Saturday, August 15, 2009

A 'thought experiment'

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while I feel the need to 're-visit' certain topics that haven’t been discussed in a while and this particular subject has been out of sight for quite some time.

Back when this nonsense first started, there was a lot of ‘speculation’ that there’d be a ‘run’ on the dollar.

Simply put, the dollar would sink so low, so fast that you’d wake up one fine morning and find out you weren’t being paid nearly enough.

In no uncertain terms you would be compelled to confront your employer and demand a raise or you’d cease working for them, effective immediately.

What do you suppose your employer would tell you? Would you be shocked if he laughed in your face? (This is not his likely first reaction as he’s in the same leaky canoe you’ve suddenly found yourself in.) He pays himself far better than he pays you but that doesn’t mean he has enough to pay all of his employees some multiple of their current wages (say double for the sake of argument.)

In order for him to pay you (and his other essential staff) double, he has to double the price of his product (and then some or he’ll leave himself ‘short’.)

There’s no doubt there’s going to be a lay-off later that day and you’re ‘righteous’ action has probably resulted in placing yourself at the head of the list he’s been drawing up.

The bigger the operation, the more heads that will ‘fly’.

So you apologize profusely, clock in and wait for the bad news. Break time rolls around and the only thing anyone is talking about is why prices went ‘haywire’ overnight.

Nobody knows why the coffee shop downtown is suddenly charging $10 for a small regular and the gas station down the street is asking for $15 a gallon for regular. Without a stiff pay increase you can’t afford these prices.

You know you went to sleep in your own bed last night but you have somehow woken up in Zimbabwe.

Lunch time rolls around and the boss calls a meeting, the sooner he gets this over with, the better. What’s he been up to while you’ve been working all morning? He’s been on the phone to his customers, advising them of the upcoming price hikes.

He started off saying that he’d honor the old price for ‘work in progress’ but too many customers cancelled their orders when they heard the new price and found out their orders weren’t ‘in progress’.

So he had to take the tough stance of telling the rest of his customers that the new prices were ‘retroactive’…and he lost even more business.

You’d think he’d be locked in his office, muttering how ‘screwed’ he was but no, he kept his head. He knows his customers are in the same boat he’s in, they’re going to have to double their prices too.

After he gets off the phone with his customers it occurs to him that he’d better call his suppliers to make sure ‘double’ was going to cover it.

Most suppliers are pretty confident that double is ‘safe’ but some are tripling their prices, just in case this sudden ‘upset’ isn’t over.

Guess who decides to make a national announcement at high noon? You get word that the lunch meeting is postponed until after the president says his piece.

Since the building has one of those PA systems that nobody can decipher, the Boss says you should all go out to your cars to listen to the president’s speech yourself as it’s being broadcast on all channels.

So everybody (who brought one) grabs their lunch and heads out to the parking lot…it’s colder than a well digger’s ass so you hope the Pres makes it quick as you don’t want to run your engine too long with gas at $15 a gallon.

What do you suppose the President has to say? It turns out the Israeli’s bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities overnight. The entire Middle East is at war AND all of our ‘trading partners’ dumped the dollar at pretty much the same time.

Not only are we at war BUT the dollar is also officially worthless. Our trading partners all want to be paid in Yuan…or oil, even our European trading partners as they have all had the ‘boom’ lowered on them as well. Their money is ‘no good’ too.

And there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it…short of going to war with China…and Russia.

What do you suppose are the next words out of the President’s mouth?

“We launch in ten minutes…”

Naturally, he advises everyone to seek out the nearest fallout shelter, knowing full well that none have been re-provisioned for over thirty years.

Suddenly, that big raise you were looking for that morning seems ‘inconsequential’. If you survive this, you will spend the rest of your natural days in ‘nuclear hell’, starting with a year long ‘nuclear winter’. How you’re going to survive that with no food is another question by itself, but there you go!

Let’s suppose for a fraction of a second that the President and the chiefs of staff DON’T lose their minds and sacrifice hundreds of millions of lives over a stupid thing like worthless money.

This is both doubtful and a ‘long shot’ but it could happen. (Understand that the wealthy have well stocked fall out shelters right at their fingertips.)

You also need to understand what’s at stake here, the Israeli government would be sent to The Hague to answer for ‘war crimes’, as the US would ‘voluntarily’ surrender its veto at the UN.

Then Israel would be ‘banished’ from the Middle East…and relocated to say, Michigan.

Starting to look pretty unlikely already, isn’t it?

Anyway, the Chinese move the UN from New York to Taiwan, along with annexing the island back into the Chinese Republic.

Because they can…

Naturally, the Yuan is named the world’s new ‘reserve currency’ (with the Ruble, the Rupee and the Real being offer ‘equal’ status with the Yuan) and the USD is ‘re-instated’ at 25 to 1. So merely ‘doubling’ your pay isn’t going to cut it, although ‘double’ is all your employer offers, if he even deigns to continue employing you at all.

BUT, we have lived to fight another day!

The interesting question everybody is wondering about is ‘how’ we got ourselves into this mess? And the answer is suddenly apparent. We were ‘sold out’ by the ‘more for me’ capitalists among us.

Um, I’m pretty sure few of you think he above scenario will ever play out in your lifetime…but there’s nothing stopping the Chinese from pulling the plug ‘tomorrow’, all they need is a half-assed, legitimate excuse.

We owe them a shit load of money…for stuff we could have just as easily made ourselves.

Think about that good citizen and wonder how long it will be before you wake up after a not so good night’s rest only to find yourself in Zimbabwe.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

P.S. I'm not purposefully painting the Chinese as the 'bad guys' here, this is simply where the chips currently lie. They didn't ask for this but they certainly have had it 'handed' to them.

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