In his most recent book, "The Precipice," Noam Chomsky refers to the USA as "a society that has long been the safest and most terrified in the world." What are they so a-feared of? With the military they've got, it wouldn't be invasion. It's something far more diabolical. After a great deal of research and, unlike any of us, Noam does research while being one of the smartest dudes in the world, he has concluded that what we, and I include myself as a fellow North American, are afraid of is the rich. The wealthy, the one percent or maybe even the POINT one percent. The only folks who prosper during times of fear because they benefit from our fear, indeed they base their wealth on it!
What am I blathering about? Just a few pages before the above statement in "The Precipice," Chomsky talks about St. Alan. The mere fact that people know the name Alan Greenspan is testament to his danger. If you are from the era when we all watched so much television that commercials were the "memes" of the day, you'd recognize the phrase, "When E. F. Hutton speaks, everyone listens." Greenspan is E. F. Hutton. He is the former chair of the FED and was instrumental in turning boring, safe banking into a sexy, risky industry in which market players were given more powerful instruments (derivatives) with which to make bets on the future... using OUR MONEY! He was worshipped and followed as a god by members of the economic professions and other admirers for decades until the bubble he helped create, largely through the bloated housing "securities" market, burst in 2007/2008. If you watch "Inside Job" and "The Big Short," you will know that this makes him basically...
This was the "miraculous" economy of the 80's, 90's and 2000's. If you remember back to those years and you take a look at your bank statement, you might think, "Hey, wait a minute... how come I wasn't in on that miraculous economy?" Well, you were in a way if you are the vast majority. That way? You were the earner of the money that was used to create this economic "miracle," but you were in no position to gain, just to lose. You take the risk, the banks and investors make all the dough. It's a shitty deal, right? So why did we all allow it? Two reasons: ignorance and fear.
Before I get ahead of myself and maybe assume too much of my reader, let me give you another name: Lewis Ranieri. The mere fact that people DON'T know his name is testament to his danger. He was the inventor of the mortgage backed bond in the late 70's. He got the idea of "bundling" people's mortgages so that the banks got paid early and investors (huge entities composed of money like investment firms, pension funds, hedge funds etc.) assumed the debt. Banks actually made a 2% profit for selling these bonds. People pay their mortgages so they were considered safe. This is where the awful term "securitization" comes from.
The original housing bonds probably wouldn't have caused a big problem. It was greed that caused the problem. You see, these mortgage backed bonds sold out. The market was so hot, they needed more. So banks started giving mortgages to everyone. NINJA mortgages for people with no income and no jobs - sure. The subber the prime the better because banks could make higher percentages on them. This is where the money business started making fancy, euphemisms so that they could sound like they were the only ones who understood this crap. This'd be our ignorance. Words and non-words like "derivatives," CDOs and CDS's. A collateralized debt obligation was a derivitive derived from bundles of sub-prime mortgage loans. Basically loans everybody KNOWS will be defaulted on. Absolute crap, BUT they go to Moody's and slap a triple A rating on them (and Moody's played along because if they didn't accept money for their bullshit triple A rating, their competitors would) and - voila - the market stays hot.
Pretty soon credit default swaps or "shorting" the housing market became popular. They were like insurance taken out on the housing bond market. If 15% or so of the mortgages in a bundle defaulted, the CDS paid out like insurance. So you WANT the house "owners" to default on their mortgages. You pay premiums, like any insurance, every month until the CDS pays off, but when it does, it could be 10-1, even 20-1 payout! Usually banks, after selling the garbage CDO's, convincing investors they were "diverse" and deserving of their triple A ratings, fucking short the shit they've just sold! THIS - THIS is your miracle on Wall Street! How the hell did this happen? Surely America (and all the other central bank driven economies of the world (which is all the big ones)) have protection against such irresponsible bank behavior! Don't they?
Well this is where St. Alan came into play. The Glass Steagall Act was drawn up in response to the collapse of the US banks in 1933 - the Great Depression. It separated commercial banks from capital markets and it is believed by many that the undermining and eventual repeal of its most important provisions figured largely in accelerating the '07/'08 financial meltdown. It actually happened quite late in the game. In 1998, the Fed pressured congress to allow the merger of Travelers - a huge insurance and "securities" conglomerate, and Citicorp - the largest bank in America. Hello? Can you say conflict of interest? This was exactly what Glass Steagall was drawn up to avoid! I don't know if this happened, but hear me out: Citibank could theoretically put together the shittiest piece of crap CDO made up of the most highly suspect home loans given to the most questionable of home "buyers," sell it to ITSELF at a huge percentage, take out a CDS on it, wait five minutes for it to default, then PAY ITSELF. Now I KNOW this sounds confusing because how could a bank profit by paying itself from its own money. Ahhhh, this is where another of their fake words comes in: leverage. Leverage is what the financial racket calls the practice of creating fake money out of thin air. Basically taking loans out on their loans.
Okay, if I were to go to a bank and apply for a loan today, they'd ask for collateral. A loan of 8000 bucks might require me to put up something of value, like my home, worth 10,000 or so. I live in a tent. A really, really NICE tent. Anyway, this is negative leverage and I am stuck with it because the banks set the assets to equity rates. So of course if they are taking loans from themselves they are going to give themselves an awesome rate of assets to equity. It was up to 12-1 in 2004. That means the bank could take a loan of (or buy a CDO worth) 96,000 bucks and only need the same 8000 bucks of backing. That's 88,000 dollars of fake money. And, of course, banks don't deal in the paltry sums we do, we are talking millions, billions and even trillions of "leverage" or money bankers just pulled out of their unregulated asses by the time 2008 rolled around and leverage rates were 33-1. Before that time only governments had such freedom to "print their own money."
How did they get away with this? Years and years of pressure put on law makers to adjust laws and allow for irresponsible gambling in the financial market, and lobbyists paid by that industry to pressure government to deregulate - that is, to defund regulators like the Security and Exchange Commission. The SEC had ONE employee at the height of the crisis. Banks and financial firms were free to do whatever they wanted and it was largely because of Greenspan. The regulation of the financial markets was left to the financial markets themselves with a parental warning from governments and legislators to please try to exercise self-restraint.
You might, like any person with an ounce of human compassion, wonder how this whole industry could just cheat so many home owners and mortgage payers. Well, it's worse than you think. They cheated every tax payer, and when I say that I want you to know that beyond a certain income, nobody pays taxes. It's just the poor dumbasses. The whole time this bubble was being blown up, the faces of the tranche traders, CDO floggers and the absolute worst, the guy who made Mark Baum (Steve Carrel's character in The Big Short) seek redemption from the craps tables, the SYNTHETIC CDO hawkers remained smug. This was because they KNEW the banks were too big to fail and would eventually be bailed out by the stupid, but hardworking tax payers of America. I remember at the time thinking 700 billion was an inestimable amount of money, but since 2008, out of the public eye, that total has ballooned. Here's a paper by some grad students from the University of Missouri who calculate that it has reached beyond 29,000,000,000,000 - that's 29 trillion dollars.
So, at long last, what did Alan Greenspan say the glory days of his success in economic management was based on? Substantially "growing worker insecurity." Fear. Intimidated working people not asking for higher wages, benefits or security. Workers accepting stagnating wages in exchange for desperately maintaining employment. You'd better believe this fear is something that a lot of effort and planning has been put into! And now that I'm essentially out of a job, I'm starting to understand it better.
I've noticed, and blogged extensively about how the employment process here in Asia has been artificially complicated and the frustration at the endless tedium of job application that makes a worker suffer the slings and arrows of their outrageous misfortune to have shitty jobs. But we bear those ills rather than fly to others we know not of. What are the ills we know not of that make us bear slings and arrows like desk warming and bogus counseling and working for free during vacations and bullshit meetings being called to fill holes in your schedule and 150-page website editing duties that are also unpaid... I could go on, couldn't I? You know if you've read my blog. I knew when I signed on at my current job, which I still have till the end of Feb., that it was the worst offer I'd ever seen for a post-secondary institution in Korea. I took it because I was afraid of being unemployed during Covid.
Now for the first time in many years, I've been applying for jobs back in North America. What a travesty that has become! I've howled before about Korean recruiters insinuating themselves into a perfectly functional job market that used to exist here whereby schools advertised on sites like Dave's ESL Cafe and teachers applied directly to somebody who worked for the school to which they were applying. Now a lot of the jobs are sold to recruiters. Something similar seems to have happened back at home.
Indeed, Linkedin, Workopolis, Wowjobs, Jooble, Glassdoor are some examples of job websites to whom a lot of schools seem to be selling their application processes. And you can't use them until you register and they don't tell you that you need to register until after you've spent an hour or so filling in all the blanks you can. And THEN sometimes you are told your application is incomplete and you need to fill in all the necessary blanks marked with red exes, but you have exactly zero blanks on your entire application marked with red exes. I usually try to avoid these jobs because often they are old jobs that are already filled. They don't care about hiring you, they just want your information to sell. The sites often reset or time out too so an hour-long application turns into a three-hour battle with technology and in the end when you press "submit" or "apply" or whatever, a wave of fear rushes over you in expectation of some sort of glitch, which so often is the case. And there are sometimes some really good looking jobs on these sites, so I have to brave them and face my fear occasionallly.
Then sometimes you manage to find an email that actually IS associated with a real educational institution to which you want to apply. Often they lead to their OWN automated application sites that are almost identical in design, length, frustration and glitches as the work websites. I've applied to teach at Vancouver Community College, a place where I studied for my Provincial Instructor's Diploma many years ago. I made a special resume and cover letter for them, answered all their questions, uploaded documents like reference letters, transcripts, teaching philosophy and such, only to reach the end and find the message that my application was not submitted because I need to fill in all the required blanks that are marked with red exes... and both times, there were no red exes.
There are some disturbing psych tests that are part of these online applications too. Much like the places in Korea that require entire curriculums, I'm just not comfortable giving total strangers that much of my private information. I don't know why it is, or at least used to be illegal to ask a person's age, religion, or race, but now they ask deeper, more meaningful questions with impunity. "I'm a person who enjoys seeing others succeed." 1-5 5 being very much like me and 1 being not like me. What if you are super competitive and hate seeing others succeed? Is that going to set off flags? Or maybe NOT being super competitive will set off the flags the job market being dog-eat-dog as it is. How about we at least have a Zoom meeting before delving so deeply into my soul? I reckon if you want to ask questions about my inner demons, you'd better ask me out on a date first. Right? At least wait till the interview. But apparently not. Maybe I'm out of touch. Maybe people are walking down the streets of Toronto or New York these days asking random strangers, "Hey, man. What do you feel are your strengths and weaknesses in a teamwork situation?"
Then even if you DO manage to submit a few applications, you start wondering why nobody's calling. You start questioning yourself. Am I too old? Am I not good enough? And even if you get an interview, you still might not get chosen and you have the same crushing feelings of inadequacy. And even if you nail the interview, land the job and accept, you have to move, start a new job, meet new co-workers and friends and work for an employer that may be just as bad or worse than your previous one. New bad stuff, new good stuff, but all stressful stuff.
Are you starting to sense the fear? And this is just to add to the regular fears that go along with not being employed. Will I need to move? How long will it take to get back to work? How much will my doctor or dentist appointment cost without my insurance? How long will my savings hold out? Will people think I'm a lazy bum? How can I make car /house payments? What if I have to get social assistance? What if I have to move back in with my parents? Will my friends/family think less of me? Will I ever get laid again? Over here in Korea there are other worries like will my bank account or phone get cancelled? How can I find an apartment without a work contract? How long can I stay on a visitor's visa? Does it automatically convert when my work visa expires? Will they take my alien card? What things can and can't I do without my alien card? Life is just a giant pile of stress when you are out of work. If I had a wife and kids, the list would be a lot longer too! Does anyone think the social, legal and cultural jobless stigma has been so fully developed by accident? Is it any wonder that so many of us keep jobs we hate, work for and with people we hate and live in places we hate for so long? I certainly don't think all of this is random happenstance.
Even though we are regarded by the economic elite as dog shit on their shoes, they need us. If we ever had a perfect example, it was the 2008 "financial crisis." It wasn't that so much as retributive justice. Or WOULD have been if the guilty parties had to pay for the damage they caused, or, I dunno, maybe go to prison? But they didn't. We did. And still are. And we're doing so by clocking in every day working our asses off so those people who hate us can have almost all of the wealth, security and power.
That's why they've set things up so it's terrifying to be out of work.
But it looks as though I'll be fearful for the next few months anyway. I can't get any job earlier than April but the one I have now. I mean if Gongju Dae re-hires me, they're the only place I can work for in March. Anywhere else I'd have to start an entirely new immigration process, which requires a new criminal record check and all that paperwork. I contacted the place where I have gotten my previous CRC's and they told me Covid has affected the process differently in Canada and Korea. In Canada the process the government is responsible for regarding criminal record checks has been slowed to a crawl and is backlogged. The fastest they'll get their end done will be a month and a half. That's the fastest. Then I have to get it apostilled at the Korean consulate. They'll take their usual 3-4 days, but they've jacked up their prices due to Covid.
I'll have to move because my housing contract expires at the end of Feb. My landlord won't sign a new one for less than a year. It will be very difficult to find an apartment if I don't have a job contract here. And even MORE difficult for less than a year. But I've been offered a place to stay and even store my stuff by good old Heather and Mike. Can you imagine the fear I'd be experiencing right now if I didn't have them? Or if I didn't have them and didn't have any savings? I'd probably BEG to have my job back with twice the foreign fuckery and at half the pay! It's all by design.
That's how they getcha!
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