Let It Pour

In Act IV, scene II of Shakespeare's King John, just after John has killed the rightful heir to the throne, causing powerful nobles to defect--just as the forces against John are being assembled and his position of power is being questioned--just as everything seems about to fall apart, a messenger enters the King's quarters, looking fearful. The king, noticing the messenger's troubled countenance, speaks:

"So foul a sky clears not without a storm: Pour down thy weather."

The metaphorical language, as pointed out by Mark Turner in The Literary Mind, is both crystal clear and simultaneously loaded with nuance. The messenger's face corrolates to the foul sky and the messenger's news to the rain that must fall before sunny days are again possible. Pretty straightforward. But, considering the context, much more is in evidence. The king's utterance also implies a certain limitation to regal power--a power to command actions but not natures. A king can command a messenger to convey his message but he cannot determine the message's content, not, at least, without distorting its truth. A king can demand a weather report, that is, but not determine the weather. He might even demand that a frown be called a smile and an overcast sky be called sunny, but he cannot rule over natural forces. A king cannot command the skies.

And neither can US presidents or Federal Reserve chairmen--not even with 750 billion dollars.

Since the dawn of America over two hundred years ago, America has fostered a reputation for its cock-eyed optimism. And, at times, it has served us well. An optimistic spirit was needed, obviously, for a small fledgling nation to defeat the mightiest military of its time during the American Revolution. Optimism is a great quality to have when you're young, when you lack the confidence that comes with experience, and when older cagier veterans are trying to defeat you by mere posturing. It's a great quality to have when you're shooting a pressure free throw, for example, and you need to overcome your nerves and let your body do what it knows how to do, trying not to over-think the moment and become distracted.

But optimism isn't a virtue; it's a skill. And like all skills, you should only use it when it's needed. You might be the greatest sharpshooter in the world, but if you try applying your talent to circumstances in which it isn't required--as a means of resolving conflict, say--then you're probably destined for a life in prison. Your skill will be your ruin rather than your saving grace. Similarly, if you apply optimism to a scenario in which your child is screaming hysterically in the next room, your skill becomes a potentially lethal liability, not to mention an effective means of denying responsibility. Sometimes, too, a skill doesn't manifest strength as much as it conceals weakness. A young man or women might become a master at sexual seduction in order to conceal a sense of complete alienation from the opposite sex--to compensate for the fact that he or she can't connect with others on any other level, and so his or her skill works to conceal loneliness and alienation--as a means of preserving the illusion of compatibility with human society. And a mother failing to respond to her crying child might not be an act of optimism as much as it is an act of denial--a weakness of courage, I mean, to face the potentially dire circumstances that await her if she tries to learn the source of her child's distress.

The American financial system has been crying for a long time. Over eight years ago, Ralph Nader sounded the warning that the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) were on track to follow the savings and loan industry of the 1980s and 90s (TheNation). He was ridiculed. Every month of this year, the unemployment rate has increased while Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke along with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have been "seeing signs of improvement" in the economy (dumbasses). And now we have the mess that we have.

What's more, though the screaming child isn't being ignored at the moment, the people in charge don't seem to understand what they're hearing. Rather than going in to check on the child, they've decided to spend 700 billion dollars to build thicker walls--as if the problem is with the screaming and not with the threat that the screams are trying to signal. Put in other terms, our financial leaders are trying to amend the message and not the problem. And the reason why is simple: they can't amend the problem, because the problem with the kingdom isn't that it's unraveling and that the king is about to be overthrown; the problem is with the king. The king is illegitimate. The reason they're trying to build thicker walls is because that's all they can do. That's all they have the authority to do.

Karl Marx, in a small book called The German Ideology, proposed that political ideologies are primarily "the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas". To Marx, ideology is a consequent of material social conditions, such as those of private property, and, in order to keep those conditions secure, an ideology is created to justify and idealize the material condition. In other words, the world is turned upside down. People are taught to believe that the ideology created the material conditions and not vice versa. Consequently, human beings come to view their actions as the consequence of inevitable economic factors. Ideology serves merely to obfuscate the very simplistic reality of material life--and to maintain the dominance of the rulers. Ideology becomes the artifice whereby the rulers obtain and maintain the power to rule. False and illegitimate ideology serves to promote false and illegitimate power. A mirage is created which is invulnerable to attack. Consequently, the screaming of the economy, rather than the material conditions of the economy, become the problem that has to be commanded away.

Now, I don't claim to be a financial expert. I've read about fifty articles about what's currently happening and all I can tell you is that our financial markets are a labyrinth I could never navigate ... but I can tell you this: the market depends on material resources and a financial system that creates money (and not value) from debt isn't sustainable. Ideology in the form of rhetoric can't create real long-term value--and real value (of the materials) can't keep pace with the artificial value (of the stocks) inflated by credit and hyper speculation and short-term investment and derivatives and price fixing and debt securities, etc. More specifically, the current crisis is a direct result of material social conditions which require and encourage debt, the same social mechanism that has been used since the dawn of civilization to ensure that assets are consolidated in the hands of the wealthy.

As Wall Street economist Michael Hudson puts it: "The “magic of compound interest” refers to the tendency of savings to double and redouble exponentially, with a matching rise in what debtors owe on the other side of the balance sheet. These mathematics have been operated throughout history, ever since the charging of interest was invented in Sumer some time around 2750 BC. In every known society, the effect has been to concentrate wealth in the hands of people with money. In recent years, one’s own money is not even necessary to do this. The power to indebt others to oneself can be achieved by free credit creation. However, the resulting mushrooming exponential growth in indebtedness must collapse at the point where its interest and other carrying charges (now augmented by exorbitant late fees, bounced-check fees, credit-card costs and other penalties) absorb the entire economic surplus.

This is the point that has been reached – and passed. It has been developing for many decades. But there is a great reluctance to accept the fact that debts cannot be paid."

Summed up: no economy can grow as exponentially and interminably fast as debts--no matter how much they're commanded by the Fed to do so. This bailout has nothing to do with preventing a recession. No market can exist without recessions, and the king can't do anything to change that fact. Recessions, like rainstorms, are not only inevitable, they're also good for the market economy. A recession simply means that money has been invested in an industry that no longer serves the economy's needs, and now that money has to be re-invested in other industries. In the long run, the economy is better off after the reinvestment takes place. By trying to prevent recessions, we only inflate the bubble and make the ultimate crash a little bit more severe--but the recession still comes. The king can't prevent the economy from functioning like an economy, but he can ensure that the recession doesn't hurt the people in charge; he can ensure that it protects his illegitimate power, provided we go along with it, provided we continue to believe that we're simply the victims of inevitable economic forces rather than illegitimate rulers. And that's what this bailout is all about. It's a chance to keep the bubble inflated long enough for the illegitimate people at the top to cash out before it pops. The pop, though, is inevitable.

Just before the messenger arrives in the throne room, King John has been informed of the death of Arthur, the rightful heir to the crown, and the lords give him an accusative look. The king responds:

"Why do you bend such solemn brows on me?
Think you I bear the shears of destiny?
Have I commandment on the pulse of life?"

Once again, the King's powers are demarcated. The king, by his own admission, doesn't command the pulse of life. He can't determine destiny. And yet the King is directly responsible for Arthur's death, giving further indication of his illegitimacy. The king can kill, though it isn't a legitimate power, but, as John learns later in the scene when he learns of his mother's death, he cannot bear the shears of destiny. He cannot keep either his mother or the kingdom she seized for him alive.

For me, the larger question isn't whether the Fed should try to stave off a recession. As I said, recessions are inevitable in the market economy, in the same way that storms are inevitable and in the same way that deaths are inevitable, even the deaths of empires. Not only is the financial system of the American empire unstable and ripe for death, but the entire empire, an empire dependent on infinite growth in a world of finite resources, is long overdue, as well. It's time has come. The longer we prop it up with illegitimate power, the harder the ultimate crash will be and the more people will suffer. I say we let it die now. Use the financial crisis as an opportunity, an opportunity to die and be reborn--to reinstate the rightful king, which is none other than the natural world on which we're all dependent and a part of. Don't re-inflate the economic bubble or the empire bubble. Just pop it. Let the clouds over-saturate and tilt your face up to greet the rain. Messenger, pour down thy weather!

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