Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Sun, 30 Aug 1992 15:32:49 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Sorry, no more kidding,
              exaggeration is for when you cannot handle the extremes of truth

Yesterday's lesbian-feminist-atheist aspiring Congregationalist clergywoman
was a real person. The feminist guru was the fictitious outcome of reflecting
on the former and, "What could be more bizzare than that?"

Still, the empirically observable world takes the gold: In 1988, Dr Ravi G.
Batra, then an international-trade specialist at Southern Methodist, published
The Great Depression of 1990 wherein he expounded and popularized the theories
of his own guru, P.R. Sarkar, whose teachings syncretized Orthodox Hinduism and
Orthodox Communism. The date 1990, when capitalism was to collapse of its inner
contradictions, was selected by the frankly mystical historical cyclicalism
common to Hinduism and the flakier realms of economics.

Not only did the book sell enormously and Batra make commensurate amounts of
royalty money: Though at the time, 1988, I disbelieved it on principle, The
Great Depression of 1990 did indeed, we now know, arrive on schedule and we
are still in it. Anyhow, I stuck Batra and his guru's Teachings into a bad
novel called Service Economy where a Swiss banking criminal, The Gnome [of
Zurich], has turned to computer crime and stolen billions which he puts...in
his own new bank and runs a global speculation game with the semiskilled
assistance of The Night Man, a creepy failure (like me) who'd rather be Woody
Allen and attract women but as he's not, stares at computer screens thinking
about them; which the real me has just now emancipated himself from. From the
tangles of speculation and office-based industries with lots of computer
terminals arises in the desert Tierra Despoblada City TD, drawing like magic
millions of people to the computer terminals.

Four years later, I now know that was kid stuff compared to Michael Milken and
Junk Bonds and Drexel Burnham Lambert and Kohlverg Kravis Roberts and the whole
Savings & Loan/Real Estate speculative mania/financially deregulated chaos/High
Negligence and Misdemeanours of the Reagan-Bush White House/Keating Five.

The Keating Five was not a jazz ensemble, just a bipartisan bunch of helpful
guys, and Keating never stole a tune, just money wherewith he may have helped
out the Five, but this was minor. What was not minor, what actually ever verged
on the Large, was Phoenix AZ, a place more like Tierra Despoblada City TD than
the latter was like itself. Adorning the whole figmentational edifice of bad
loans cum imaginary assets was albeit inadequate to lend Keating's Postmodern-
ist Babbitry a touch of Class, were two hyperluxurious hotels, one of them the
$580 million Phoenician, a veritable Caliphal Samarra of the sands, wherein
King Charles Keating kept his office/Court. In February 1990 the feds arrested
Keating, fired his wife and 25 other friends & relations, and Nationalized the
hotel, once more, The New York Times reported last week, decently Privatized.

The Phoenician Hotel was purchased for a desert song by the Government of
Kuwait. Want to guess the purchase price? You'll simply absolutely die. One
Hundred Ten million. With that kind of giveaway, how can the Kuwaitis lose?
The Times pointed out that the Kuwaitis know deserts, they know palaces. The
place does not lack for tourists, paying guests, as the scene of the scandalous
debaucheries of the Protestant Nero. Still, the Kuwaitis complain that Keating
ran the show like money was no object, failed to count the cost, *any* cost;
and exhibited absolutely *no* sense of the Bottom Line: It's going to be a long
hard slog to break-even-point.

[First part of a series on: Crisis USA]
Daniel A. Foss