The End Seems Near

Lately, I've been having some very apocalyptic premonitions.

I wonder if we are killing, or haven't already killed, the entire Gulf of Mexico. I wonder if we haven't already passed the tipping point of irreversible climate change. I wonder if we haven't already reached peak oil and if the world economy hasn't already been destroyed by rampant greed and poor financial management.

Meanwhile, volcanoes erupt, earthquakes shake, sinkholes open up, and floodwaters rise. It seems as if the very earth itself is colluding in our self-destruction or else ridding itself of us before we rid ourselves of her.

And on top of all that, Gary Coleman passes away. RIP, Gary.

Today, I got another email from Democracy for America, the latest in a long series that I've received in apparent retribution for having donated to the Obama presidential campaign a couple years ago. In this latest message, it was pointed out that the big banks on Wall Street, the JP Morgan/Chases, the Citibanks, the Banks of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and so on, have had another incredible year, getting huge taxpayer bail-outs, making record profits, and paying out multi-million dollar bonuses to their CEOs while many of them are still participating in all the highly leveraged activities that caused our housing and credit crisis in the first place.

The good news is that Congress is poised to pass major financial reforms later this month, so the President can sign the bill before the 4th of July. The problem is the bill they're planning to pass isn't enough. According to the New York Times, "The financial reform legislation making its way through Congress has Wall Street executives privately relieved that the bill does not do more to fundamentally change how the industry does business. Despite the outcry from lobbyists and warnings from conservative Republicans that the legislation will choke economic growth, bankers and many analysts think that the bill approved by the Senate last week will reduce Wall Street's profits but leave its size and power largely intact."

In other words, too big to fail banks will still be too big to fail. The email said that it's time to take matters into our own hands, and that I should join the Move Your Money campaign and pledge to move all my money and savings to a local community bank or credit union today.

According to the email, community banks and credit unions don't act like the big banks. Typically, they're more responsible in how they manage their money, they're more closely connected to the people and businesses who live near them, and they're more inclined to make loans they know will get paid back. And my local credit union isn't going to ask Congress for a multi-billion dollar bail-out either. If enough people move their money from a big bank to a smaller, more local, more traditional community bank, we can break up the big banks ourselves. By working together, we won't have to wait for Congress to make change happen.

Okay, good idea, but unfortunately not one grounded in reality. As Paul Krugman recently pointed out in those very same Times, Georgia has one of the highest rates of bank failures in the country, and it isn't big banks that are failing here, it's those very community banks and credit unions to which Democracy For America wants me to move my money.

Down here in Georgia, it's been shown that short-sighted greed and myopic mismanagement isn't the sole purview of the big banks, but that if a vacuum appears at the lower end of the karmic ladder, small banks and local lenders are more than willing to move in and fill the void. But they're not likely to get multi-millions of taxpayer bail-out dollars, though, I'll grant you that. They just get foreclosed upon as others move in to replace them.

It would be re-assuring to say that the end is near, but the true horror of it all is that everything will still go on without respite or relief. But on a positive note, last night I heard Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zero's Janglin' as the background music for a Ford commercial, so there's always that.