21.04.2020
I want to start this blog with an update of what’s been going on before I go off on one of my rambling ideas about the nature of things.
The biggest news at the time of writing I think, is the price of oil. The oil price in the US has just gone negative for the first time ever. It lost 305% of it’s value in one day, it’s now -$37 a barrel. The cost of storing the oil is now more than its worth. I don’t really know what the implications will be, apart from a few people losing a LOT of money and the US economy will surely really tank.
If you're not interested in this stuff skip to the word HERE
I don’t totally understand what caused it, but I believe there was a price war between OPEC and Russia, who both increased production in order to cut the other’s profits. Russia had built up currency reserves rather than investing, so were better able to weather the strom than OPEC expected and prices kept falling. This took place at the same time as the virus so there was also a huge drop in demand. On April 13th there was a story about OPEC cutting supply by 9.7milion barrels a day to boost prices, but it didn’t work and today the price crashed. I think because there is too much oil in America, and they are running out of storage space, so paying buyers to take it off their hands.
It’s very tempting to read positives into this, that it’s fantastic that some utter crooks, and the parasites that feed off their exploitation will go bust, but it isn’t that simple. I was reading the other day about the Asian Contagion financial disaster in 1997. It wasn’t pretty. It started with a rumour. The word was, the Thai banks didn’t have enough US dollars to back its own currency, the Baht, which was pegged to it. Remember we talked about money being a faith based system? People started losing faith in the Baht, which set off a speculative currency attack, which basically meant people were offloading as much of the money as they could because they didn’t trust its value. This of course, made it very hard for it to retain its value and eventually the Thai government was forced to float its currency (ie, make it purely symbolic, not tied to the value of anything) and abandon the dollar as security.
Once that happened, massive capital flight occurred and the currency tanked. Another thing we’ve mentioned, one of the ways capitalism holds democracy ransom. In short, everyone who invested in Thai shares offloaded them as quick as possible before they lost more value and took their money out of the country, which of course made them lose even more value.
It would have stopped there, Thailand would have had a hard time, but the effect on its neighbours would have been limited if it wasn’t for the way investment packages had been sold around the world. That countries involved were known as the Asian Tigers because of the ‘economic miracle’ that had taken place there, Thailand had had GDP growth of 8-9% in the years up to the crash, so capital was flooding to that area faster than anywhere else in the world. Stock brokers, hedge fund managers etc, packaged shares up from these countries and sold them together. This meant when one country lost value, all the other countries packaged up with it did too. Billions and billions of dollars worth of value disappeared.
The problem with the ‘economic miracle’ was that it was mostly financial, the growth was specualtive. People were buying shares because they expected the value to go up, not because of the productivity of the companies they invested in. Which is very similar to where we are in the UK and the US now. Despite sluggish growth, our productivity has been falling for a decade. So when the market corrects, and values match reality, there’s a mighty big crash, in fact the longer an economy is stable, the bigger the inevitable crash is. This is one of the contradictions built into capitalism that Keynesian economics sought to temper. Right now, our problems are compounded by the fact asset prices are hugely inflated by historically low interest rates and the quantitive easing (money printing) our economies have become addicted to, oh and that $6trillion the federal reserve has created to buy up US assets in an attempt to keep value in the economy in the last month or so. This means our stock markets are completely divorced from reality. Like utterly, completely fucking mental, on another planet. So who can say what will happen.
As someone with libertarian left, or anarchist leanings you might think I would welcome a big old stock market crash, a bonfire of the vanities, but the truth is, if we have to live under a capitalist system, it’s much better to live under one that functions well. This is why I hope it’s bad enough to actually break, because the alternative is awful. During the Asian Contagion, the IMF held off lending support to make sure they counties involved were truly on their knees and would accept all their demands. The bitter medicine (deregulation, privatisation, erosion of workers’ rights and cuts, the usual formula) didn’t work anyway, and in the year following the crash the suicide rate for men went up 39% in Japan, 44% in Hong Kong and 45% in Korea. In many occasions whole families committed suicide, when that happened only the father was counted as a suicide, the rest murders.
Similar things happened in the 2007-8 financial crash (another one that’s worth looking into. It’s fucked. Like completely fucking stupid. Absurd. Criminal), but this is a bigger deal because this is an economic crash, by that I mean, it’s real, it’s a not a web of imaginary numbers over extending till it collapses. And if you think about what a few rumours about the stability of a currency can do, the price of oil moving negative will surely be world changing.
We’re already seeing the old principles of neoliberalism being abandoned, it’s hard to say what else might happen. I only have a vague grasp on economics from reading a few books that look at things in hindsight, so I have no idea what financial sorcery is being cooked up right now or what the impacts will be. I don’t think many people do. But I think this is a big moment.
One of the ways things might change for the better is interest rates might also move negative. The world economy is already on life support with the US and UK interest rates at 0.25%, I’m not sure where else they can go. This would stimulate the economy by creating an incentive to invest rather than hoard capital, and would essentially change the direction of the flow of money, from moving inexorably toward those who already have it, to away from them. One can only hope.
HERE
Ok enough of that. Down here on Earth, on the Shadwell front lines, our lock down has been officially extended for another three weeks. It doesn’t feel like that on the street though. It’s getting busy again. If the rest of London is anything like this, I can’t see things going well.
This was the scene yesterday, I think, or the day before, the days are merging. Bangladeshi people eat a leafy vegetable, the shape of spades in a deck of cards, you don’t find in most shops, to my shame I’ve never tried it and I don’t even know the name. Anyway the people round here seem to really love it. I think a shipment must have just come into London, because two shops were selling it through windows. Huge amounts of cash was being handed over for these little brown paper bags of leaves.
No social distancing. In fact, the streets seem to be going back toward pre lockdown levels of business.
Ambulances have been busy on my street. The paramedics and drivers only have flimsy plastic sheets to protect them. A week or two a go they all had white over suits and masks. Not any more.
As ever the sirens are more or less constant, as are the helicopters. From my window, as I sit here and type, I see the London Ambulance helicopter come and go two or three times and hour. Police helicopters circle most of the time too, as well as the occasional military one, which are easy to pick out by the way they sound. One was hovering over in the middle of the night for about an hour the other day.
Lots of people are still dying every day, and unions representing NHS workers are saying members may stop going to work because of the lack of protective equipment, masks and gowns etc.
In fact, I’ve seen the numbers of dead NHS workers has just gone up to 100, while that’s been going on the government have got themselves embroiled in another scandal. The Department of Health and Social Care have been accused of stealing the images of real NHS workers to create fake social media profiles tweeting support of their herd immunity strategy.
I applied for another 15 or so jobs over the weekend, and for the second time since I’ve been looking someone got back to me. It’s doing support work the health service, they took my details, asked a few questions and said my local council will be in touch if there’s any jobs that fit. I’ll probably be driving a van around or something, which would be good, can listen to audio books as I go.
I've actually literally just got an invite for an interview for a job as a hospital porter.
The Ritalin’s done me good too. I had a bit of work the other day writing a treatment for a production company, about 2500 words, would usually take me all day, because I had to stare out the window for a few minutes after each sentence. This time I did it in about two or three hours and everyone loved it. Usually the amends would be agony too, but this time I did them with no fuss, no mental anguish. I cheated slightly by taking a second pill in the afternoon because I got the brief late. It was like mental rocket fuel. My doctor just put me on a slightly higher dose.
I’m not sleeping great though. Lot’s of people seem to be saying they’re having strange dreams. For me the dreams seem more vivid than my waking life. Sometimes I write notes in my sleep about what I’m dreaming on my phone, here’s one:
“Very tall annoying flat mates, Boudi, is it like Boudicca? OMG how did you know? I looooooooove you. Missing penis. Spinning around holding hands, asking about his missing penis, other friend offers to put me in touch with his consultant. Rubber gloves. I forgot the safe word.”
I’m going to take a day off the Ritalin, just zone out all day, see if that helps.
Went up to an Asian supermarket the other day to get frozen dim sum for my birthday dinner. Saw they’re price gouging protective masks.
Another craze that we’ve got on board with is home baking. Making sour dough, I’m completely hooked on it. My dad dropped an enormous bag of pizza flour and a little sour dough starter outside our door the other day, we didn’t know what to do with it at first, but now I love it.
My partner is very worried she's coming down with covid. I've been checking her temperature, it keeps going to the verge of covd territory, but so far she's ok. I stocked up on paracetamol just in case.
Yesterday I wrote most of a rambling essay about the comic 2000AD and using it as a prism to analyse the current crisis. I was quite tedious, obvious and rambling when I got into each aspect, so I’ll spare you. The premise might be interesting to you though, that the four Dark Judges represent a more astute version of the four horsemen of the apocalypse than the ones in the Book of Revelations, and their characteristics are all clearly on show in Boris Johnson and his government, especially in light of the Sunday Times article detailing his incompetence and not giving-a-shitness.
It’s behind a paywall, but I highly recommend you don’t pay, the sooner Murdoch’s papers go bust, the better. You can read it here for free, and you should. https://archive.is/20200418182037/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-38-days-when-britain-sleepwalked-into-disaster-hq3b9tlgh
Here’s the fun bit–
The Dark Judges come from Deadworld. A world raised from the ashes of a global holocaust of their own creation, by necromancy. Originally Judge Death was Sydney, a judge tutor at Law School who was seduced by the fascism present in all unbridled law and authority and took it to it’s dark conclusion. All crime is committed by the living, and crime is intolerable, life itself must be snubbed out. The crime is life. The sentence is death.
Before long, Sydney meets the Deadworld incarnation of the Weird Sisters, the Moirai or Fates from Greek mythology, The Sisters of Death, Phobia and Nausea and their cousins Dementia, Ephemera and Pustula. Together they commit vile acts and learn the dark arts of necromancy that allows the Dark Judges to stand in judgement pure, free from the disease of life.
Now the undead judges were able to abandon their old identities. Sydney and becomes Death. His students become Mortis, who has a Midas touch of decay, Fear, who reflects the accused’s own darkest fear back to them and scares them to death, and Fire, so named for burning a school down when he sentenced the students to death for noise pollution, did the same.
I was mesmerised by this story. In fact, I still have an issue with Judge Death on the cover. Prog 1006, I looked it up, it was from August 1996, I was 9.
2000AD took a brilliant view of the world, it is still going, but I haven’t read a copy in years, but it was irreverent, questioning, funny, clever, honest and dark. I really loved it. And even if that image above wasn’t originally from the comic, it is definitely in its spirit. The idea of the four Dark Judges, or horsemen of the apocalypse representing greed, privilege, indifference and arrogance, seems a lot more astute than the biblical war, famine, pestilence and death from the Book of Revelation. We discussed in an earlier post that we are living through an apocalypse in the true sense of the word, maybe not the end of the world, but a revelation of the true nature of reality. If we look at it from the perspective of the four Dark Judges, things start coming together.
Boris Johnson is all four, riding the necro-mount of stupidity.
The trashy pulp writers of comics like 2000AD, and novelists like Philip K Dick, Michael Moorcock and story journals like Weird Tales, do a much better job of critiquing our ruling classes by writing about other dimensions and temporal locations than most of our actual journalists.
My partner wont' allow this up anywhere in the flat. Don't blame her tbh.
I go on to talk about privilege, theories of being promoted to your level of incompetence, the way fascism is so attractive because it appeals to both the id and the ego, and the authoritative personality type so prevalent in our servile media. You get the picture.
It was well Mexico.
Stay safe pals.
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