More Reflection on the Sea Island Debacle.
When Bill Three was interviewed for a profile in 2003, just before the demolition of the old Cloister Hotel started, he explained
"The banks almost pay you to borrow money today,"
as to where the money was coming from.
That was the same bank, Synovus, which started out paying my mother about five thousand dollars a year interest on the Certificates of Deposit she bought with her life's savings (she died in 2005, aged 98) and then had reduced that to less than a thousand a year by the time they were "almost" paying Bill Three to take the money. If the extent to which our seniors have been defrauded of their life savings hasn't been covered much in the press, it's probably because the Federal Reserve Bank lowering interest rates to near zero was/is being blamed for an apparent flood of money that nobody wanted to use, and nobody has yet figured out what to do about them. It's sort of like being in a car with a drunk driver racing down a mountain. There's nothing to do but hang on for dear life. (I say "apparent" because it turns out that the flow of money to Main Street had already slowed to a trickle by 2003 and federal loans were being doled out to make up for banks that didn't lend).
If the man who boasted of his family's tradition of good stewardship over forty-one miles of coastal lands doesn't want to talk about what the banksters are doing to him now, who can blame him? Bill Three may even think his own greed did him in. He got hooked on money and ended up defeated as most addicts do.
It's an old pattern--give away something for free and then, when the good turns into a craving that gnaws at the gut, the deprivators can reel you in and out at will. We're all familiar with how it works. The tobacco companies did it. They even sent reps to hang around the entrances to girls' convent schools and discretely distribute free samples in cunning boxes of five--about a day's supply for the casual smoker. The distributors of heroin do it too, I'm told. That legal tender could be used in the same way comes as a bit of a surprise. Maybe because money, having such a long history in use, follows a slightly different trajectory to get people hooked. The deprivation comes first. Then, any relief serves to make the subsequent deprivation that much worse.
Asked the proper questions, most any recent target of economic development could explain how it works. What most victims probably don't realize is that the deprivation they experience is actually the objective. Whether they're banksters or drug lords, the deprivators aren't after people's assets (their money or their health); they just want to deprive them of it. Like pulling the wings off flies.
As someone who happens to think that next to the invention of writing, making speech palpable, the invention of money, a figment of the imagination that makes the transfer of goods and services both palpable and transcendent of time and space, is the next best thing, the use of money as a tool of deprivation strikes me as the grossest abuse. That's because the intermediation of money facilitates the transmission of things both spiritual and material (lubricates exchange and trade) and depriving people of its intended use not only stymies the transfer of material resources and assets, but interrupts the flow of culture, science and education from one generation to the next. Society is impoverished when people are deprived of the use of money.
Imagine if all the alphabets of the world were suddenly locked up in vaults and humans were reduced to relying on the spoken word to share whatever information they had gleaned from their everyday experience. Indeed, you don't even have to imagine. There are a number of small populations surviving quite well in the Amazon today, without writing or taking much account (enumerating) of their environment and not knowing that their primitive way of life is about to become extinct. Perhaps ignorance is bliss as our political conservatives seem to believe.
But, the effects of deprivation, of removing the attributes and comforts of culture and civilization, aren't really the issue. Since it's the habit of focusing on effects and consequences which distracts us from the perpetrators or agents of deprivation and allows their abusive behavior to continue unchecked, the issue we need to address is how the deprivators, especially the ones operating under cover of law (predatory interest rates are a good example of legal deprivation) can be effectively deterred.
Perhaps the first step involves overcoming a bit of pride. Pride, it seems, prevents some people from admitting, even to themselves, that, like Eve, they were tricked into crediting the representations of someone whose main objective is the perversion of the truth. Many people are reluctant to admit they were fooled. So, like Bill Three, who has gone into seclusion while the vultures from Goldman Sachs have descended to clean up the carcass, ashamed of having been stupid, the victims of abuse blame themselves and the perpetrators go after their next victim. Hiding behind the shield of money, which shows no fingerprints, makes it oh so easy.
Will regulation make a difference? The history of regulation in the United States is not encouraging, since it typically involves a significant bribe (dedicated rights of way, license to pollute) in exchange for record keeping that, at best, makes it easier to assess the damage later. About as useful as putting a sexual deprivator under supervision by the office of probation. Where was the Comptroller of the Currency while our money supply was being inflated by credit default options and other "innovative financial instruments" of deprivation and symbolic torture?
"Reform" might prove more useful. Especially if the conservative meaning of "get rid of the old to make something new" is followed. It's what has the no-value-added health insurance industry in a tizzy. If insurance reform succeeds, can the banksters be far behind? Hope springs eternal.