bevies of near-naked elves, a portal to serious debt:
Goldman Sachs' employees are getting bonuses that average over $600,000 a head and run up to $100 million for some of the top guys, though it's a safe bet the cleaning crew won't be seeing any of this largesse.Barbara Ehrenreich 14.Dec.06
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Those of us who don't understand how money works, in the beginning of our incomprehension can see the possibility of just printing money, if you had the press to do it on.
If you had the legitimate printing press where the real money is made, where the actual bills are made, you could just do a couple of private runs for yourself, and that would be that.
Of course it's more complicated, and there's always the consequences.
The consequences of diluting the money supply toward meaninglessness. The consequences of your not being the only one with access to the printing equipment, and the eventual competition amongst those so privileged to see who can get the biggest heap the quickest. And what to do with it. That's always a problem, but seldom seen as one from the outside - what to do with all that money.
You could see Goldman, Sachs as the heirs of a complex Ponzi scheme, or you could see them as drones, little workers in a hive whose interface with our mammalian world is tangential, even extra-chronological.
You could imagine that what you're looking at, what you see when you look at Goldman, Sachs and these other financial aristocracies, is what did it in the first place, what created money, the concept, the idea of money, like seeds sown long long ago, and now reaps its bounty. You could pretty easily see them as not caring at all about what effect this has had on what you are, you in that large sense that goes back and back to a time when there was no money.
What we were when there was no money.
There's a tacit sense that in those days we never laughed, never sang, never really knew love, so that now things are much better, but you could suppose that that idea is coming from the same place that has created all that surplus that's being burned in the glamorous potlatches of the other world, within this one or alongside it, where these parties glitter and sparkle for their few moments, in this festive season.
