Conquistadors of Credit

After the physical exploitation of the earth is completed, stripped of its metals and petroleum, the bankers undertake the credit exploitation. This entails the offering of credit to the governments and citizens of the poorer countries — for the consumption of gadgets or creation of businesses or the building of infrastructure — and the long-term interest harvesting of the credit-based GDP growth that follows.

 

The bankers are the new risk-taking explorers of the planet and through securitizations, derivatives, and explicit State backing (tax payer guarantees limiting their downside risk), are able to strip wealth out of even the poorest inhabitants.

 

It all seems good and right in the beginning as the credit bubbles are created in the poorer countries, and the citizens are able to buy goods and services they were historically unable to afford. But the only real winners after the inflationary collapse can be the asset holders. And these assets will eventually be repossessed by the banks after the extension of credit has peaked, overall growth has flagged, deflation has destroyed those who were too leveraged, and the loans have now become unpayable.

 

It will be many generations before the collapse of the banking created credit-based growth model. 80% of the planet awaits the promises of growth offered by the banking credit apparatus. The Western world has been harvested, its economic soil deadened, the people and governments no longer able to accept further credit exploitation. But the impoverished rest of the planet is waiting and willing and the bankers have only just begun to exploit it.

Fish House

from the forthcoming masterpiece Slime Line

 

There was bad news coming out of the Fish House. Salmon season had just opened and already half the workers had quit the slime lines. Of the four lines only two were running. There were only the Somalis and a few of the mental defectives left to work them. The salmon backed up and the Fish House Lead had a nervous breakdown. He began to shake violently, unable to speak, and laid down on pile of fish guts and passed out. When they got him awake he tried to quit but the foreman wouldn't let him. There was talk we were to be pulled off the dock and sent inside to help.

 

"You don't want to go in there," said One-Eyed Eddie. He had started out in the Fish House twelve years ago. "I got out and I never want to go back. You don't want to go in there."

 

The next day the Plant Manager sent us.

The Death of Francisco Flores

from the forthcoming masterpiece Slime Line

 

It was a beautiful late summer day. Salmon season was ending and the seiners were coming into the harbor after two months of fishing on the Sound. The Kaylor T had made its last contracted trip and the big tender was docked beside a seiner that was having its nets and a small skiff craned up onto the dock. The captain of the Kaylor T had gone to the Fisherman's Lounge to wait his turn at the crane. He wanted a huge section of steel housing removed from the deck and put into storage at the fishery until next season.

The Plant Manager told Francisco Flores to get the old mobile crane truck. The captain of the Kaylor T was an old friend. There was no reason to call him down just to move the ship to the dock-mounted crane.

Francisco Flores drove the old mobile crane to the edge of the dock above the Kaylor T and secured the stabilizer legs. He extended the boom out and began lowering the hook. It was low tide and the boat far below the dock in the water, and Francisco Flores let out a lot of cable to get the hook down to One-Eyed Eddie. It was a huge section of metal housing that covered half the deck. Nobody had any idea what it weighed. Eddie secured the big four-ways sling to each of the corners and he clasped the hook to it. "Winch up! Winch up!" Eddie yelled, signaling with his index finger.

On Domestication

4. The whip is the first law of domestication: the making into property of animals and men.

 

9. The beating of farm animals into submission: man's first practice of domestication—teaching him the usefulness of brutality—a domestication he would learn to perform upon himself and other men.

 

10. The hunter-gatherers banished a man from their lands, but the farmers (the early Statists) instead took custody of the man and through physical coercion attempted to change his behavior. For when all lands are owned—are the property of States and other men—there is nowhere to banish a man. Outlaws must be whipped in the public square, imprisoned (made the 'property of the State'), or put to death.

 

14. The hunter-gatherer had no use for the whip. He had neither animals nor men to swing it upon.

 

17. The first instruments of war were implements of farming, for the tilling of fields, repurposed to kill other men. The first weapons of war were made in the same blacksmith shops as scythes and ploughs.

The Iraqi

from the forthcoming masterpiece Slime Line

The Iraqi named Menter was a refugee from the war. He came from Baghdad to Alaska in the middle of winter through a job placement program for refugees. He came to America already unhinged and his discovery of alcohol, cocaine and loose Alaskan women had only unhinged him further. His English was a barely comprehensible mumbling of words that he ended with a smile. He seemed altogether harmless if you didn't know him better.

The Iraqi enjoyed smashing things. He would push over and kick the 160lb. metal totes while cleaning them, making huge booming crashes along the dock. Down in the ship holds where we pitched black cod and halibut, Menter would overhead slam the fish into the metal totes. Esteban would joke that he was trying to re-kill them.

For many months he had an off-on relationship with the moody, big-boned Russian girl from Alaskan Fish and Game. Her job was to stand on the salmon sorting belt and do some sort of analysis on the brains of red salmon. She would lobotomize the reds by cutting off their foreheads with a knife and then, with a tweezers, pluck out the tiny brain and place it on the back of her hand. She examined the brain for a moment before flicking it away and beginning again on another salmon.

Every few days the Iraqi threatened to kill her. He left hundreds of messages on her cell phone saying, "I kill you. Bitch I kill you." Sometimes he threatened to bomb the cannery and kill everyone.