and demand intelligent results from our public and private institutions.
The economy is only one of many important problems that we must deal with. Global Warming must be addressed and quickly. We are running out of conventional supplies of Oil despite the lies that the Oil company’s continue to spread. The unconventional oil is expensive to get and is very toxic to the planet. We are running out of cheap oil and we should be looking at alternatives now. The price of oil will skyrocket again and as things look now we will not be prepared for it. The rise in prices experienced in 2008 was, in my opinion, the tipping point that knocked down the debt ridden financial system.
As with the “last” Great Depression good leadership will not suffice. We will need great leadership. As a matter of fact just doing a good job in any endeavour may no longer be acceptable. Greatness may be the new norm. Barrack Obama is, at this point, the only leader arising from the ruins. Is he a great leader? Time will tell. David Brooks, one of the saner conservative pundits in the United States writes for the New York Times. In his column on February 24th he acknowledges that “society is an immeasurably complex organism” and that we can be “strangers to ourselves”. Some of the west’s great writers from the left and the right understood this and “tended to be sceptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down”.
Brooks goes on to say that “we are on the cusp of the biggest experiment of our lifetimes”. He thinks that Obama is wrongly trying to tackle every major problem at once and will likely fail. Even so, Brooks hopes that Obama doesn’t fail, as the stakes are enormous.
If we can manage to get involved with solutions, pay attention to what is happening around us, be realistic in our goals and needs and remain hopeful about the future we will not only survive a very serious malaise but will be even stronger when it’s over and begin the engineering of a new world. Renewed, attentive, and involved we can build a better world together with our children who, as always, will inherit our wind, ill or otherwise.
Media reports are not very encouraging but then have they ever been? Fear sells and it’s even affecting weather reports now; have you noticed? Normal winters are now killer storms that will blow us to oblivion. Can the media be trusted to provide us with accurate data? Olliver Hardy didn’t even say “fine mess”. He said “nice mess”. How did this get changed around?
There are a lot of questions.
One big question is just how worried should we be about this crisis in the Global financial system? Or is worry even the right word? Would concern be better? Can we do anything about it? Should we do anything about it?
What, Me Worry?
“ Down to the very last breath
Bartender what’s wrong with me
Why am I so out of breath
The captain said excuse me ma’am
This species has amused itself to death”
Rodger Waters, of Pink Floyd fame, wrote that in 1997 for his solo album Amused to Death. 1997 seems like a long time ago doesn’t it? Times were great then. We had lots of money and lots of amusement to spend it on. Eat, drink, and be merry, for … well it is tomorrow now isn’t it? Have we now succeeded in amusing ourselves to death on borrowed money? Being broke and out of work can sure make it seem that way. Not much to laugh about these days either. With every passing day the noise from the media has been relentlessly harsh and negative about our financial decline. It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous epitaph – an entire generation who’s prosperity was merely a mindless illusion.
Should we be worried? The word worry comes from the high German and originally meant “to strangle”. It refers to a state of “high mental distress”. If this is what worry means than it won’t help much. I heard a great line recently that went: “worry if you think it will help”. I love that. Of course most of the time worry won’t help so why bother. Now concern is another matter. It does appear that we should be concerned about what is happening at the very least. Concern means “to be a care” or a “trouble”. This sounds less drastic than worry and would be a more realistic approach to a very real problem. People we care about can be adversely affected by all of this. We can be affected too. We need to be concerned.
Getting to Now
Since the end of the American Civil War we have had numerous recessions and only two Depressions. Now this is true if you believe that some of the very deep downturns we have experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930”s were really recessions and not depressions. John Ralston Saul, an award winning Canadian essayist and novelist wrote in the mid 90’s that we went into a Depression after the Oil Shock in 1973 and had never come out of it. Remember all of that deficit spending by governments? The word “Depression” itself has become a grammatical pariah since the last war and our leaders will turn themselves inside out before they use that word. Ain’t language wonderful?
When I was a young man, newly wed but childless, we experienced the first of two great oil shocks. The world seemed like it was coming to an end. Gasoline shortages, especially in the United States, and no oil from OPEC. We all bought wood stoves and small cars and tried not to go over 55 miles per hour on our highways. Things were looking very dire indeed. When we patched things up with OPEC the economy sputtered to life and gradually our fears were diminished. Soon we didn’t think much about it anymore until it happened again towards the end of the 70’s. By 1981 re-emerging energy concerns (the second oil shock) and stagflation drove the economy into the ground again. This time I had a mortgage and a child. My wife and I were fortunate to have the mortgage locked in at a reasonable rate and we both kept our jobs throughout the recession. Inflation was very high and so were interest rates. It was troubling but it passed without much direct affect on us and on most of the people that we knew.
There were several downturns since those days including the Tech implosion of the late 90’s and the Asian meltdown. In 1973 I would definitely say we were worried. But it passed and the ensuing troubles didn’t affect us enough to be more than reasonably concerned. Since then I have always felt that we weren’t making the right decisions about energy and one day it would bite us big time. In spite of that underlying suspicion I sensed that things would be OK and they were. We all went back to buying things and otherwise simply enjoying the fruits of our labour. Big oil discoveries in The North Sea helped us to forget the lessons of 1973 – oil is limited. In a sense we went back to sleep while the icons of the financial system looked for ever more ways to increase earnings beyond rational sustainable limits. We started to build big trucks again.
Everything really took off with the neo-liberalism of Ronald Reagan. A free market became synonymous with personal freedom. Get government out of the picture and take off the regulating “shackles”. The Bushes and Clinton took it even further and soon modest income earners could, incredibly, owe tens of thousands on their credit cards. Mortgages were given to anyone who applied. The free market would provide nirvana for all. Sensible regulation was discontinued. In late 2008 everything came tumbling down. All of a sudden the world was broke.
Who can We Trust?
Reagan, famous for his way with words, summed it up pretty good - “A recession is when my neighbour loses his job. A depression is when I lose mine.” Are we in a depression now? Will we get the truth?
Who can we look to in these unprecedented times? Will a saviour emerge and lead us out of the wilderness. Enter Obama. Can he fix things? Will the Right make sure he can’t by maintaining an attitude of, as John Prine puts it, “we're gonna spite our noses right off of our faces” in his great CD In Spite of Ourselves. After virtually enabling the financial system to run everything into the ground can we trust government to get everything back on track? Even when it has a leader as highly regarded as Obama is at the moment?
How about the big corporations themselves? This isn’t the first time they’ve brought the system down and I’d bet it won’t be the last time either if things don’t change. If you want to get an insight on how the powerful corporations brought us to the brink read The Tyranny of Oil by Antonia Juhasz. You will not only learn a lot about the dangerous powers exercised by the oil companies you will also see how the rest of corporate America has benefited from using the exact same measures developed by the big oil companies to dominate their markets at the expense of every entity including this planet. Don’t kid yourself thinking that those guys standing in front of a Congressional Panel are sorry for what they have wrought. They aren’t sorry at all. They should all be in jail. Virginia Hammerness, the granddaughter of the man who founded Bank of America, recently called the bank’s current condition “totally repulsive” and blasted the bank’s management for being “idiots”. You shouldn’t trust an idiot.
Are the media any help at all during these stressful times? Seems to me that they are the cause of most of the stress. It’s very difficult for most people to be literally plagued day after day with overblown descriptions and explosive adjectives that are bound to wear people down. In a January issue The Medill News Service asks:
“Job cuts, depleted banks, mounting foreclosures – the media continue to churn out news on the country’s economic troubles. But is constant news coverage of the recession only making things worse?"
The article goes on to say that such negativity “causes a chain reaction that has a negative impact on retail and a negative impact on the economy.” And that “news organizations should report the facts, but that they should also bring in more optimistic perspectives when possible”.
And this from the Washington Post: “Unfortunately we now live in the cycle of 24-7 financial news coverage. One pundit’s idle chatter or a leader’s words taken out of context can create a storm of controversy that wipes out stock prices in a whole sector of the economy”.
An article in February 24th’s issue of The Globe and Mail asks the question: “Will Invoking the Great Depression Bring It On?” The really surprising nugget in this article is that while we have very good criteria available to determine when we are in a recession “there is no widely accepted, precise definition of depression”. Now that’s weird. So who calls it what? Should we be looking beyond the media? Where then? As I asked earlier, are we in a Depression now?
It’s hard to find an institution to trust these days.
What Can We Do About It?
There is one thing I think we should fully understand, especially in times like these. We should become aware that there are man made forces in motion on Earth that are simply beyond the control of ordinary people and even governments. If a big system like Capitalism is flaming out or imploding as Communism did in the late 80’s we can only patently wait for its demise to unfold. Many will deny that this is in fact happening but I believe that this is the case. Today, I’ve read, the most successful capitalist system is operating in Russia. It’s dominated by their version of the Mafia. They recruit the best IT graduates from their Technical schools to develop software that will allow them to clean out our bank accounts. This is what this system has evolved to - Russian Mafia and Bernie Madof.
I believe that we are going to evolve through a great paradigm shift of a Global nature over the next few years. We will never again attain the high levels of consumption that we have recklessly enjoyed for the past several decades. Times will be very hard on many people during this period. How hard times will be will depend on those whom we trust the least – Government, Corporations, the Media – regaining our trust and doing the right things. We will also have to be more conscious of what is going on around us and address wrongheadedness wherever it arises. We have to pay a Zen-like attention to everything that is happening around us and demand intelligent results from our public and private institutions.
The economy is only one of many important problems that we must deal with. Global Warming must be addressed and quickly. We are running out of conventional supplies of Oil despite the lies that the Oil company’s continue to spread. The unconventional oil is expensive to get and is very toxic to the planet. We are running out of cheap oil and we should be looking at alternatives now. The price of oil will skyrocket again and as things look now we will not be prepared for it. The rise in prices experienced in 2008 was, in my opinion, the tipping point that knocked down the debt ridden financial system.
As with the “last” Great Depression good leadership will not suffice. We will need great leadership. As a matter of fact just doing a good job in any endeavour may no longer be acceptable. Greatness may be the new norm. Barrack Obama is, at this point, the only leader arising from the ruins. Is he a great leader? Time will tell. David Brooks, one of the saner conservative pundits in the United States writes for the New York Times. In his column on February 24th he acknowledges that “society is an immeasurably complex organism” and that we can be “strangers to ourselves”. Some of the west’s great writers from the left and the right understood this and “tended to be sceptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down”.
Brooks goes on to say that “we are on the cusp of the biggest experiment of our lifetimes”. He thinks that Obama is wrongly trying to tackle every major problem at once and will likely fail. Even so, Brooks hopes that Obama doesn’t fail, as the stakes are enormous.
If we can manage to get involved with solutions, pay attention to what is happening around us, be realistic in our goals and needs and remain hopeful about the future we will not only survive a very serious malaise but will be even stronger when it’s over and begin the engineering of a new world. Renewed, attentive, and involved we can build a better world together with our children who, as always, will inherit our wind, ill or otherwise.
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