Where We Are This Week 03/17/23
I’m in the final stages of redoing our hallway bathroom - a project I started a couple of months ago. I’ve worked on it intermittently when I wasn’t busy with my job - or this - and in between my daughter’s naps in the next room.
It’s been quite the lesson in construction. Tiling, replacing the subfloor, refinishing the tub, plumbing; they’re not the sort of things I’ve learned making skateboard ramps, but I’ve managed.
Accompanying each new stage in the renovation are myriad trips to Lowe’s. Myriad is an understatement. There has been a seemingly unending stream of trips to the home improvement store since I began my project. If there were a heat map of my travels over the last two months, the roads from my house to Lowe’s would be as red as Prince’s Chevrolet. And it’s not for any affinity I have for the store, it’s due to my lack of ability to forecast what I might need - a lesson for another time.
What becomes painfully apparent inside Lowe’s - or comparable establishments - is how multicultural our society truly is. The Spanish language is present in every aisle. It’s certainly possible that it, and its speakers, are overrepresented in your typical building store - which has other implications entirely - but its prominence is undeniable.
America is like a mansion with so many living areas that it’s possible to reside in your wing without ever interacting with your roommates; so much so that you might even delude yourself into forgetting they pay rent, too.
Spanish speakers are an obvious example of our diversity as a nation, but, depending on who you are and where you live, you might not realize that there are over 40 million of them. And that’s just one easily identifiable subset of the population; what about the other groups of people whose differences are just as significant but don’t venture out into the common areas as often?
A great president of ours once said that a house divided against itself cannot have a Common Denominator™ - or something like that. So, my advice to you is this: next time you’re perusing the kitchen cabinets and you see an unfamiliar face, ask them what they’re doing, and how they got into your kitchen.
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Banks Are Broken (and so is money)
If it looks like 2008, feels like 2008, then it must be 2008. Wait, that can’t be right.
Silicon Valley Bank went belly up in the course of about 24 hours late last week. Evidently, the bank’s assets were over-leveraged in long-term bonds with the US government that had been heavily impacted by inflation - among other risky investments in primarily the tech sector.
Notably, the company had previously lobbied Congress for certain exemptions from federal banking regulations citing its expertise in the tech sphere and its spectacular risk management. I haven’t landed on the best way to convey my sarcasm for what I’m about to say next, so I’ll just write it as plainly as possible. SVB spent the nine months prior to being taken over by the government without a chief risk management officer.
It makes so little sense that it makes all the sense in the world, right? I feel like we generally assume successful companies and governments have competent individuals steering their respective ships - or at least swabbing the decks, but let me disabuse you of that notion right now.
Again, I’ll stake my claim sans histrionics. The FDIC insures no more than $250,000 per account. Roku - heard of them? - had $487 million in uninsured deposits at SVB when the bank went into federal receivership on Friday.
SVB went into crisis mode over the weekend. Bank authorities and depositors alike had no idea whether they would be able to access their funds on Monday morning. Miraculously, the federal government announced before the weekend concluded that all accounts at SVB would have access to their money, insured and uninsured, come the start of the business week - but surely someone at Roku still lost their job, right?
Now, you may be thinking, “Well, it’s good the depositors aren’t punished along with the bank’s executives; they ought to be the ones to face the consequences of their mismanagement.” Nope.
Not only were company-wide bonuses being handed out hours before the government takeover, SVB’s leadership made sure to cement their profits weeks before the bank’s collapse. See the tweet below.
But it wasn’t just Silicon Valley Bank that got bailed out, New York’s Signature Bank was also placed under the control of the state last week as a result of its similar risky practices. Barney Frank, ex-congressman and coauthor of the Dodd-Frank Act - the act that sought to place more stringent restrictions on financial institutions after the collapse of 2008 - sat on the board of this bank. And not only that, according to the Wall Street Journal, during his tenure on Signature’s board, Frank worked with lawmakers to ease the very limitations that he drafted.
Signature Bank is a much smaller enterprise than SVB but was still deemed too big to fail by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, but she did warn that, despite the treasury’s actions, not every bank in the future will have its depositors guaranteed. Yellen said that only institutions whose imminent failure poses a ‘systemic risk’ to the financial system will be bailed out in the future.
If you’re a community bank or a small business, exactly how much confidence that your assets will be protected does that inspire? The problem with our financial system and fiat currency, in general, is that it requires the populace to retain an unflinching faith in the US government even as it appears to be constantly undermining what vanishingly small amount of trust the people still have in it.
Lest we forget, it took a mere 48 hours for the assets and futures of the wealthiest and most influential members of our country to be secured by the feds. It took the better part of 10 years for the residents of Flint, Michigan to have clean, drinkable water again.
Residents in East Palestine, Ohio are a month into their own chemical waste saga and have been left in the dark regarding the severity of the situation. Authorities have finally green-lighted more extensive tests of the levels of toxicity in the region, and who have they appointed to oversee them? Norfolk Southern, the company responsible for the catastrophe.
Different, yes, but the same.
Russia downs US drone
For those following closely at home, you can go ahead and move your escalation marker on your war charts to the next highest level.
On Tuesday, a Russian plane downed a US drone flying over the Black Sea. Because Russia has still yet to declare war on Ukraine, the language surrounding this is a little silly. Russia insists that their conflict in Ukraine is part of a ‘special military operation’ - if there really is a distinction to be made between the two, we all should be wary that Putin will eventually declare war on his neighbor.
As such, the Black Sea has been claimed by Russia to be encompassed by the scope of said military operation and has repeatedly warned the United States that the area is off limits. But, man, we just love flyin’ those drones, don’t we?
I mean, asking the American military to not fly a drone over international waters is like asking Keanu Reeves to not make another John Wick movie. Might we all benefit from it? Maybe, but we’ll just never know.
I know I could have lost some close friends of mine as a result of that last statement and, for that, I apologize.
US National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby described Russia’s actions as “unsafe, unprofessional and reckless.” Yes, and flying an aircraft called the MQ-9 Reaper, a literal and metaphorical harbinger of death, off the coast of Crimea isn’t. Pish posh.
As a species, and certainly, as a nation, we have quite a penchant for war. I don’t know if you remember this, but America just got out of a two-decades-long entanglement in the Middle East, and it seems like the powers that be are hellbent on giving us a rousing encore. Well, I say we let them! They still haven’t played their biggest hits.
There is no anti-war party in US politics, they’re all for it, it just depends on which war. The House just voted overwhelmingly against withdrawing American troops from Syria, an action that could have passed with a Republican majority.
Lawmakers in DC just play warhawk madlibs until they get what they want; the same narratives, the same dialectic, they just swap out subjects and adjectives. Ryan Zinke of Montana said that, in order to fight ISIS, "either we fight 'em in Syria, or we'll fight 'em here.” The ‘hard truth’ as he called it. Adam Schiff literally said the same thing about Russia last year.
So, it looks like we’re fighting both of them over ‘there.’ Bully for us!
Spooky SXSW
I haven’t been this jazzed about a performance since I saw Radiohead in 2012. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get to Austin in time for this one, but I hear they’re going on a world tour in the near future.
Who, might you ask, is the illustrious artist I’m referring to? The CIA. Yes, the CIA hosted a ‘Creative Industries’ panel at the yearly music festival. I wonder what they closed with? Bay of Pigs? The Kidnapping Plot of Julian Assange? or the fan favorite, Regime Change (You Know You Want It)?
The CIA is making a concerted effort to construe the organization as cool and non-threatening. Remember the ad they released of the woman talking about her intersectionality at the agency? Personally, I’ve always hoped that if I were to be assassinated that the perpetrator would be an agent of diversity so that helped in assuaging those concerns.
So, now, they’re chatting it up with festival-goers in Texas. I’m always bummed when I see an Air Force ad in Thrasher Magazine but this rebranding campaign feels like a whole other level of state propaganda. The Air Force isn’t about repelling from a helicopter the same way the CIA isn’t about citizen outreach and the STEM fields.
The dystopian nightmare that is lurking around the corner looks to be some combination of 1984 and Brave New World; you can file the ‘secret government agency’ panel at a music festival under 1984. You’re telling me these smiling spooks in suits are supposed to be our, what, friends?
Our tastemakers in the arts have really lost the plot. In the 60s, the feds had to try a lot harder to ingratiate themselves with the youth. If Jim Morrison really was a CIA operative - look it up - at least he gave us ‘Not To Touch the Earth’. Now, we’re just inviting them to the party?
If you missed them in Austin, fret not, dear reader. The CIA’s Subversion With Style Tour is coming to a soon-to-be-destabilized nation near you.
To a better next week.
Cheers,
~FDA
I had not heard of the CIA rebranding as a possible fraternity / sorority organization, filled musical adventures. I can’t wait to do a selfie in front of their tent. That’s unbelievable!