"There's No Such Thing As Money."

I remember the moment when I realized America had lost its collective mind.

Sarah Palin had just wrapped up her interview with Katie Couric, delivering quite possibly the most embarrassing interview performance in televised history. I mean, Jesus, even if you don’t like the lady—and I don’t—it was painful to watch. “Well, that’s it,” I thought. “If that’s what comes after John McCain’s coronary, we might as well make it unanimous for Barack.”

Katie Couric and Sarah Palin, from Sarah's historic interview--a moment in television history proving that two dunderheaded broads whose joint IQ doesn't equal my shoe size can still be fascinating, as long as they're hot. 

But that didn’t happen. Within seconds of the Couric/Palin interview, Fox News commentators began talking about how Mrs. Palin had done a “brilliant job fielding tough questions from a hard-as-nails interviewer.”

This is horseshit of a mindboggling level of audacity. Katie Couric lobs more softballs than a minivan full of lesbians. But tons of people chose to believe Fox News’ interpretation of the events. And I realized that a large chunk of the American public just flat out chooses to opt out of reality.

I don’t think it was always this way. I truly do believe that at earlier times in our history, we as a nation and as a people have been more engaged with reality. But for some reason, we just opt out of it now.

I’m not sure why, but I have a sneaking suspicion that television has a lot to do with it. I’m not saying there’s no place for escapism, but at least in the old days, when you went to see a movie, you entered the theater, a physical place distinct from the rest of the world. The lights went off; and when the movie was over, the lights came back on and you left. It was like waking up from a dream. There was a definite break between the fantasy world of the movie and reality—a distinct separation between fantasy and reality.

But television is in our homes (in many houses, in every room in the home), on our computer screens, on our phones. It surrounds us with a damn near inescapable cocoon of fantasy and unreality, integrating fantasy into the fabric of our daily lives. It’s warped our collective psychology and both facilitated and hastened our headlong retreat from the real world.

Resulting in huge chunks of America that willingly swallow the biggest, most baldfaced whoppers you can imagine and outright lunacy like,

• “Your child set fire to the shop teacher not because he’s a psychotic little asshole, but because he’s gifted.” 
• “Taking pills will help you safely lose weight.” 
• “Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.” 
• “The Koch Brothers’ economic interests are your own.” 
• “Barack Obama was not born in the United States.” 
• “Lower taxes on billionaires will result in more jobs for all of us.”
• "People actually care about what you made for dinner/where you visited recently/how your health is when you post it on Facebook."

But perhaps the most glaring evidence of our retreat from reality was the economic meltdown of 2008.

I don’t get the Great Recession. I don’t. I mean, I do, sort of, maybe, in the sort of foggy way that most people get it... banks made a ton of bad loans to people who had no way of paying them back, and then somehow it all went to shit and now everyone’s scared for their jobs. I guess I get it, a little bit.

But on a much more fundamental level, I don’t fucking get it at all. We still have the ground. Stuff still grows out of it. We still pull metal and fuel out of it. People still need to eat and wear clothes and buy stuff made out of metal and drive cars and stay warm. It isn’t like we lost a big chunk of the ground. It isn’t like the western half of the U.S. fell into the ocean. The economic meltdown was not caused by a drought, a flood, a famine, a hurricane, or anything else that affected our ability to produce stuff that other people need.

In other words, nothing that happened in the real world actually affected either our needs or our ability to produce goods to meet those needs. Nothing physical, material, or based in reality happened to change the system. 

But we’ve succumbed, somehow, to some sort of worldwide mass psychosis. Modern capitalism is based on absolutely nothing at all. Nothing. Zip. Bubkes. Zlich. The entire “financial industry” based on a delusion—a perception of reality. But it’s all, essentially, one big bubbleful of nothing. We've opted for the fantasy that nothing actually amounts to something--and we've allowed it to ruin countless lives. 

Here’s how I understand it. A bunch of banks knowingly lent a bunch of nothing (okay, not nothing, some pieces of paper with some numbers on them, but for our purposes, it was still pretty much nothing) to people to buy houses with nothing. The banks then took this nothing that the people who bought the houses had promised to them, and packaged and re-packaged and re-re-repackaged this nothing into different and various other forms of nothing, which they then sold to other people, in exchange for more nothing. The other people then used this new nothing to finance their acquisition of more nothing, and with that nothing, they were able to leverage their ability to borrow more nothing, which they then SOMETIMES used to do some actual stuff, but mostly was just in exchange for more nothing.

Along the way, different chunks of this nothing were given interesting names like “stocks, “bonds,” “hedge funds,” “derivatives,” “money markets,” “options,” “futures,” “mutual funds,” “triple renooberated fiduciary allocatives,” and other terms which I don’t understand, and neither do you, and that’s precisely what the people who gave them those names intended. But at the end of the day, they were all just names to signify the transfer of nothing from one set of people to another set of people.

Didn’t matter, though. The nothingniks figured out ever more ingenious ways to make money off of nothing. They would bet nothing against nothing. You could buy a piece of the odds of those bets—which were nothing—and then resell that nothing for more nothing. And then you could shave little bits off that nothing and repackage those little shaved bits of nothing into other forms of nothing with new and even more opaque names.

And everything was going along swimmingly, until someone committed the financial equivalent of yelling “FIRE” in a crowded theater and said, “HEY! They’re not paying back their nothing! There’s nothing here!”  At which point, it all went to shit in a global cataclysm of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and people started beating each other up in Athens and camping out in Zuccotti Park.

And somewhere along the line, we forgot that the whole goddamn thing was all about nothing.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Our species seems prone to losing our collective shit in vast numbers. Charles Mackay’s 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds may well yet be the best book on the subject ever penned, with chapters on Tulipomania, the South Sea Bubble, the Mississippi Land Bubble, the Crusades, and other hullabaloos and to-dos over absolutely nothing. But in recent years, no one example, or person, better sums up what I’m talking about than Robert Maxwell, the British media baron who fell off his yacht and drowned in 1991.

This is Robert Maxwell, the biggest crook in Britain's history, and a virtuoso of the art of making nothing look like something. 

Maxwell, while alive, was one of the world’s wealthiest men—or so people thought. But after he died, it turned out that he was zillions of pounds sterling in debt, he’d looted his companies’ pension funds to pay off debts, and his empire, an intricate web of more than 300 different companies and entities, collapsed in flames. He’s still the biggest crook in Britain’s history.

I wouldn’t call him precisely a hero, but I am fascinated by him, and I’m not the only one. For some reason, this great, fat, replete, smiling bastard, this ubershnook, this super-criminal who could have stepped off the pages of a James Bond novel (in fact, he was the inspiration for Elliot Carver, the villain in the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies), captivates a lot of people. He’s been used as a character in novels. There are tons of books about him (I’ve read five of them), two plays, and a full length BBC movie, Maxwell, starring David “Poirot” Suchet in the title role, and written by a guy named Craig Warner.

I mention the writer because, being of that persuasion myself, I like writers, and because this guy Warner is a bona fide genius. Two passages that he wrote illustrate, perfectly, the delusion I’m talking about.

In one scene, Maxwell, discussing the value of his companies with two of his bankers over dinner on the roof of his London skyscraper, waves his great fat flipper of a hand and says dismissively,

We talk about “tangibles” and “intangibles,” but do we really know what we mean? Cash is supposed to be tangible. But cash has no real value. It’s just paper. And on it is a promise of something, a promise of some sterling silver. But who goes to the Bank of England to demand their silver? No one. We just trade the promise.

Later on, Maxwell is dictating his plans for the next day into his little pocket tape recorder:

Buy as much MCC [Maxwell Communications Corporation, his flagship company] as you can. Support the price. Take the money from MCC itself and give it to Robert Maxwell Holdings for investment. And then to McMillan to buy their printing presses for half what they’re worth, and then buy them back at half price, which gives us a 300% profit on those assets, which we’ll record as trading profit. We shall go back to MCC and buy more shares and we can use their certificates to guarantee loans, which will then be funneled through Liechtenstein, and with that, we’ll buy more MCC shares. And, well, if anyone asks who controls Liechtenstein, we’ll say “who the FUCK knows. It’s a charitable trust. We’re not omniscient.”

He pauses, smiles, and then turns the recorder back on and says,

There’s no such thing as money.

See, Maxwell got it. He knew that the system was all based on nothing, and he figured out how to manipulate it, work it, and leverage all that nothing into a seat in Parliament. Yachts. Planes. Helicopters. Mansions the world over. Suits from Savile Row, shoes from John Lobb. Art and antiques. Invitations to the best parties, access to world leaders, dinners with the Queen, awe and admiration, women, Cuban cigars, and enough caviar, prime rib, and champagne to eventually swell him up to over 400 pounds.

He figured out how to turn fantasy into reality. Granted, it all came tumbling down, but he had a hell of a run at it while it lasted.

Amoral as all hell? Well, sure. But there’s something in me that admires the hell out of a guy who figures out that it’s all based on nothing and makes a hell of a livelihood at it. Especially while the rest of us continue, willfully, to believe in the fantasy that the gobbledygook and doubletalk slung at us by the bankers, stockbrokers, estate attorneys, financial planners, Federal Reserve, and President means or signifies anything more than a great, steaming, pile of nothing.

You can watch the entire movie "Maxwell" on YouTube. Well worth the time. 

Of Baseball, Cuba, Corporate Power, and Free Speech.

I’m a newly-minted baseball fan. Suddenly, after close to forty years of simply not giving a damn about sports of any kind, I am a rabid baseball-a-holic and diehard supporter of the St. Louis Cardinals.

It happened last year, when the Cards, in one of the most dramatic World Series games ever (Game 5, bottom of the eleventh, two outs, two strikes, bases loaded, David Freese belts in a grand slam homer) defeated the Texas Rangers.

In other words, the team once owned by Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis' oldest and most beloved business which, thanks to George W. Bush, was picked up at a bargain-basement price by the Belgians, defeated the team once owned by Dubya hisself.

If you don’t see cosmic significance in that, you’re crazy.

My old Midwestern rust belt city’s jaw-dropping ass-smacking of Dubya’s Rangers at the eleventh hour turned me, formerly indifferent verging on hostile to professional sports, into a fan. Since then, I’ve been watching baseball, and the issues surrounding it, with a lot of interest. And it frequently strikes me that baseball, that quintessentially American sport, is a flashpoint for many other issues which with Americans wrestle.

For example, the latest brouhaha engendered by Florida Marlins’ GM Ozzie Guillen’s comments on Fidel Castro.

For those of you living in hermetic isolation who missed it, Ozzie Guillen recently gave a magazine interview wherein he said he admired Fidel Castro for his ability to stay in power and flip off the world’s biggest, baddest superpower from less than 90 miles off its coast for more than 50 years.

Now, while it is less than a ringing endorsement of unqualified support for all the aspects of El Jefe’s character (and honestly, considering the old bastard has survived a zillion cockamamie U.S. plots to kill him, including, but not limited to, planting explosives in his cigars, who DOESN’T have a sneaking admiration for him?), it still wasn’t the smartest thing to say. Not if you’re the GM of a team in a city where exiles from Castro’s Cuba make up a big chunk of the city’s population and wield a hell of a lot of political and economic clout.

Couple of things to point out here. One, Ozzie is Venezuelan by birth. And after more than a hundred years of essential U.S. colonization and tyranny, it’s understandable that the Venezuelans might be oriented more towards Castro than towards Washington. Ask Hugo Chavez. He sure is.

Two, Fidel Castro, as son-of-a-bitch dictators go, is a little lower on the Satanic Maleficence of Son-Of-A-Bitch Dictators scale than, say, Saddam Hussein. Or Muammar Khadafy. Or the Kims of North Korea. Or the Assads of Syria. Or the Saudi royal family. Or Kony. Or Idi Amin. Or General Suharto. 

Predictably, though, Miami's rabidly anti-Communist and Republican Cubans—who, thanks to their economic success and thick concentration in Dade County, have a hell of a lot of political influence—went absolutely loco. They choked on their cigars, spilled their mojitos all over their white suits, and frothed at the mouth with holy righteous indignation that someone said something about Fidel Castro that didn’t end with, “...and demons should sodomize him with fire-ant covered rattlesnakes in hell forever and ever, amen.”

Ozzie called a press conference, apologized profusely, said he’d been “misquoted,” that he "hated Castro," that he’d been “thinking in Spanish and speaking in English,” and essentially stumbled over his own dick in an attempt to backtrack faster than Mitt Romney in a room full of pro-lifers and show how sorry he was by groveling like a prison bitch.

And the Marlins, just to show Miami’s Cubans just how appalled, shocked, indignant, and aflame with holy righteous indignation they were, suspended him for five games.

Something about this rubs me the wrong way.

Dumb thing to say? Well, yeah. But Ozzie Guillen broke neither the laws of the United States nor the rules of Major League Baseball. Poor judgment or not, he exercised the basic American right of free speech. Ironically, a right which, presumably, Miami’s Cuban exiles came here to enjoy. And he was penalized for it.

My father makes the point that while he has the right to say what he said, the Marlins, likewise, have the right to suspend or fire him. Legally, it appears my dad is right. They do. But I’m not sure they should. It’s illegal for corporations and companies to punish, penalize or discriminate on the bases of race, religion, age, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation. Those categories are all protected classes. Why, then, is it acceptable and legal in the United States to penalize someone for exercising their constitutional right to free speech?

Regardless as to why it’s legal, it is. Which raises, in my mind, an even more disturbing issue. The First Amendment protects our right of free speech from the government. But free speech does not seem to have any protection whatsoever from corporate power, the ability of which to muzzle American citizens grows apace.

This scares the shit out of me. It should scare you, too.

What I wish the Marlins had done is issue a statement saying, “The Florida Marlins neither endorse nor agree with the statements made by our General Manager. We, like  you, think Fidel Castro is an asshole. However, inasmuch as he made those comments as a private citizen and did not claim to speak for this organization as a whole, there’s really nothing we can do about it, so kindly fuck off and take your goddamned protest signs with you.”

Putting principle above profit would have been the morally laudable thing to do. But they didn’t. And, more to the point, they couldn’t. You see, they’re a corporation. And corporations are, by definition, incapable of acting in a moral fashion.

This is not to say that they always act in an immoral fashion. They don’t take the low road any more than they take the high road. They are utterly amoral entities. Low road and high road, right and wrong, moral and immoral, are immaterial. They always take the profitable road, because that’s the only one they’re capable of taking.

It is illegal—a prosecutable crime—for the directors of publicly held corporations to act in any manner, or perform any action, that may jeopardize the corporation’s profitability. Even if it's the right thing to do.

Now, they dress this amorality up in fancy, high-falutin’, altruistic-sounding language: “We, the directors of this publicly-held entity, have a fiduciary responsibility to safeguard the economic well-being of our shareholders.”

It sure sounds nice. Look at the words they use. Public. Fiduciary. Well-being. Responsibility. Safeguard. Cripes, you’d think they were Mother Theresa.

But strip away all the high-blown rhetoric, and what they’re really saying is, “We’ll do whatever it takes to make money, regardless of whom or what we fuck over in the process.”

This has terrifying implications for American citizens. Because corporations are very good at making money—indeed, have a legal mandate to be very good at it—and because money is the mother’s milk of American politics, it means that the government has ordered corporations to take over, to the detriment of the citizenry.

Say that a corporation owns a manufacturing facility which produces toxic waste. And the people of the neighboring town, understandably, would prefer that said toxic waste not seep into their groundwater, get blown into their air, or settle all over their crops.

The moral thing, of course, would be to truck it away somewhere safe, or, better yet, find a way to make your shit without generating poison. But corporations can’t act morally. They can only act profitably. So if it’s cheaper for them to hire lobbyists, form PACs, make political contributions, subvert democracy, and get the laws rewritten so that it’s perfectly legal for them to dispose of their toxic waste wherever the hell they feel like it, that’s what they’ll do. Citizens be damned.

Essentially, corporations are, by definition and by legal mandate, sociopaths.

Which is why it was disheartening as hell to see the Marlins management take the weaselly way out instead of standing up for their employee and his Constitutional right to free speech. Disheartening. But not surprising.

Ozzie’s not alone. The list of public figures who’ve been taken down by the bitches’ brew of public indignation and the alacrity with which corporations move to protect their economic interests is getting pretty long. 

Tragically, though, I’m afraid that Jimmy the Greek, Helen Thomas, Ozzie Guillen, Tracey Morgan, and all the others who’ve been punished because of “offensive” things they’ve said are just the beginning. Their ordeals are merely the harbingers of something even worse. Corporations don’t care about the constitutional rights of Americans. They only care about their bottom lines, and if profitability depends on running roughshod over our rights, then it’s our rights that'll go. We have no recourse against them. And so long as they continue to increase their power, it’s only going to get worse.

You don’t have to like Helen Thomas, for example. You don’t have to agree with her assertion that the way to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East is “[for] all the Jews [to] leave Palestine and go back to Europe.” I don’t. But she shouldn’t have lost her job for saying it. 

What the cases of Helen Thomas, Ozzie Guillen, Jimmy the Greek, and all the rest of them show is very simple: We have allowed corporations to criminalize dissent. And when dissenters have no protection, then we have no plurality of thought. And when that happens, democracy dies. 

But who cares? So long as we still have baseball (and we will, so long as team ownership continues to turn a profit), will anyone miss democracy or even notice when it's gone? 

Batter up.