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Question
du jour: why is Jon Corzine still at large? In what fabulous Manhattan
restaurants has he been enjoying plates of cockscombs and lobster with sauce
hydromel and cinghiale ai
frutti di bosco, while
less well-connected citizens of this degenerate republic have to order their
suppers from the dumpster in the WalMart parking
lot where they have been living lately.
Is
there still an Attorney General in this country? Will somebody please follow
Eric Holder down a hallway and see if he leaves a trail of sawdust on the
floor. Or did congress just retract all the fraud statutes by stealth in the
same way that the Federal Reserve handed out $7.7 trillion in bailouts back
in 2008 (much more than the generally accepted figure of the $800 billion
TARP) without anyone finding out until three years later when some Bloomberg
reporters rooted the numbers out of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
filing. And by the way, what is the US Federal Reserve doing handing out
billions of dollars to the Royal Bank of Scotland? Was Scotland admitted to
the Union by stealth, too? Or did Jamie Dimon just
buy it as a birthday present for Barack Obama, who likes golf.
This
is what life in the USA is like nowadays: shit happens and shit un-happens,
and you find out about it years later. Only a desperate and hopelessly
degenerate nation would choose to live this way, in a law-optional society,
in which money means everything, and yet nobody even knows what money is (or
where it goes, and what it does when it goes there.)
Jon
Corzine has not revealed the destination of the loot (somewhere between $600
million and $2.5 billion, estimated) that vanished from the
"segregated" accounts of his many clients at MF Global. The rumor
is that it went to cover a rude margin call from Jamie Dimon's
bank, JP Morgan, after JC took some unfortunate positions in European
sovereign bonds in a bad month. Beyond the question of why Mr. Corzine is not
in jail (as a flight risk, just like DSK) is how come the Department of
Justice has not so much as issued a statement saying that they were looking
into the matter, so as to reassure both the victims and the financial markets
that this is not a culture that just makes shit up as it goes along - i.e.
that we have predictable rules and formal procedures for doing stuff.
The
clowns and villains who run America have accomplished something really epic:
they have vanquished meaning. Nobody knows what anything means anymore.
Anything goes now. All bets are off. It's not reassuring. It leads to bad
things happening like blood in the streets. When nothing means anything
anymore, some people will actually strive, make an
effort, to reestablish meaning in practical economic and political life,
because civilized life is impossible without it. So, in those historic
moments when civilization is suspended, people will work like hell to restore
meaning. Sometimes though, like Germany in the 1930s, you discover that the
suspension of civilization is itself intoxicating, and you ride with that for
a while.
Things
are really flying apart now, and just in time for Santa Claus. The European
bond rollovers are about to come in fast and furious during the season of
Advent and nobody can make their interest payments. They will be skipped or
postponed and promised for "next Tuesday," and yet the bizarro universe of credit default swaps will not be
triggered - is there a counter-party on God's green
earth who could afford a pay-out? Of course not. It was all a charade. So
we'll just learn that there actually is no "insurance" on all this
paper. Yesterday's "hair-cut" will be tomorrow's "throat
cut" as the middle innings of suspended civilization play out.
There
are heroes as-yet-sung-and-unsung in America, people who prefer reality over
reality-TV, people with a taste for meaning in life, which often requires the
recognition that some things are true and some not so true, and you're better
off with what's true. What appears to be true is that the old order is
finished and a new disposition of things is coming along. The Long Emergency
will beat a path straight to the Great Re-set. Sign up for it. Roll up your
sleeves. There is so much to do in this country. If you are young,
especially, it's all waiting for you.
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