Green IslandThe Global Financial Crisis Could be the Answer to My Prayers
November 3rd 2008 13:44
And it shall be known as "Reather"
My wife and I first went to Laos in 1997 and were delighted by how unspoiled it was. Only recently opened to the outside world, it was a country of forests, rivers and mountains populated by dignified Buddhist people of impeccable manners who often called us over to share their simple meals. Travelling in the north and heading for the legendary opium production areas we stopped for the night at a small town. The only accommodation we could find was a long wooden structure partitioned off into 3 metre square compartments like a giant chicken shack. Since there was no electricity we went to bed early and were awoken early the next morning by a big turkey with a revolting red flapping piece of skin hanging from its neck. In 2000 we happened to stop off at the same town only this time there was a choice of 3 guest houses and a big hotel at the end of the main road. The place seemed over run with youngsters with shiny new backpacks and up-to-date Lonely Planets. There were mountain bikes for hire and rubber tubes available to float down the river. The unique charm of a nowhere place had been replaced by the generic feel of a cool ‘must do’ place. Although the place had become more convenient it made me despondent; it was the harbinger of only bad things for Laos as far as I was concerned. For the writing was on the wall for Laos – soon there would be police looking for bribes and a dual pricing system would emerge and the beauty of Buddhist ethics would be replaced by a nationalistic dislike of foreigners. Sadly all too similar to what had been happening to neighbouring Thailand. After the round-the- worlders will come a plague of Israelis and finally package tourists with wheelie suitcases accompanied by Starbucks and McDonalds.
It is a hippy axiom that when cool places get “discovered” by the mainstream that within a few years they become ruined and it is the humble contention of this writer that this process was accelerated by the rapacious greed that fuelled the boom years prior to the present malaise of the Global Financial Crisis.
The roots of the problem probably lie in human nature, but if we are looking for palpable targets then it should be Ronnie Reagan and Maggie “Tetsuo” Thatcher who started the world on an economic model of privatization and deregulation that has been pursued by both “left” and “right” governments of many major countries since the 1980’s. In Britain that woman set out to portray business as ‘sexy’ and unions, concerned academics and drop outs as ‘out of touch’ and a ‘drain’ on society. In America Ronnie invented ‘zero tolerance’ and coupled it with superpower swagger which inspired such dubious heroes as mayor Giuliani who set out to ‘clean up’ America. And then of course some trade barriers started falling and telecommunications improved and big companies sought to emulate coke cola and Marlboro and sell their shit everywhere on the planet and thus Globalization was born. Despite French protests and exemplary fuck ups by the Japanese, the world (and especially the Chinese) caught the Reatherism virus and the result was a plague of Starbucks, McDonalds, 7-11s, Tescos etc. Governments sold off anything useful they owned (water, gas, electricity, oil, nuclear facilities, post offices, airlines) and restraint was sacrificed on the altar of Laissez Faire (goddess of rapacity). At the same time geeky math geniuses managed to make something out of nothing with complicated computer algorithms and set them to work on the derivatives market. In 1995 Nick Leeson over tweaked the numbers and the Kobe earthquake shook the ground and $1.3 billion in debt sunk Barings Bank. In the same year Blythe Masters invented credit default swaps to make more something out of nothing and guarantee that the general public would never be able to understand investment banking again. Finally, in the early 2000s every man and his dog started buying property and land as investments (even poor people were allowed into the party by the creation of the gangster loan dubbed the subprime mortgage). As a consequence, even urinals in rural China started increasing in value. The spread of wealth produced a cloud of smug that crystallized into the anti-Newtonian ideology that ‘some things, like house prices, only go up’. Meanwhile the Blythe geek army was busily trying to invent financial tools to shore up the racked up zeros of wealth and see off the Newtonians for good. One such tool was MBS (mortgage backed securities) whereby banks could re-package the risky gangster loans and sell them as investment which then could be traded, thereby putting more wealth into the system and allowing middle men to pick up more commission cash.
The one on the right, inventor of 'cottaging', forerunner of 'hedging'
This heralded in the age of hedging which was inspired by the former lead singer of Wham! who popularized cottaging, which is the now outlawed practice of buying a public toilet and declaring it to be a delightful cottage and any who dare to disagree are given a damned good anal rodgering before being manhandled off the premises. Hedging allowed a man to take possession of the greasiest loans imaginable and do lots of swaps for other types of loans plus marbles and conkers until the bloke left holding the skankiest loans was gleefully anally obtruded by his cell mate. And this was only fitting because Darwin had already told us that the weak need to be shafted to guarantee the fattest survive.
I could carry on waxing perverse but the end of the story is $668 trillion (give or take a few marbles) of imaginary debt that no amount of hedging can seem to shift, like a whale of a shit that just won’t flush. Not even the Canadians can be enticed to hedge it. The reason is that there’s not enough of anything in the entire world to pay for it. The world makes about $60.71 trillion a year. So if we all moved back into our parents’ house and spent nothing for 10 years and saved all the cash we could pay it off (if it was a Japanese loan at zero percent interest). Unfortunately, those responsible don’t appear to have parents so that plan has gone for a Burton.
Now I’ve got all the background out the way I can begin to trace the link between the ruination of cool traveller’s’ destinations and the ethos that lead to the GFC. Naturally it’s to do with making money from tourism and that smokescreen of a word, “development”.
A long, long time ago bearded men and women with hairy armpits tramped the world seeking ‘good vibes’. On their endless quests they happed upon many ‘cool spots’. These ‘cool spots’ were ‘diamonds in the rough’ – rural places of immense natural beauty and cities of towering civilization populated by friendly folk who believed in live and let live, who were uncontaminated by Reatherism, who worshipped non-intrusive gods and who like the Indians in North America welcomed their hirsute visitors from overseas and bid them partake in their modest repasts. As a result, word spread and more hippies set out from Europe, Australia and America to discover more diamonds in the rough. When it seemed that all the diamonds had been discovered the Reatherists known as Maureen and Tony Wheeler set out to reap the benefits and steal the gems for their fellow Reatherists and unleashed upon the world the virulent contagion called ‘the LP’. No longer did the hippies have word of mouth control of who could enter the kingdoms of hammocks, local prices, wicked weed, pristine beaches, awesome mountain vistas and amazing temples. All the secrets were in print and soon to be on the internet. It wasn’t long before the LP virus had spread to the four corners of the globe and the hippies were cast out of the garden. The eviction process was facilitated by Reatherist tactics of inviting poor countries to erect altars to Laissez Faire and allow rich indigenous Reatherists and a few foreign Reatherists to build hotels with swimming pools and introduce package tourists and Japanese to tempt the locals to inflate prices and force the hippies to go. At the same time local police forces were told to attack the hippies at their weakest spot by enforcing long ignored laws about not smoking the wicked weed. This reaped massive financial gains for the men in blue but unfortunately meant their primary role as upholders of the law was transformed into collectors of bribes.
Maureen and Tony Wheelers, hippies turned Reatherists
On the back of the Reatherist revolution in the West, formerly worthless bits of farm land, mountain land and beach in the poorer countries suddenly acquired massive value which could be sold and traded and re-traded guided by the anti-Newtonian principle that prices can only go up. The process was accelerated by a flood of Reatherists who had meticulously studied the LP and who were masters of the arcane arts of borrowing, collaterizing, marketing and hedging. Thanks to their know-how 5 stars could be planted everywhere to maximize the profits of the diamonds in the rough which then became fully tooled diamonds hewn to Reatherist perfection, excellent products to package and sell on the internet and on the high street of the original Reatherist countries.
Thong Nai Pan beach in Thailand BEFORE
Thong Nai Pan beach in Thailand AFTER
You may think this is an unfair characterization because the local people benefited from this ‘development’ of tourist spots and improved their standards of living. So I will take the time to explore this Reatherist myth of development. The original inhabitants of these cool places in many ways mirrored their surroundings, they were diamonds in the rough with certain material needs but not that fussed about having millions in the bank. Nature’s bounty provided plenty of food and wicked weed, chilling opium and buzzy coca. There was a doe-eyed maiden for every man and a piece of earth to erect a hut. There was plenty of free time to hang around in hammocks and at night the stars shone brightly as if in benediction to lives lead in harmony with nature. These people catered for the hirsute travellers who passed through but never considered allowing the extra money generated to destroy their traditional ways of life. No it was outsiders, schooled in Reatherist ways, who bought up the land cheaply and started a frenzy of shoddy building. Over night came garish hotels, free form pools, supermarkets and go go bars. And accompanying the building came non-hirsute foreigners demanding all kinds of things like ‘internet’, ‘taxis’, ‘air-con’, ‘cocktails’, ‘day trips’, ‘satellite TV’, ‘organic food’, ‘crèche facilities’, ‘spa facilities’, ‘export draught beer’, ‘e’, ‘coke’, ‘good service’ and no end of nonsense. And these alien visitors who came armed with fistfuls of ATM currency, made sure they got what they wanted. The result was inevitable - prices went up and the locals became more and more marginalized or sucked into the new cash nexus. They stopped farming and fishing and started wearing uniforms or selling drugs or selling their bodies or turned to theft or got roped into construction jobs building concrete carbuncular pastiches of their own culture.
mining in Kananaskis County, Alberta, Canada
Country life and island life has no timetables other than nature’s rhythms and these Reatherist city folk with their timetables and financing who promise TVs and fridges for everyone are Lucifers preying on ill-prepared Fausts. The locals who own land fare better for longer. They see their once humble patrimonies increase in value. They sell off their birthrights and live off the proceeds for years. They build themselves uber-shacks with satellite TV and drink cold beer and spend their days gambling with their cronies.
Next there is the tourist. Yes, they now have their smooth roads, good accommodation, internet connections, ATM machines, international menus, air-con, sports activities, spa facilities and multi lingual staff. They get to lie around swimming pools, buy souvenirs made in China and get thoroughly pampered. They re-charge their batteries and rejuvenate before going back to their high paying, stressful lives. But then again they might as well have stayed at home since all they want is back home stuff. The real benefit for them is the kudos of telling their posh friends about how well travelled they are. They don’t really give a shit about the place they’ve just visited. They just want tans and digital photos of World Heritage sites. And these people won’t be back because life doesn’t contain enough annual holidays to fit in much repetition. These people are consumers of fake culture who want 5 star treatment and who enjoy being served by illegal immigrants, tamed locals and those fleeing from poverty in other parts of the country who have all become domesticated servants who work for slave wages. And the notion of the trickle down effect is ludicrous. The profits from the 5 star hotels leave the area and goes into the accounts of investors and bankers elsewhere. The percentage of a tourist’s money spent directly on local businesses is tiny and perhaps the taxi drivers take the lion share of what the Reatherists don’t get.
Just as derivates can be mixed and matched and re-packaged and sold on and thus lose their connection with any specific piece of land or business, so the 5 star experience has lost its connection to any particular locale. International cuisine, Indian yoga, German beer, Caribbean cocktails, Japanese vehicles, European middle management, Middle Eastern oil drowns out the local flavour of a place and guarantees that a stay at an Intercontinental Hotel is the same from Delhi to Sydney to Moscow to Sao Paolo.
So you can see that nobody benefits except for the Reatherists, who profit from exploiting and developing a place according to tried and market tested formulas for other highly paid Reatherists to go on holiday and enjoy a neo-colonial experience. Meanwhile, the poor hippies and locals can no longer afford to hang out in these wondrous places.
Alright, chum. Where's my $668 trillion?
Luckily, the Reatherists have met the grim reaper who is demanding $668 trillion and isn’t going to take a rain cheque. The GFC is the proverbial ‘red pill’ and we’ve been forced to take it and wake up and smell the shit that over 20 years of Reatherism has caused. Now perhaps finally the altar to Laissez Faire will be destroyed and those polished diamonds will be left to become tarnished and the doors to the garden will be opened again to the hippies and that place in Laos will return to its ugly turkey, nowhere status. The dream is over.
It's the red pill for us thanks to the GFC
This article is dedicated to Nobber my favourite Reatherist.
Images of TNP are mine. Kananaskis by kind permission of a Canadian friend.
Wham, the Wheelers and the Grim Reaper and Reather from Wikipedia.org under the GNU free licensing agreement.
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Comment by Lilla
From The Home Front
Enviro Warrior
Dream Herald
Esoteric Bookshop
I just wanted to play that back for the brilliance it is in stating the truth.
As a fellow traveller from the past, I am enjoying tripping around with you (reliving my memories) ...wonderful read.
... going to explore some more of your
poststravels...Lilla ...
Comment by Green Island
Trippy Traveller
I hope you enjoy some of the other tales.