May 26

Written by:
5/26/2009 7:13 AM 

How long will Vashon remain unaffected by shocks in high finance? How many more days before we take off the daily mask of business as usual? How soon will the fifteen minute boat ride no longer insulate us? Try five months.

The following analysis is hasty and frantic but probably valid.

In 1987 William Greider described the rickety US financial system when he wrote “Secrets of the Temple”. A few years later when the Glass Steagel act was repealed commercial banks were allowed to enter the investment market and rickety became an understatement. Bad loans here and abroad increased. The Fed tut-tutted but did not discipline the banks. A feeding frenzy erupted in Wall Street in the late nineties when a few key members in the revolving door known as the Wall Street-Washington money axis devised a means whereby a ponzi scheme could utilize investment paper called “derivatives” to make a few insiders a lot of money and do so in a way that the Securities and Exchange Commission could willingly overlook. Fact: trading in the derivatives market came to exceed trading in the commercial market. Not just by a little excess either, it was over twice as much. Now here is where I fumble: How could the Fed have allowed the derivatives scam? Anyway, as the world knows, the rickets and the ponzi, the whole bag, hit the fan last fall. And as we the US public are slowly realizing, the insiders in the revolving door are raking in a trillion dollars of fiat money while we are doubled over under our desks ducking what the fan is throwing.

All just blog polemic? Check our sister state, the long skinny one, yep, California. A basket case on the verge of bankruptcy. Paul Krugman says it could recover (from Prop 13 et al) but  national politics won’t enable. Check the foreclosures. Check the unemployment. Check the wars. Check the social mines laid by Bush and maintained in deadly operablity by Obama. Check the US prison industry. Check social cuts in our state, teacher layoffs, school closures, bio-fuel insanity. Menwomen, how long you think we can sit on our ass in the clover out here on this island?

First thing is to create a local economy based on manufacturing from trash, massive increase in farming, widely available high speed internet, solar energy and making electric vehicles. To do this we have to retake the initiative from the county. We design, we plan, we decide, and then we tell the county what should be done.

How plain can it get?