It's all funny money anyway...

Discussing the origins of this escalating financial crisis is a great opportunity to put into question the notion of "value."  How could houses be worth a lot one day and very little a year later?  What is the re-sale value of a debt?  What is the "good name" of "Lehman Brothers" or "Morgan Stanley" worth?  What is money worth if it buys fewer and fewer things we need to survive?  What is our labor worth when it is used to produce these things?  When it is used to produce things that end up as garbage, or to provide services such as insurance that depend on our vulnerability?

Borders after the revolution

These places will still be there.  What do we do with them?  In a larger sense, what would a positive, world-scale approach to migration and  security/"community policing" look like?  How do we accommodate and reward migrants (not only from "foreign countries," an idea that will lose its political, divisive meaning) who offer socially necessary labor and cooperation, and guard against (and attempt to heal) actually dangerous people who remain alienated from the emerging society?  We are going to have to all be intimately aware of what work needs to be done and where.  We are going to have to be willing to help inspire people to find this work.  And,  established populations must develop a sense of trust and hospitality based on a common interest in making the experiment (or revolution) work.  No problem, right?!

Is it protected speech if you start a bank panic?

Just wondering, after reading today's NYT article: "Anxious Depositors withdraw cash from Asian Bank."  Started with a rumor, but hardly an unbelievable one.  Can't you shout "fire!" in a crowded theater if there really is a fire?

Reality or Catastrophism

These days it seems it would be so easy to start a panic that would accelerate the failing global financial system.  Why don't we?  Because we don't know what's going to happen afterward.  It is naive to think that this current crisis will remain confined to Wall Street.  If it spreads and hits everyday people hard, as it did in the 1930s, will everyday people be ready?  Everyone has their own dystopian nightmare, but how many of us have thought about what we would actually do amidst an accelerating breakdown of "the economy"?  If money loses value, if people lose jobs, if neighbors get hostile?  We can only hope that desperation leads to organization and humanism - but this is the United States, where individualism has long reigned and racial antagonism seems to be more the rule than the exception.  Not to mention how many fools are armed, including the police.  Today I imagined myself in front of Rainbow Grocery as the mobs approached...but before the whole place is looted, someone finds the produce buyer, who is persuaded to contact food producers to arrange distribution...the food producers are simultaneously faced with the demands of their own recently-fired workers, who offer to continue running operations as a collective in exchange for enough food to live on, and meanwhile, some organized truckers have sent a representative to the markets to arrange transport...gas station owners are persuaded to fill up tanks for the transport of basic needs until the gas runs out, but luckily refinery workers are thinking ahead and arranging fuel delivery for cooperating gas stations...bike store owners offer bicycles in exchange for promised deliveries of food and medicine to hospitals...urban emigration committees are organized to arrange an exodus to surrounding farmland, emigrants bring building materials for local housing needs....

Anyway, you get the drift.   If conditions get urgent, and ideas and energy and diplomacy are needed, where will you be? What will you do?