Cadillac Escalade

As a metaphor for America, this is probably the most symbolically accurate. Although the typical owner couldn’t afford it when they financed it, they use it to express their wealth and power while partying like there’s no tomorrow. Plus, it’s big and fairly solid, so in spite of all the recklessness it represents, there’s a decent chance that the driver and passengers may actually survive, although they may require life support to do so after the crash.

Popemobile

In the God-forsaken wasteland that is the global economy, having God on your side may be the only thing to save you. Approximately $375,000, Pope not included.

Bugatti Veyron

The Veyron is a great choice, because – much like investment banking – it was designed to do one simple thing, but does it in a way that is inaccessible to 99% of the world’s population, and does it with an utter disregard for fossil fuel consumption, safety, or practicality, serving only to stroke the ego of whoever is at the wheel. It also does what it does at incredible speed, but with a long and spectacular arc.

1966 Thunderbird Convertible

Hey, if it’s good enough for Thelma and Louise, it’s good enough for me.

Aston Martin DBS V12

Look. It’s one of the cars that James Bond drove. I’m sure there’s some gizmo for Fiscal Cliff situations. If not, it’s priced exorbitantly high enough to be a good metaphor for global finance.

Maybach Landaulet

At a half million dollars, this little baby has all the same things going for it as the Veyron in terms of being a symbol for the vulgarity that can come with stratospheric wealth, but it has the added benefit that you’ll have a great view of the canyon as you plummet to your death.

MRAP

The road to the Fiscal Cliff is bound to be a political minefield, so what better choice than a “Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected” vehicle? Plus, it looks so badass that you’ll hardly care what anyone thinks about where you’re headed, and when you get there, who knows – maybe all its badassness will actually protect you when you crash into the valley below, or – as they say in the military – you “achieve maximum surface contact”.

Stretch Limo

In spite of having a lot metaphorically in common with the Escalade, this is a far superior choice in terms of survivability. Aside from the accordion effect of such a long vehicle hitting nose-first, as long as you choose the most rearward seat, your fall would additionally be cushioned by the bevy of hookers you brought a long.

Volvo V40

Only choose the Volvo V40 if you actually want to survive. It set records on international safety tests last year, and as you can see, it is racing toward a cliff RIGHT NOW, as if to prove how ready it is. Parts and service will be costlier than with a domestic vehicle, but you won’t care, because as with all these scenarios, you’ll probably be on life support of some kind anyway.

Ford Fiesta

Nothing says “austerity” like a Ford Fiesta. It’s even built in Spain! Just don’t go over the Fiscal Cliff at speeds faster than 45 miles an hour, or you’ll end up like this.

Moller M400 Skycar

Yeah, Right. If it existed! Much like the eternal financial bliss that Alan Greenspan told us was in our future, this thing suffered from a lot of irrational exuberance, and never became a reality.

And this is actually part of what makes the film fun, in spite of its apparently heartfelt concern, dire warnings about our impending enslavement, and proposed solutions. I personally don’t question Gamble’s sincerity, but as the old adage goes, I also don’t question the sincerity of a crazed ax murderer on a rampage. On the one hand, Gamble comes across as a genuinely nice rich bloke who grew up in a bubble, and suddenly was exposed to some of the God-awful stuff going on in the world and got upset about it. On the other hand, the insane meandering from tinfoildom to cuddly new-ageyness to rabid anti-establishment libertarian rants against OTHER families of the global elite like the Rothschilds leaves one wondering if in fact Gamble’s whole shtick is an elaborate false flag, designed to keep a prole’s head spinning.

If Gamble is sincere in this epic effort, it certainly doesn’t help his credibility when half the experts appearing in the film have officially stated they were misrepresented, and the other half are paranoid delusional nutjobs talking about extraterrestrials and magical infinite power sources. But the fact that it’s almost impossible to find biographical info on the fellow – combined with the film’s bizarre obsession with connecting everything in the known universe to a mystical donut shape – makes the film a strangely amusing “meta” experience. I think I’m going to watch it again RIGHT NOW. Or at least after I make some Jiffy Pop and fashion the foil into a nice little hat.

The Thrive Trailer

If you’ve seen Mars Attacks, you know that Gamble isn’t the first to recognize the power of the donut:

Another way to achieve your goal is to create a legitimate business that so insinuates itself into people’s lives that they feel they can’t live without it, and then charge them enough to buy deregulation for yourself, so you can basically get away with murder, price-fixing, repossession of property, and slave-like labor practices. This would be the health and insurance, telecom, mortgage, and mobile device industries, respectively. The health and insurance industries get a special Goodfellas bonus for somehow maintaining their reputations as wonderful, life-saving services, in spite of the fact that the latter drives you to bankruptcy by weaseling out of paying when you most need them, and the former is often everything BUT healthy. As Walter Cronkite observed decades ago, “America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”

But if you REALLY want to carve out your name in history as a master criminal – and never spend a single day in jail – you need to do BOTH of the above, by going  into banking or economics. Banking is the field for you if you like shopping for $87,000 rugs while your company is going under, or if you enjoy contriving elaborate schemes to strip the average working stiff of his self-esteem and home while telling him he can’t live without what you have, even though it was never yours to begin with. Economics, on the other hand, is a great field if you admire the basic methodology of the TV weatherperson, palm reader, or astrologer, but prefer hanging out with politicians and bankers.

The scary thing about all this apparent hyperbole is that it really isn’t hyperbole at all. Since 2008, we’ve witnessed the most massive financial crimes in history, seen very little in the way of punishment, and in fact seen the very perpetrators of the crimes elevated to the highest levels of government. Often in the very agency that is intended to regulate the industry in question. Even scarier is that these people are either blithering idiots who have no idea whatsoever how markets work, or they made this all happen on purpose.

If you’re a student of economics, there’s no hope of persuading you to think differently than you already do, because you’re almost certainly already indoctrinated into one of the two main schools. If you’re a Keynesian, you’re probably smugly saying “I told you so” and selling lots of books. If you’re a neo-classicist, maybe you’re still running around gazing at the world with 20/20 hindsight, constructing logical fallacies to explain the catastrophes after the fact. Or maybe there’s another secret frat house within the neo-classical school. Maybe this whole global economic shift is intentional. Maybe it’s just a variation of the kind of scorched earth policy suggested by the Starve the Beast strategy. We will never know, since so many things are either veiled in secrecy, or buried in the mind-numbing avalanche of data.

At the end of the day, there’s not much middle ground. Those responsible for guiding the markets over the past few decades were either dead wrong about their theories (operating sort of  like a Shaman doing a raindance while it’s raining), or they were intentionally engineering a world-changing shift in how governments work in relation to banking and finance. How could it be anywhere in between? Take the arrogant, floppy eared, squinty-eyed Ayn Rand sycophant Alan Greenspan. Wrong at almost every turn in his career, but rooms would fall silent when he spoke, eagerly awaiting his pronouncement about the new prime lending rate. Or his banal twaddle about irrational exuberance or whatever. At least he finally admitted to 30% of his ignorance. And more recently, two of the people who – if they really knew what they were doing – were best positioned to see catastrophe coming and failed to do so. And to fix the problems they failed to see coming, resorted to the exact opposite of what their own theories would recommend. They used the Invisible Hand as a big bitch slap to the world in general, basically telling us that if the government didn’t pay for the mess, the world would end. And then these guys not only kept their jobs, they either got bonuses or government appointments to boot.

The question of criminality is not a matter of opinion; in the aftermath of the financial crises of the last several years, the SEC has filed hundreds of actions. Over 700 in fiscal year 2011 alone. The scale of misdeeds by the financial services industry is literally mind-boggling. Even trying to list the most egregious here would be absurd; information in quantities like this literally requires databasing.

The most disturbing thing of all though is that little is likely to ever be done; no significant players have gone to jail, and when cases ARE successfully prosecuted, the banks pay fines in the millions against offenses in the billions. It becomes merely the “cost of doing business”. And you and I don’t seem to care, we still stick our hard-earned money in the same bank that we bailed out while we argue about Mitt Romney’s dog transport methods and Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

And any seemingly organized civil reaction has turned out to be a joke. While the Tea Party is far from the band of PBR-swilling yahoos that most smartypants liberals like to frame them as, they have largely either (quite successfully and intelligently) folded themselves into the conventional political process, or on the fringes, are obsessed with looney ideas about sovereign citizenship and other misinterpretations of constitutional law. And the Occupy Movement? NICE JOB. Call yourselves “Occupy Wall Street”, get the world’s attention, and then spend the next six months arguing about everything BUT Wall Street. Christ, even HIPPIES were more effective in fomenting social change.

So while we will probably continue to see these quiet wrist slaps by the SEC, most bankers can sleep well tonight in their five hundred dollar jammies, because the Department of Justice isn’t going to actually put anyone in jail. Why? It’s too hard, they say. These cats are just Too Big to Jail.

I’ve personally begun A-B
testing for the revolution.

If you’ve visited DissociatedPress.com with any regularity over the last few years, you know that I’ve been a bit annoyed with Wall Street since 2008 , when the industry built on gambling your hard earned dollars on sophisticated ponzy schemes to line billionaire bankers’ pockets with bonuses came tumbling down like a lost weekend in Vegas. Except when the hustlers lost their wad and woke up with a brain splitting hangover, they somehow managed to convince everyone to float them JUST ONE MORE TIME, swearing they’d mend their evil ways. Well, like any addict struggling with an addiction, they lied of course, slipped themselves a bunch more bonuses and wild parties just months later, and in the big picture, pretty much broke capitalism in the process. So it was with some excitement that I started watching the Occupy Wall St movement begin to gather steam last month; I even set up a site at OccupyAnnArbor.org, figuring if the movement didn’t arrive in my town on its own, I would HELP it arrive. No worries there though, within a few days of creating the site, about 1200 people had gathered spontaneously on one of the many Facebook groups that had suddenly popped up. Which is what I think the power of this movement is; it is genuinely grass roots and citizen-driven. People make fun of the cardboard signs being used at most gatherings, but to me those signs are a GOOD thing. As soon as we start seeing a lot of professionally-produced signs, we can probably assume the movement has been co-opted by a particular party or interest group. But that doesn’t mean we have to prove the “none of us is stupid as all of us” adage is actually TRUE. I think all the ninety-niners (see what I’m doing there?) should take a moment to read Frank Luntz’s Words That Work, and maybe Lovemarks, the brilliant book by Kevin Roberts about why we love the brands we love. The reason to read that first book is because Luntz helped the GOP understand the winning strategy of “it’s not what you say, it’s what people hear”, and the reason to read the second one is because it might help protesters understand that as much as using a black power fist makes you feel like you’re partying with Jimi Hendrix and Malcolm X, it makes the casual viewer think you’re a naive socialist who is out to undermine the American way of life. So while lots of artists like Shepard Fairey and Rob Sheridan are offering up free designs, I think even these talented designers are going a little too “oppressed laborer” with the imagery. So I’ve assembled a few images and ideas of my own about how to reframe the revolution a little. Feel free to chime in or share some interesting thoughts of your own, and if you’re looking for some inspiration, there’s a healthy collection of motifs here.

Language & Message

First of all, some simple thoughts on message and agenda. One of the funniest quotes I’ve heard recently was when a friend said “The problem with Occupy Wall Street is that they don’t have a single clear talking point I can sarcastically dismiss.” Which is the bright side of the the complex message behind the movement. It’s real. It’s human. It’s palpable. And therefore it doesn’t fit into a soundbite. All the same, there’s no sense fogging it over with demands for dismantling the American way of life and the immediate elimination of automobiles, or whatever.

Keep it simple

It’s about corporate influence peddling, corruption, and failed representation of the citizenry. Bankers, politicians, and corruption. Stop trying to roll in health care, war, big oil, environmentalism, gay rights, Social Security, film incentives, and your vision of a perfect socialist world. That’s for later, and that’s how politicians work. They start with simple values and sneak in all their pet agendas in the final demand, making it impossible to know what their values really are.

Don’t Accept Party Support

No matter how much you like the values of that party’s platform, they don’t give a shit about you. They just want to harness you as a voter block. The recent endorsement by the Democratic Party should is anathema. It’s sort of like having Charles Manson or Bernie Madoff say what a great guy you are. Union support is iffy, but very probably okay, if the looser “Occupy” brand stays intact.

Don’t Wait For Instructions

It was people who love being in charge who got us into this mess. Why would you wait for instructions from someone who feels like coming up with a list of instructions at a time like this? I can’t tell you how many downward-spiralling groupthink threads I’ve seen on the web where intellectual liberals did the intellectual liberal thing and talked an idea into oblivion instead of just DOING something. These are my instructions to you: don’t wait for instructions. Just DO SOMETHING. Your heart is probably in the right place.

Visual Design

I wish the firm that did much of the 2008 the Obama campaign materials – celsiusDesign – would step up and volunteer their services. The brilliant typography and visual theme choices made by that firm probably had as much influence on Obama  getting elected as his campaign stumping did. In the primaries, Hillary’s stodgy and reliable-looking design themes made her campaign look crusty and slow in the head, and in the actual election, McCain’s material looked like signage for the local military recruiting office.

The Not-so-invisible hand, i.e: The Fist

This image, while it probably satisfies some occupiers’ sense of rebellion and solidarity, probably says to the casual viewer “I am a communist who wants to ruin your economy even more”. And in some cases, this may even be partly true, as in the case of some of Occupy LA. members.

Below is my first stab at a new look for the revolution, followed by the theory and design guidelines:

The first thought was that “We Are The 99%” and “Occupy Wall St” have built enough basic brand identity that it might be possible to merge the two in simple graphical fashion. Since people are “Occupying” all over the country, I thought I’d drop the “Wall St” and lose the “We Are”, representing the 99% idea more graphically. Some basic guidelines were to use a common legible typeface, and graphical elements that avoided gradients or 3D elements, so they would be easily reproducible. I also went with red, white, and blue, for the obvious reasons that the colors display patriotism, and include both major parties’ colors. But as I tried a lot of typefaces and  arrangements of the “99″, I realized the tendency to do the “cutesy eye thing” was overwhelming, and while fun, kind of diluted the message. So in the end, I dropped the 99, figuring the pie chart “O” said it well enough:

Feel free to criticize, I’m not actually a graphic designer.

I also adapted the original AdBusters “Wall Street bull” motif for OccupyAnnArbor.org weeks ago. If you’re familiar with Ann Arbor’s “Diag” area, you’ll recognize that the bull looks right at home on its brick-paved central meeting plaza:

We’ll be featuring a collection of images from around the web in an upcoming piece, feel free to suggest a link in the comments…

This image really has little to do with
the article, but we spent a lot of time on
it so we like to use it whenever we can.

I wish I were the US government, or a bank. Then, whenever I’m broke or actually running at a deficit, I could just say “that’s okay, Deficits don’t matter” or “people of America, if you don’t give me exactly the amount of money I need, life as you know it will cease to exist” and everyone in America (and their grandchildren) would give me billions of dollars, which I could share with my other friends who had been frivolous about finances or made some insanely bad investments. Unfortunately, I’m not a bank or the government, so it is mostly with a detached amusement that I sit and read about the shirtless flirts in Washington that we pay so much to sit around arguing about the annual budget. I mean, we shouldn’t be surprised that congressmen spend all their time looking for dates on Craigslist, when the alternative is actually trying to understand monstrously incomprehensible legislation like the health care bill, net neutrality issues, or for the near future, the federal budget. I mean, have you actually ever looked at the thing? Even when the New York Times creates a clever and relatively simple interactive graphic, it’s mind boggling. But definitely preferable to buying the darn thing, I mean, The basic overview is 216 pages and costs 38 bucks, and the Appendix is 6 times longer than that (1368 pages) and costs 75 bucks. If you bought all the available related publications, you’d have 2448 pages to sift through, at a cost of $214.00. And that doesn’t include the CD-ROM, which thankfully is not an audio book read by Timothy Geithner. If you want to learn more about how the budget is put together without spending 200 bucks, the Wikipedia page goes in-depth. Over 13,000 words in depth in fact. Remarkably, the words “billion” and “trillion” are only used 81 and 59 times respectively. Me? While everyone else sits around arguing about taxes, spending, sacrifice, and responsibility, I’ll be kickin’ back, ignoring the doorbell and the phone as creditors continue harassing me. Why? Because deficits don’t matter. And besides, I oddly find myself agreeing with Fox/WSJ writer Paul B. Farrell’s rant Fed dictator Bernanke needs to be toppled – Forget Mubarak, it’s Fed reign of terror that must end. To distract myself while I sit here broke with it not really mattering, I think I’ll play a few rounds of the poverty survival game  Spent. Because virtual homelessness is a lot more fun than real homelessness.

With all the all the Commie Central Liberals, Tea Party Wingnuts, and Rand Paul Conservatives running rampant in this country, waving signs and shaking fists at whatever Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann point their fingers at, and with so much excitement about the Palin/Quayle 2012 campaign that marines are getting Sarah tattooed on their bums, it’s surprising that the BankRun2010 movement hasn’t gotten more press traction on this side of the pond. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a grass-roots movement inspired by this video clip (also below) in which French ex-footballer and deodorant model Eric Catona suggests that when a person takes part in conventional protests, they’re really just “swindling themselves”, since they’re using their time and perhaps money to engage in an act that is likely to have little real impact. His idea? An intentional run on the banks. His argument is that since banks hold all the real power in the world, the only way to change the system is by bringing down the banks. To that end, December 7 is the day that has been suggested as a day that we all withdraw our money for a day. Because what, after all, is a wealthy, smug, morally decrepit banker, with no money in his bank? Probably a less smug, morally decrepit person. As a borderline collapsitarian myself, I have to say I think this is one of the best protest ideas since the Gandhi era. On the purest level, there is absolutely nothing wrong with briefly taking your money from the clearly corrupt hands that hold it, simply to remind the bankers attached to those hands that the power is not theirs, it’s ours. In my (obviously opinionated) view, any argument against this as a rational form of protest is predicated on the idea that the banking system as it exists today is somehow of intrinsic benefit to humanity, and must be protected for the good of us all. And is most likely to be presented by the bankers themselves. It will be interesting to see what kind of turnout there really is; a protest with similar motives in Chicago last year had some brief momentum but ended up being a blip in the media. After the videos below, we’ve compiled a list of active Facebook pages for “BankRun 2010″ by country.

The video that set things in motion:

This what a bank run looks like with Jimmy Stewart in charge:

The Facebook groups so far…

ALBANIA

BELGIUM

BULGARIA

COLOMBIA

CZECH REPUBLIC

DENMARK

ENGLAND

FRANCE

FRANCE

GERMANY

GREECE

ICELAND

IRELAND

ITALY

LEBANON

LUXEMBOURG

MEXICO

NETHERLANDS

PORTUGAL

ROMANIA

SPAIN

SWITZERLAND

SLOVAKIA

SWEDEN

URUGUAY

USA

Wow. Just when I had stopped worrying about how the collapse of Ireland’s economy might trigger the broader collapse of the global economy (it turns out Ireland’s economy isn’t dead, it’s just resting ), now I have to worry about the collapse of India’s economy. After watching America’s banking system get gutted by smart rich guys loaning tons of money to people to buy houses they couldn’t afford, SOMEONE should have noticed the potential for the same to happen with the massive microcredit industry in India. The parallels are actually rather remarkable, except the consequences are much more dramatic. This Globe And Mail piece politely refers to how the poorly-regulated microloan industry in India has resorted to “usurious interest rates and coercive means” to operate. Meaning they’ve apparently been operating much like the local loan sharks everyone was happy to see them replace. This has led to suicides by microcredit-bankrupted individuals who are now being urged by Indian legislators to “strategically default”. Which then gives the banks a fright, because they’re exposed to the tune of $4 billion on all of this lending. The tragic thing on the human end of this scenario? The worst of these overextended borrowers who are choosing suicide as a solution may only owe as little as $2,000. Too bad the Gates Foundation and others didn’t speak up sooner about how the microcredit model was so flawed. For a refresher on how this sort of crisis can play out, see the graphic below.

For the full story, see The Subprime Primer.

Okay, western civilization. You had your shot, and the best you could muster was Lady Gaga, Glenn Beck, mortgage derivatives, and American Idol. So when the hell are you going to end like any other self-respecting civilization? Well, pretty soon, according to the seemingly intelligent people who’ve posted 18 pages of immensely detailed commentary on sites like this. And also according to seemingly intelligent people like Michael Ruppert, former LAPD officer, writer, and founder/editor of From The Wilderness , the popular newsletter and website devoted to investigating political cover-ups and peak oil issues. I recently watched the film Collapse, which is essentially an 80-minute monologue delivered by Ruppert in an Errol Morris-like documentary style. Ruppert is an intelligent and articulate guy, and has clearly done his research. And he’s convinced the end is near. I can actually recommend the film; it’s definitely thought-provoking. But as I watched it, a line of thought kept occurring to me. People like Ruppert present a pretty good case for our impending demise, but why are they so fixated on this simplistic outcome? Why such apocalyptic alarmism? I personally don’t think we can use historic models to predict even our immediate future; this is an unparalleled period in human development simply because of population density, mobility, and rapid information exchange that just makes things less predictable across the board. So why do people ranging from a respected scientist like Frank Fenner, who says the human race will be extinct in 100 years to collapsitarians like Ruppert, to borderline nutjob survivalists like the American Preppers Network all think we’re doomed? If you don’t feel like taking the plunge, at least skim The Psychology of Apocalypticism, a lengthy exploration of the topic from a “psychohistoric” point of view. It mostly frames the topic in terms of how religion has shaped our culture, but doesn’t explore two psychological angles I think are pertinent when exploring the “psychology of the apocalypse”. One being the simple anxiety aroused by realizing we may have to change our way of life, and the other being an unconcious collective guilt for how good we’ve had it in the west while so many around the world suffer. And let’s not forget that according to Oxfam, natural disasters actually have increased six-fold since 1980. Oh crap. Maybe the end IS near.

The movie Collapse is interesting, but it’s possible that Michael Ruppert is just a pessimist…

Can this man predict when your world will crumble? Probably not.