Quotable: A Bailout by Any Other Name
from a Yahoo! article entitled "Lawmakers scramble to revise bailout bill":
"Let's not call it a 'panic'. Let's call it a 'depression'." (True story and still it went down in history with a capital D.)
"Let's not call it a 'recession'. Let's call it a 'slowdown'."
"Let's not call it a 'bailout'. Let's call it a 'rescue'."
I suppose the important difference between bailing and rescuing is the latter implies that you have a watertight ship somewhere. But even the term 'rescue' is an admission of immanent danger. If you're resorting to euphemisms in order to lull people back into a false sense of security, you might as well come up with something inspiring. Performance-enhancing dope regimen? Triple-shot espresso federal injection?
The problem with the 'bailout' idea is the assumption that you have something on which to be floating once you have fixed the leak--water as well as a ship. Bailing an airplane or a hot air balloon wouldn't be terribly effective. Unless we take 'bailout' a different way: bailing out as in ejector seat. "Damn, we're a mile high and we've run out of fuel. There aren't enough parachutes even for the crew. Let's make sure ours are golden and whisper sweet nothings into the intercom just long enough to save our own skins and make our exit. Leave this thing running at 500 mph and put her on autopilot to keep the horizon level as long as possible. They won't even know what hit them."
The problem with the 'rescue' idea is the aforementioned watertight ship. The economy does not work like a ship. It's a bit more like a projectile, or maybe a vortex. Economic activity is not a matter of 'growth' so much as momentum. To stop (or even to slow down too much) is to fall apart completely.
Why?
Because money isn't there. It exists only in people's imaginations. The second greatest trick the devil ever pulled, after convincing the world he didn't exist, is convincing people that money does.
Back to the first quotation: "lost wealth." What was it made of? Where was it? Where did it go? People get nervous and try to hang on to it and 'Poof!' it disappears. Money appears only when it is moving, and if you are going to 'grow' it you have to keep it moving faster than it was moving before so that the vacuum it leaves behind does not catch up with it. Maybe it would make more sense (or at least less nonsense) to say that money is a negative phenomenon; it exists in the appearance of its absence.
Illustration: "See that fancy widget? It came into being of its own accord. The only thing between you and the widget is a little void in the shape of $99.99. If you run a piece of plastic through this machine the $99.99 will seem to exist, you can go home with the widget, and the balance of the universe will be restored."
This is how capitalism works. 1) You create a money-absence on one end by putting a price tag on an object. (Objects for sale are 'products' and are made of things called 'raw materials' that someone took from somewhere before it had a price tag, so you can take them without leaving a void, at least not one that you have to count.) 2) You create an existential or physical void on the other end by developing an imagined deficiency in the consumer's psyche or by arranging reality so that the consumer (for lack of skill or material access, or due to pride, laziness, or socially conditioned presumption of entitlement) cannot or will not meet his or her own natural physical needs and wants. 3) You then bless this arrangment as an immutable law of science and come up with equations to prove that as long as you don't include anything inconvenient in your calculations everything adds up right, and call it "Economics."
(The third greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing most of Earth's human population, who are theoretically intelligent enough to know better, that they could demonstrate their superiority and achieve 'progress' by resolutely building a civilization on such ridiculous premises as the immaculate conception of machines, the infinitude of extractable fuel, and the spontaneous generation of inanimate objects. This problem isn't exactly new. It just got more dangerous with the acceleration of technological power and more jumpy and volatile with the invention of credit and detatchment of money from its already fairly dubious and arbitrary foundation in (practically useless) shiny minerals.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, here in my hand I've got 1 trillion dollars. Now you see it, now you don't." (The American public is gullible; they will believe we really had that $1 trillion when Wall Street opened on Monday. If we say that we just need $700 billion to make that trillion reappear, maybe they will give it to us. They always have before.)
Where is the $700 billion going to come from? Our unborn great-grandchildren? The increasing population of theoretically employable college graduates who can't even earn enough to pay rent, let alone buy a home or save for the future? The corporations whose positive balance sheets and stock values are based on the assumption that money (and fuel and metal and rock and fiber and food and water) will keep moving faster forever? The taxpayers whose hope of retirement is based on the sticker price of stocks which is based on the ability of corporations to maintain the perception that money will start moving faster again sometime soon if the government gives the banks the privilege of pretending they have $700 billion of future taxpayer money?
The Economy is running out of fuel metaphorically as well as in obvious terms (the liquid and vaporous fossil stuff) and even the most skillfully spun political rhetoric can't keep it running on fumes for long. We have already squandered the real wealth - clean air, clean water, healthy forests, fertile soil, native cultural wisdom. All our current 'leaders' can give us is smoke and mirrors, flamboyant gestures, and empty words. We have nothing left to lose but our illusions.
That's some quality presidential leadership for you. On both counts."Bush noted that the maximum $700 billion in the proposed bailout was huge, but was dwarfed by the $1 trillion in lost wealth that resulted from Monday's stock-market plunge."
"'The first thing I would do is say, "Let's not call it a bailout. Let's call it a rescue,'" McCain told CNN. He said 'Americans are frightened right now' and political leaders must give them an immediate solution and a longer-term approach to the problem."
"Let's not call it a 'panic'. Let's call it a 'depression'." (True story and still it went down in history with a capital D.)
"Let's not call it a 'recession'. Let's call it a 'slowdown'."
"Let's not call it a 'bailout'. Let's call it a 'rescue'."
I suppose the important difference between bailing and rescuing is the latter implies that you have a watertight ship somewhere. But even the term 'rescue' is an admission of immanent danger. If you're resorting to euphemisms in order to lull people back into a false sense of security, you might as well come up with something inspiring. Performance-enhancing dope regimen? Triple-shot espresso federal injection?
The problem with the 'bailout' idea is the assumption that you have something on which to be floating once you have fixed the leak--water as well as a ship. Bailing an airplane or a hot air balloon wouldn't be terribly effective. Unless we take 'bailout' a different way: bailing out as in ejector seat. "Damn, we're a mile high and we've run out of fuel. There aren't enough parachutes even for the crew. Let's make sure ours are golden and whisper sweet nothings into the intercom just long enough to save our own skins and make our exit. Leave this thing running at 500 mph and put her on autopilot to keep the horizon level as long as possible. They won't even know what hit them."
The problem with the 'rescue' idea is the aforementioned watertight ship. The economy does not work like a ship. It's a bit more like a projectile, or maybe a vortex. Economic activity is not a matter of 'growth' so much as momentum. To stop (or even to slow down too much) is to fall apart completely.
Why?
Because money isn't there. It exists only in people's imaginations. The second greatest trick the devil ever pulled, after convincing the world he didn't exist, is convincing people that money does.
Back to the first quotation: "lost wealth." What was it made of? Where was it? Where did it go? People get nervous and try to hang on to it and 'Poof!' it disappears. Money appears only when it is moving, and if you are going to 'grow' it you have to keep it moving faster than it was moving before so that the vacuum it leaves behind does not catch up with it. Maybe it would make more sense (or at least less nonsense) to say that money is a negative phenomenon; it exists in the appearance of its absence.
Illustration: "See that fancy widget? It came into being of its own accord. The only thing between you and the widget is a little void in the shape of $99.99. If you run a piece of plastic through this machine the $99.99 will seem to exist, you can go home with the widget, and the balance of the universe will be restored."
This is how capitalism works. 1) You create a money-absence on one end by putting a price tag on an object. (Objects for sale are 'products' and are made of things called 'raw materials' that someone took from somewhere before it had a price tag, so you can take them without leaving a void, at least not one that you have to count.) 2) You create an existential or physical void on the other end by developing an imagined deficiency in the consumer's psyche or by arranging reality so that the consumer (for lack of skill or material access, or due to pride, laziness, or socially conditioned presumption of entitlement) cannot or will not meet his or her own natural physical needs and wants. 3) You then bless this arrangment as an immutable law of science and come up with equations to prove that as long as you don't include anything inconvenient in your calculations everything adds up right, and call it "Economics."
(The third greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing most of Earth's human population, who are theoretically intelligent enough to know better, that they could demonstrate their superiority and achieve 'progress' by resolutely building a civilization on such ridiculous premises as the immaculate conception of machines, the infinitude of extractable fuel, and the spontaneous generation of inanimate objects. This problem isn't exactly new. It just got more dangerous with the acceleration of technological power and more jumpy and volatile with the invention of credit and detatchment of money from its already fairly dubious and arbitrary foundation in (practically useless) shiny minerals.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, here in my hand I've got 1 trillion dollars. Now you see it, now you don't." (The American public is gullible; they will believe we really had that $1 trillion when Wall Street opened on Monday. If we say that we just need $700 billion to make that trillion reappear, maybe they will give it to us. They always have before.)
Where is the $700 billion going to come from? Our unborn great-grandchildren? The increasing population of theoretically employable college graduates who can't even earn enough to pay rent, let alone buy a home or save for the future? The corporations whose positive balance sheets and stock values are based on the assumption that money (and fuel and metal and rock and fiber and food and water) will keep moving faster forever? The taxpayers whose hope of retirement is based on the sticker price of stocks which is based on the ability of corporations to maintain the perception that money will start moving faster again sometime soon if the government gives the banks the privilege of pretending they have $700 billion of future taxpayer money?
The Economy is running out of fuel metaphorically as well as in obvious terms (the liquid and vaporous fossil stuff) and even the most skillfully spun political rhetoric can't keep it running on fumes for long. We have already squandered the real wealth - clean air, clean water, healthy forests, fertile soil, native cultural wisdom. All our current 'leaders' can give us is smoke and mirrors, flamboyant gestures, and empty words. We have nothing left to lose but our illusions.
posted by Ingrid at 11:28 AM
1 Comments:
well said.
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