|
As 2010 dawns
I have decided to take a new direction with the content presented here on the Writing Shop main web site, for a number of reasons, some personal and some related to new business opportunities I will be exploring this year. For the last ten years I have faithfully used this publishing place to present my thoughts, observations, predictions, ideas and criticisms of crucial events. In recent years this coverage has been dominated by articles ruminating on the inevitable consequences of our economic schemes, and commenting on the enormous bailout engineered to rescue the bad investment deals concocted by the wealthy banking sector. But in reviewing the numerous articles I wrote on the subject the last several years, I have concluded that there is really very little more to say.
Anyone who has read me over the years will probably agree with the basic conclusions expressed throughout my articles. It is the nature of the Internet that people seek out kindred minds and souls to read. I got started writing here shortly after 9/11, an event that shocked and galvanized us as a nation. Unfortunately, the direction in which we were led was a fruitless quest to secure oil resources masked by a thin veneer of righteous indignation that we came to call the “War On Terror.”
In the early months of that conflict, in articles like Scare Tactics, Culture Clash and History Lesson, I strove to expose the fallacy of the neocon war aims,
and rivet home the glaring truth concerning their real intentions in Iraq. In Ignorance is Bliss, I tried to equate the suffering of the Iraqi people to the comfort zone we
had come to expect here in our own lives, realizing that Our War was being fought in someone else’s home so that our home would remain the quiet and comfortable place it had always been. But around the time New Orleans was devastated by the hurricane in 2005, I began to perceive an errant thread in the fabric of our own society starting to unwind. In Bye, Bye Big Easy, I reflected on the disparity of wealth here in the US, and watched what happened in one of our great cities when order and civility broke down. In a way, New Orleans
became a metaphor for our nation as a whole in my mind, with the well off motoring away to safety while the poor huddled under the damaged room of the superdome. I wrote: “The crisis in New Orleans is a microcosm of
America as a whole. We are a society living below sea level in a rising tide of energy adversity. And the Big Easy, along with the easy American life style, may be gone forever.” The flotsam of damaged oil rigs and
dislocated gasoline supplies were an obvious and strong indicator of the dangers inherent in Peak Oil. I predicted a huge spike in energy prices that eventually came to pass in $150/barrel oil and gas prices over $4.00 per
gallon.
At that time, the nation as a whole was still motoring along like a real estate agent leading a home tour in a Hummer, the wheels well greased by liberal lending and credit by the banks in a raft of exotic
mortgages. Price speculation was rampant, and the so called “value” of housing was skyrocketing. Yet with it there was an enormous accumulation of debt in amounts that dwarfed that sustained before the last Great
Depression. It was obvious to me, and to many other writers on the Internet at that time, that all this speculation in the housing bubble had to eventually come to a screeching crash, and I predicted as much in one of my most
read articles entitled Perfect Storm, in 2005. At the very height of the housing bubble it darkly and accurately pointed out the impact of energy adversity, crushing debt, fraud in the
housing industry and other forces that were certain to cause a major economic downturn. Back then, with everyone and their mother flipping houses and becoming a real estate agent, I sounded like a haggard prophet of doom crying
in the wilderness. But I was correct in everything I predicted, though that is little solace given the enormous pain and dislocation our current economic distress has caused.
As the second Bush term continued, I turned
the ire of my pen to issues related to the erosion of our personal freedoms in service to the fear generated by what I considered a gross overreaction to the threat of terrorism. In Articles like Who-What-Where-When-Why, Farewell Freedom, Business As Usual, and Amerika discussed the steady encroachment on our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms presented by the Bush Administration’s manic fear of Osama bin Ladin and his kin. I argued, as ably as I could, that the real threat to our society was the wolf in sheep’s clothing on Wall Street, seeing the shadowy derivative and securities game for what it was, a grossly overleveraged house of cards that was completely dependent on an ever rising housing market that was doomed to crash. The banks, I believed, had engineered their own doom through risky overleveraging, insurance swaps destined to collapse, and downright fraud in the packaging of all these mortgages into toxic securities to avoid risk. The lack of regulation in this market was borderline criminal. These were the real terrorists. The banks and financial hucksters in three piece suits have harmed tens of millions of Americans. They have broken homes, marriages, and families with their Option ARM bombshells, ruined careers, wiped out life savings, destroyed equity, swindled investors, and brought the economy to the edge of oblivion. The financial losses are equivalent to those sustained by a 9/11 scale attack—every week.
They have done more harm to this nation than a thousand Osama bin Ladins. Was I wrong?
As the Bush era thankfully closed, the spectacular collapse of our financial industry that I expected was already well underway. I
had begun more intense coverage of economic issues with articles like Bank Robbery, Home Wreckers and Bear Market,
and chronicled the inevitable machinations of the Federal Reserve as they began to grind into operation in Fed-Up? March of 2008 came In Like A Lion,
and it was not long until major houses in the financial world, institutions that had stood for nearly a century, came pancaking down on one another like the floors of the World Trade Center. Bear Stearns died that month. Lehman
Brothers was soon to follow. The perfect storm I wrote about three years earlier was now raging through the nation, city after city sustaining hurricane force damage to its housing market and, as values sank, all the
financial underpinnings that sustained the market were collapsing with them. By October of 2008 the markets were in full panic mode and it was clear to me that the banking industry had at last choked on the toxic mortgages it
had created, and was indeed Insolvent.
The election of Barak Obama promised much hope and change, but I was sadly disappointed to see that no real reform was forthcoming. Everything
that was done to bail out the wealthy simply served as a stop gap measure to buy us time. Nothing was fixed, nothing reformed, and the banking industry continued to lobby vigorously against mortgage reform, fair credit card
laws, and supervision of the shadowy securities markets where they made the lion’s share of their profits and excessive bonus money. I quickly came to see the vast disconnect between the wealthy investor class, Wall
Street, and the enormous pain that was being felt on Main Street. I came to believe that what we were really seeing was the onset of the same dark prediction I had made in 2005, another Great Depression that would slog on for a
decade or longer. In articles like The Road Ahead, Surviving Hard Times, Food, Fuel and Freedom, and Thinning The Soup, I sought to view the stark realities of double digit unemployment, collapsing retirement portfolios, constricted credit, and the steep foreclosure rates that were destroying the
dream of home ownership in this country. In 2009 I opined on the Stubborn Facts of our Main Street economic distress, all hidden by rosy news of “green shoots” and a supposed “recovery.” In the long extended article 11th Hour, which received over 7500 reads, (more than most published novels) I compared our situation to the Depression of the 1930s, and I am still convinced that we are, in fact, now
living through a similar event, with no real recovery underway.
As the year closes, however, it has become clear to me that the new administration will not bring the change we had all hoped for. Enormous sums of money
were committed to save the banking industry, amounts exceeding all past national endeavors —all our wars, all our building and development projects. Yet the toxic debt still remains hidden on the books of the banks,
explained away by accounting rules changes and level three asset sleight of hand. I remain convinced that the enormous debts transferred to the public to rescue the wealthy will still have to be resolved, perhaps by
default, before this crisis truly reaches some resolution. But whatever it is that I have to say about these things, I have already said five times over. So I’m just not going to write about these issues any
longer—at least not in biweekly articles threaded by weekly blog posts on the subject. Enough said.
Instead I am going to begin presenting more creative fiction here at the Writing Shop, and also invite contributions from the reading audience. To let those down easy who have come to enjoy my regular rants, the subject matter of the first fiction release is much akin to the topics discussed in the article index. 9 Days Falling is a fictional look at the road we have been walking on these last several years, and where I think it will inevitably lead. I hope it will educate as much as it strives to also entertain, and I offer it in serial release free of any charge, as all content at this site has always been presented as a free service to readers.
In closing I would like to thank all the thousands of readers, 50,000 or more, who visit my site to read my monthly rants. I hope you learned something, or at least were moved to deeply consider the implications of the things I was writing about. And I hope you will join me as I roll out 9 Days Falling in the months ahead. The first scenes are now available on-line here.
As an experiment in communal thinking, I
invite anyone who gets seriously interested in the 9 Days Falling project to contribute a scene of their own for publication as a part of this story. Let it become “a tale that grows in the telling,” the collective vision of serious minded and creative readers and writers who visit this site. The new world we all hope for is out there waiting, but not before we take the journey depicted in 9 Days Falling, and beyond. We will emerge from this crisis only by building a world and way of life that is equitable, sustainable and truly moral. But we cannot begin building until the old models are put to an end. Business as usual will lead us nowhere but to perdition. We need real change. Let’s get started now.
To all of you, as we face the enormous challenges ahead, I wish you good luck. I hope that, in spite of the bearish news often presented in this discourse, your hearts will remain open, hopeful, and compassionate for those who will surely be in more dire need in the days and months ahead.
With warmest regards and much thanks,
John
Schettler
Jan 2010
And now... The first step in that new direction...
|
