Last month, the International Monetary Fund (not to be confused with the Impossible Mission Force) revised their prediction that the
planet’s economy would be back on its feet by 2009, saying it wouldn’t likely happen until 2010 at the earliest. Funny how, here it is,
2009, and they decide, as mid-year rapidly approaches, that the economy won’t be out of bed before December 31.

Really? What gave you that idea?

Sheesh. Why does the incompetent news media keep listening to the incompetent money people who failed to see this mess coming at all?

They lied to hide that things were falling apart, they lied when things were falling apart, why should we believe any of them now?

What’s almost as bad as letting the people who caused this mess stay in charge so they can fix it? Expecting those same people to be
honest and accurate when it comes to seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

If there is ANYTHING I have learned so far this century it’s that there is NOTHING that "experts" in government, finance or business possess that should allow them to call themselves "experts." Whether you’re Jim Kramer, the dude in the White House, or the doughy white guy in the picture in the CNN.com article I capped for this post (original here: www.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/04/22/imf.forecast/index.html ), odds are you’re so entrenched in the current system you’re too blind to see that system’s blatant problems.

After the last, near-decade of messes, I feel like anyone who doesn’t end their claim with the phrase "I could be wrong" should not be trusted. Hell, I’d be fine with a seeing a simple "IMHO" someplace in a press release from the WHO or the NHS or NOAA or whomever.

If We, The People, have any brains, we’re about to enter another era like the 1960s, where the motto becomes "Question Everything" because that’s exactly what we should be doing. We’ve been trusting our leaders in government and business to keep our civilization running and we see now that we have been lied to across the board. So we need to ask questions at every turn–stop trusting big business to tell us what is going on with big government. Question it all–don’t read one article and be satisfied–find other sources in and outside the country–talk to people about what you read, compare notes. Think for yourself and, again, relive that motto from the 1960s: question everything!

This time, though, let’s lay of the drugs, OK? I think that crap made the last generation forget all the stuff they were supposed to question and that got us back into this mess. It’s believed that Thomas Jefferson once said "The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." Where Tom said that or not, it’s true.

Ben Bernanke (right), on my Kindle 2, the real most powerful man on Earth (Photo Credit)

Finally a Solution to the Economic Mess I Can Get Behind…

Last month I came across an article on Arthurmag.com which presented a really great idea– hack the economy. What does this mean? It means rebuilding it on our own–DIY it, retrofit it, reverse engineer the way we provide and receive goods and services. Let me quote the article by Douglas Rushkoff:

The cyberpunk ethos was actually based in the very same DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos I’m espousing now. Cyberpunk was about reclaiming technology, making modifications oneself or with one’s friends, generating value from the bottom up, exchanging goods and services in an alternative economy. I’m not saying we get rid of money—only that we learn to make it ourselves, as communities. I’m not saying we get rid of banks—only that we stop outsourcing our banking to Wall Street firms that mean only to extract value from our communities.

I have always admired hackers—computer hackers and social hackers. I’m just trying to expand the range of technologies and institutions we feel ready and willing to hack. We should hack money. We should hack banking. We should hack business. This doesn’t necessarily mean hacking the dollar, which is just one kind of closed source currency. We should hack money by coding new kinds. Bank hacking has been around for a long time—it’s just that credit unions and other local or community-based bank models were driven down by the anti-competitive practice of banking conglomerates. It’s time for those institutions to be renewed, as well.

As a bohemian artist type, I’ve kinda been doing this off and on for years. Favors for friends repaid with favors in return, is usually what this looks like in the immediate here and now. Granted, I still need a job and I still need money, but it’s important to understand that there are and have always been alternatives to the almighty USD.

Speaking of the US Dollar, you should know it’s a product we are all forced to use and it represents the single most powerful monopoly that exists today. The Federal Reserve literally creates money and loans it to banks at interest. The chairman of the Fed recently said in a 60 Minutes interview (my emphasis added):

The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It’s much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing.

So, why is it only the Fed that can print money? Because they are part of the government? No–because they’re not part of the government. How do I know? Simple–ask yourself which member of the Fed board do we elect?

None of them.

We get to vote for the guy who names the chairman every four years in November (the POTUS) and the senators and congressmen which supposedly have oversight over the Fed, but have only once heard of Congress actually performing said oversight on the Federal Reserve. The reality is that most presidents don’t get to name a chairman of the Fed because the chairmen of the Fed have terms of 14 years (yes, on paper the term is officially 4 years, but they’re almost always reappointed).

So, how do we hack the economy?

That’s a good question. I think the idea is to trade goods and services when ever you can. Stop going through the Dollar system for absolutely everything. Getting rid of a bookcase or couch? Don’t sell it–trade it with someone. Or give it away. There are loads of sites online that help with this process. Whether it’s Craigslist.org or, a site I use here in the Big Apple, NYCDailyDeals.com, there are alternatives to buying or selling everything. Another popular site is freecycle.org.

There are even people trying to get their own currency off the ground since owning gold and silver coins is still legal. LibertyDollar.org is a site that will tell you all about this new form of currency. It’s legal, but no one really takes it as cash, just yet. Now, I don’t approve of the Liberty Dollar because of a message engraved on each coin:

“Trust in God”

Yeah, so let’s replace one BS currency with another? I think the Liberty Dollar folks are missing the point. It’s not “liberty” until you’re really free (to not believe if you choose).

But I digress.

The point here is ultimately this: Humanity has existed in it’s current evolutionary state for something like 200,000 years. It’s done most of that existing without Chase Manhattan or Citigroup or the Federal Reserve System.

We humans came up with the concept of money–why can’t we come up with alternatives?

So, let’s start thinking about ways around relying on money for everything. I know it’s an uphill battle, but we’ve got to start somewhere.

I don’t often go in for goofy “which host of The View are you?” style web memes, but this was actually kind of clever. With all of these big businesses begging the USG for bailout cash, what about us small-business-types who live our lives around our blogs and/or Twitterstreams? Well, if you are one of us, head over to MoneyPath.com/Bailout.html to find out how much you should arbitrarily get for your blog or Twitterstream.

Of course, this isn’t real, if it were, our government would be fair and just. :)

Here’s how thepete.com did:

MoneyPath

My blog deserves
$189,911
of bailout money.

How much do you deserve?

Oh man, check out how well my Twitterstream did:

MoneyPath

@thepete deserves
$6,768,370
of bailout money.

How much do you deserve?

BE CAREFUL. MoneyPath is a FINANCIAL SERVICES website!! They try to make money off of you while “helping” you find a loan. MONEY PEOPLE CANNOT BE TRUSTED. Who do you think got us into the economic mess we’re in now? It wasn’t you and me, that’s for sure!

I think I found the original version of this clip via a Tweet from theeconomysucks but what it talks about is pretty damn newsworthy and I’m a little surprised that it didn’t merit some sort of mention in the American mainstream media when the event occurred. Essentially, Pennsylvania Democrat, House Representative Paul Kanjorski tells C-SPAN, on February 6, 2009, that, last September (2008) he and other reps were told by the Fed that the world was a single day away from a total and complete economic meltdown.

I’m not kidding.

The original video, which I found here: www.liveleak.com/view?i=ca2_1234032281 but can also be found on YouTube here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMu1mFao3w , ends up being much longer than I think it needs to be to get the point across, so here is the important 1m37s where Kanjorski explains what happened.

In case there’s anything funky with that video player, you can also watch an mp4 version of it or download it here and the original clip, also converted to mp4, is here.

Let me nutshell it. According to Kanjorski:

1) The was an electronic run on money market accounts on the morning of September 18, 2008.

2) The Fed watched as $550 billion was pulled from these accounts.

3) The Treasury “opened up its window” and “pumped $105 billion in the system and quickly realized they could not stem the tide.”

(I’m not sure what point 3 literally means, but that’s what he said.)

4) They then closed down the accounts, stopping any more money to be removed and then upped the FDIC limit to $250,000. Yeah–this is why they did that. I saw it in the news back then and wondered why that was specifically done.

5) If they hadn’t acted as soon as they did, the Fed told the House reps that $5.5 trillion would have been removed from the US economy by 2pm that afternoon. The conclusion the Fed reached at that point was that the US economy would have faced a complete crash and would have taken the world economy with it within a day.

According to Kanjorksi, they felt that if that had happened it would have been “the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.”

Missed it by THAT much!

Oh, I kid the end of the civilized world, but I love it!

Joking aside, it’s pretty damn scary that we came this close to economic apocalypse and no one seems to have reported on it in the news. Apparently, it’s all over the blogosphere now, but the only thing I found on it that was more than a WTF post (like mine is) was a post at BaltimoreChronicle.com which seems more concerned with corruption than the fact that the economy almost evaporated last year.

There’s also a transcript for the February 10, 2009 (yesterday) episode of Countdown that you can read which also talks about this story, but it doesn’t go into much depth. It just reassures us and blah-blah-blah. What it completely fails to do is really explain why this “electronic run on the banks” happened, how it could happen to the tune of $5.5 trillion and why the hell this wasn’t major goddamn news across the world. It also fails to give us a legitimate reason to trust that it won’t happen again.

Let me put it simply: if the US Treasury Department hadn’t upped the FDIC limit to $250,000, the economy wouldn’t be here today.

The really scary thing is that all the Treasury had to do was SAY something that sounded good to people. It doesn’t appear to me that anyone in government or at the Fed is doing anything differently due to the economy almost melting down.

There’s something seriously wrong with that.

UPDATE 4:34pm: found a post at fool.com about this from two days ago that calls the date of Kanjorski’s comments on C-SPAN to be January 28, 2009. That post is also an interesting read, though doesn’t tell us anything new at this point.

George Washington is not pleased to be worth more!
OK, this is, I think, a pretty good indicator of one of the few actual problems facing America (and humanity, really) today.  So, this dude called Thomas Homer-Dixon is some sort of interdisciplinary whiz-man and he wrote this opinion piece for TheGlobeAndMail.com called "Deflation's Big Game" and it describes the suddenly infamous "deflation" as "it's own cause" or as "a self-fulfilling prophecy," depending on which part of the paragraph you're reading.  Oh and he also says that the word deflation is "…the economists' dread word, and in the past week it has leapt from a
dusty back corner of their lexicon to the front pages of our newspapers."

Color me naive, but I always thought inflation was a bad thing.  I'm old enough to remember the 1970s and how inflation was a huge problem.  You probably know what inflation is–it's when our currency inflates like a balloon, but the value of the dollar goes down.  It's sort of like a reverse psychology thing.  The amount of dollars it takes to buy a carton of milk inflates–it takes more money to buy that milk than it did years before.  How does this devaluing happen?  It happens because money is added to the existing supply through loans.  Put simply, the more of something you have, the less that something is worth.

Now, I'm just a guy with a blog, right?  I went to film school and grew up reading too many comics, so maybe I need to go to MIT, like Mr. Homer-Dixon did, before I'll properly work all this out, but if inflation–a devaluing of our dollars–is bad (duh, of course it is) wouldn't deflation–one assumes, the opposite of inflation–be a good thing?  Logically deflation would mean the shrinking of the number of dollars you need to buy that milk.  Yet, to economists, THD says, deflation is a bad thing.

Well, maybe THD defines "deflation" differently than I do–let's see–here's his explanation for the "D" word:

Deflation refers to a sustained drop in prices caused by falling
economic demand – a situation where unemployment of both people and
capital soars and where the standard monetary tools that policy-makers
use in response, such as interest rate cuts, stop working.

Huh, seems he's not linking "deflation" with "inflation" at all.  Or, if he is, he's doing it in such a backhanded way as to mislead us into thinking the two aren't connected. 

But let's break that definition down–he says deflation refers to a drop in prices caused by falling demand.  So, people stop buying and prices drop to compensate.  See, due to the law of supply and demand, if demand goes down, the price must go down as well to encourage buying and the moving of product. 

This is literally the inversion of how I defined "deflation" above.  What's happening is the price of milk drops and allows that George Washington dollar coin to buy more of the white stuff.

But what Homer-Dixon is essentially saying is that a drop in prices is bad for our economy.

Lower prices is bad?  Maybe Homer-Dixon believes that, but only Homer Simpson would mindlessly trust that to be true when common sense says otherwise.  While THD doesn't come out and say as much in his piece, the entire article is framed from the point of view that the system is good and worthy and that there's nothing wrong with it.

In fact, by pointing at consumers buying less as the cause of deflation, he's basically saying it's all our fault.

What's worse about Thomas Homer-Dixon's piece is that it suggests that we all need to get together and spend more money to help the over-all system back on its feet.  He describes a story of a couple of idiot hunters, each unable to kill a deer on their own–they simply must work together to bag this deer–but if one bails and chases after a rabbit, both of them are going to miss out on the deer.

The question I have is, why can't they just walk out of the forest and go to the nearby supermarket?  Why can't each farmer become a vegetarian and backyard-grow their own food for themselves?  Why fall for this idea that they must hunt deer and feast mightily on its flesh?

Because if we don't accept this story, and the story that it's really our fault, the alternative option is that the system isn't perfect and may even be (GASP!) a bad system.

This is the kind of brainwashing I'm really getting tired of getting from the media.  Sure, this is an opinion piece, but he never says that in the article.  THD also fails to mention the possibility of alternatives.  Like the idiots in Washington who say universal health care would be socialism or communism, this guy isn't preaching to the converted–he is the converted.  The problem is that the conversion is literal.  Homer-Dixon (at least in this one piece) represents the single-minded pod-people-esque mindset that the free market economic system is a pure and divine system that would work just fine if we meddling kids would just behave like sheeple and did what we were told.

This system is collapsing.  Greed was allowed to run rampant and no one wants to take responsibility for it. 

What Homer-Dixon has done is spin the story on it's head–like the movie Star Wars being described as a tragic story of a father who finally comes in contact with his long lost son, only to discover he's fallen in with the insurgent crowd and eventually blows up his dad's place of work, murdering hundreds of thousands of people.  Thomas Homer-Dixon spins the tale of a system that is versatile, but delicate–a Porsche, if you will.  A gorgeous, fast car capable of reaching incredible speeds, delivering immense pleasure to the driver and pretty good looks to people on the sidewalk–but it's clearly the pedestrian's fault for getting hit by one. 

Remember, the very idea of an economic system exists so that humanity can better function–if there are going to be sacrifices, they should be on the part of the economic system that sacrifices for humanity, not the other way around. 

We're getting into a very scary place, as a species of people.  Some of us humans seem to think that institutions and belief systems are more important than human lives.  People's lives are being ruined in this country thanks to our economic system.  In other countries people have died because of it. 

This is not the time to be a "team player" for the system.  Question authority.  Question everything you are told because almost any "expert" is part of the system that is so desperately flawed.  They will defend it, sometimes unknowingly.  We have to be smarter than that.  As humans, we can, and must know when to, adapt to changing conditions–systems are great and important, even.  However, when they stop working we should not be loyal to them just because they work for some.  The free market system may be viable again with proper regulation.  But blaming the consumers is like blaming that pedestrian crossing the street just as the Porsche was zooming down it. 

The rich folks are at the wheel, the rest of us are walking.  Couldn't we find a compromise?  Maybe we could all take the bus?

Posted by email from thepete’s posterous