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from March/April 2009 issue, posted Mar 15, 2009
Am I mistaken, or did Bender's Big Score anticipate the financial meltdown?
By Paul Richmond
Numbered references appear
at the end of this article.
It's a simple fact that many of the best and most prescient works are simply ignored in their time. Citizen Kane, for example, considered by many to be the best movie of all time, was a box office failure. Director Orson Wells was never able to make a film he wanted to after it.
One feature that was released with minimal fanfare in recent years was the first feature born of Fox's cancelled television series Futurama. The animated Bender's Big Score is simple and prescient: a group of scammers come to Earth and con the entire population out of everything on the planet. The main characters attempt to deal with this in various ways, and ultimately everyone on the planet gets miffed and launches an all-out attack on the scammers and the robot army the scammers have built using all of Earth's wealth.
Bender's Big Score was released in November 2007 on DVD and aired in March 2008 on Comedy Central--long before the collapse of our banking system that has spurred trillions of dollars in bailouts.
How prescient the writers' of Bender's Big Score were is something I ponder. Presently financiers such as George Soros and Paul Volcker say they see no end to the present collapse.[1] The head of Russia'a foreign academy has predicted the United States will disintegrate by July 4, 2010.[2]
As writer Kevin Phillips pointed out in his book Bad Money, published as the collapse was starting to be talked about, the dollar value of the derivatives and other financial junk was actually larger than most parts of the economy connected with real goods and services. Despite the fact that these "too large to fail" banks have hired some of the best mathematicians on the planet to disguise their financial junk, it doesn't require being particularly versed in mathematics to see where this is now going.
The economy of real goods and services (what is left of it) is being taxed to make up the lost value of the junk economy. Since the economy of real goods and services has a smaller financial value than the junk had, it will, if we continue on the present course, be completely drained to pay off the junk. This is the basic math most of us were introduced to around First Grade.
I wonder if those involved in Bender's Big Score were looking at our past. There were many earlier examples of scammers taking over economy. One can look at the "Dot-Com Bubble" where incredible things were promised for a new technology. Scammers got investors to invest many times the value of what any of the services might possibly be worth. Stocks were traded and traded the values rising, ever rising. When the music stopped, those who'd sold their shares made mint, and the rest were fleeced.
This was the same game that accompanied the selling and reselling of shares of stock which prompted the Great Depression in 1929.[3] It was the same game that accompanied the building of the railroads where investors were encouraged to invest many more times the cost of the railroad's construction for tracks that were never built.
Nor is it a new concept that such scams would dominate the world of finance. One has only to look at the Savings and Loan meltdowns of the 1980's where a property with no value would be sold back and forth, each sale commanding a higher price. When it eventually collapsed, the taxpayers picked up the bill.
Such a scam was first laid out in Mel Brook's movie, The Producers, in which Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder realize they can make more money by promoting a theatrical production that will fail. Their scheme is to sell many times the value of the play in shares to investors, knowing it will fail.
What is different though about the current collapse from the prior ones is its scale. The ongoing financial collapse is of such a scale that it threatens to crush the entire society, leaving us with something resembling the scenario of the Road Warrior movies and its siblings such as Doomsday, Resident Evil, and some of the more recent work of George Romero. What could prompt such level of recklessness that the ultra-greedy would seek to destroy the entire system?
A model I found useful in understanding what was going on was laid out by author Robert Kaplan in his piece The Coming Anarchy. First published in February 1994 as an essay in the Atlantic, and then as a book in 2,000.[4,5]
As GW Bush and Al Gore campaigned for the presidency, Kaplan wrote from the perspective of those who own most of what can be owned on this planet. His premise is that the ecology of the planet is collapsing, and with the collapse of the ecology comes a collapse of the economy, and of course vast social unrest.[6] We are then left with two choices: repair the ecology (which isn't happening), or set up systems of control so that as the ecology and economy collapse, power relationships are maintained.
Kaplan goes into some length describing the second scenario. We will see merging of military, law enforcement, intelligence and private security. Such mergers already seem almost commonplace when we look at Homeland Security, Blackwater, Halliburton and the like. But consider that Kaplan wrote this before September 11, 2001, before the PATRIOT Act, before the Project for a New American Century, and even before the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and the 1995 Crime Bill which gave us most of what Bush's critics associate with PATRIOT.
To understand this is not to acknowledge it as inevitable, just as the scammers could not inevitably control earth in Bender's Big Score.
If we are to have any chance in this we are to proceed with our eyes open to what is going on. The continued ramping up of law enforcement, Homeland Security, Wars on Terrorism, Wars on Crime, and Wars on Drugs are there to build and feed this infrastructure that will maintain power relationships as the economy and ecology collapse. Most of the other stuff is noise and pretext.
It's too bad that Bender's
Big Score didn't win an Oscar, or some sort of special recognition
for having its metaphorical finger on our country's problems. I urge
you to commit to memory the scene where everyone from Santa to the Harlem
Globe Trotters unites to drive the scammers off of Earth. The
soundtrack for this scene is capable of getting you through some bad
times.
Paul Richmond
is an attorney practicing in Port Townsend, WA.
REFERENCES
[1] www.reuters.com/article/
[2] See Harper's Index 2.2009, item 12, citing to Finam FM ( Moscow ).
[3] See for example John Kenneth Galbraith's book The Great Depression.
[4] www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/
[5] 2,000 Random House, ISBN 0-375 50354-4
[6] A recent description of environmental
collapse leading to unprecedented social unrest can be found at http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2009/02/21/2462014-mass-migrations-and-war-dire-climate-scenario
Who Do Americans Trust?
Certainly not the media, though online media fares better than traditional print
By Andrew Nachison, iFOCUS
Most Americans are putting their faith in small business owners, entrepreneurs and science and technology leaders to lead the US to a better future--and they are significantly less hopeful the news media, government or large corporations will do the same, a new We Media/Zogby Interactive poll shows.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans (63%) said small business and entrepreneurs will lead the U.S. to a better future, while 52% said the same of science and technology leaders. Americans are far less optimistic about the leadership of government (31%), large corporations and business leaders (21%), or traditional news media such as newspapers, television, radio, and magazines (13%).
Americans think leadership toward a better future is more likely to come from family and friends (38%), non-profit groups (32%), or even themselves (36%). The Zogby Interactive survey of 2,397 adults nationwide was conducted Feb. 11-13, 2009, and carries a margin of error of +/- 2.0 percentage points. This is the third year of the survey.
Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the leadership currently provided by large companies, government and traditional media--and they are not confident the leadership from these groups will improve in the future. The survey shows 71% are "not very" or "not at all" satisfied with the leadership provided by traditional news media. Even greater numbers of Americans are unsatisfied with the leadership of the government (74%) and large corporations and business leaders (81%).
While just one in four (27%) Americans are satisfied with the leadership provided by traditional news media, Internet media including blogs and social networks fared far better, with 56% satisfied with online media leadership. Fewer than a third of Americans (32%) believe online media will provide leadership in the future, but they are much more confident in the potential of Internet media to guide the U.S. in a better direction than they are in traditional news media (13%).
This raises an old question that takes on new meaning as the world's economy reorganizes around diminished returns: what's the purpose of a news enterprise? Is it simply to produce, package and distribute data? Or is it more?
Americans most likely to look online for breaking and daily news
Nearly half of Americans (46%) said they first turn to Internet news sites for information on breaking news about national and government issues and nearly as many (40%) said online news sites are where they get most of their news and information. These online sites far outpace traditional news sources, such as television (25%), radio (14%), and newspapers (12%), as a source of daily news and information. It comes as no surprise that younger Americans are most likely to favor online news sources, but only those age 65 and older are more likely to turn to television (36%) over the Internet (29%) to get their news.
Methodology: Zogby International was commissioned by iFOCOS to conduct an online survey of 2497 adults. A sampling of Zogby International's online panel, which is representative of the adult population of the US, was invited to participate. Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion, gender, education to more accurately reflect the population. The margin of error is +/- 2.0 percentage points. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups. *
