Hannah’s Blog

That’s what the Columbia Journalism Review says. The collapse of Wall Street has not been well covered by the traditional press. Perhaps traditionalists are just incredulous. Anyway, the failure is being dissected here, albeit by a professor of economics. Which accounts for his insistence that the problem lies in financial institutions not having followed the rules. Economists are all about following rules, even when they have been proven not to work — i.e. produce the desired result.
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The “Southern strategy,” supposedly put in place by Richard Nixon and his minions in response to the civil rights revolution of the nineteen sixties, is generally evaluated on the basis of results–a disenchanted previously Democratic regional population electing Republicans to national office on the basis of vague promises to promote their sense of exceptionalism and moral superiority. That no tangible benefits were forthcoming to these voters has long been obvious and still the Republican base has not only remained loyal, but morphed into the Religious Right. Democrats scratch their heads in puzzlement. This Sunday’s article on Corrine Brown in the Florida Times-Union reminded me that the issue is more complex, but also entirely explainable, if one considers the motivation and the results objectively.
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We are all aware that tumors, even if they are benign, are an impediment to individual well being. Growths are anti-social. And yet, in recent decades we’ve been persuaded that growth is good.
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Conservatives are often derided for having a narrow perspective on the world, of seeing things as either black or white, bad or good, and ignoring the various shades of gray. But the problem with this bi-polar, up or down, this or that rendering of reality isn’t that it overlooks the indistinct and immobile middle, but that it is lacking in color.
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More Reflection on the Sea Island Debacle.

When Bill Three was interviewed for a profile in 2003, just before the demolition of the old Cloister Hotel started, he explained

“The banks almost pay you to borrow money today,”

as to where the money was coming from.

That was the same bank, Synovus, which started out paying my mother about five thousand dollars a year interest on the Certificates of Deposit she bought with her life’s savings (she died in 2005, aged 98) and then had reduced that to less than a thousand a year by the time they were “almost” paying Bill Three to take the money. If the extent to which our seniors have been defrauded of their life savings hasn’t been covered much in the press, it’s probably because the Federal Reserve Bank lowering interest rates to near zero was/is being blamed for an apparent flood of money that nobody wanted to use, and nobody has yet figured out what to do about them. It’s sort of like being in a car with a drunk driver racing down a mountain. There’s nothing to do but hang on for dear life. (I say “apparent” because it turns out that the flow of money to Main Street had already slowed to a trickle by 2003 and federal loans were being doled out to make up for banks that didn’t lend).
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The principals in the Sea Island Company would probably contest that assertion, arguing that since its opening in 1928 with the Cloister Hotel as an anchor on the south end of Sea Island, Georgia, the resort on the edge of the Atlantic has always been a well-run enterprise. In a generous mood, the Scion of Sea Island, might well suggest that there’s some confusion about the Sea Island appendage to St. Simons and the Jekyll Island Club across the Sound to the South. And, indeed, that Jekyll fell on hard times during the first great depression and was eventually acquired by the State of Georgia at a tax auction is frequently remembered, in part because of its historic connection to the organization that eventually evolved into what we now know as the Federal Reserve System and which, once again, was asleep at the switch as the world’s bankers messed up.

But, there’s no mistake. Bankruptcy seems endemic to the Golden Isles, even though, until recently, entrepreneurs at least went through the motions of trying to avoid it. So, for example, the financial situation of the Jekyll Island Club, which caused them to default on the taxes they owed the state, is described thusly:

The Revenue Commissioner, M E Thompson, wanted to purchase one of Georgia’s barrier islands and open it to the public as a state park. Finally, on June 2, 1947, the state purchased the island through a condemnation order for $675,000 (or approximately $5,563,416 in 2003 dollars).

And the first time the properties, that eventually evolved into the Sea Island Company holdings from their original acquisition by Major Pierce Butler soon after his wife’s death in 1790, fell under the auctioneer’s gavel in consequence of his grandson’s profligacy and mismanagement the event was recorded thusly:

Pierce Butler (Mease) squandered a fortune estimated at $700,000, but was saved from bankruptcy by the March 2–3, 1859 sale of his 436 slaves at Ten Broeck Racetrack, outside Savannah, Georgia — the largest single slave auction in American history.

So, technically speaking, there was no bankruptcy a hundred and fifty years ago, but there is one now and the effect on those who labored to make the enterprise profitable is much the same–family disruption and economic hardship. One thing it’s not is a surprise. The debacle that is now Sea Island did not happen over night. One could see it coming. I saw it coming.

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As I’ve tried to describe in previous essays on torture, it seems pretty clear that torture is essentially a deprivation of rights–what organisms need to function and survive. That it’s not well recognized is evidenced by the fact that deprivator–i.e. the agent of deprivation–isn’t even listed as a word in common English dictionaries. Deprivation might as well be a force of nature, like inundation or circulation, not subject to human direction or intervention. And that, no doubt suits the deprivators just fine. Agency without responsibility is always attractive, especially when the results are negative.
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