The financial crisis that has engulfed us? That is the real WWIII.
This feeling certainly helped spawn several conspiracy theories. Yes, the world’s economic crisis kills and antagonizes one and all: It attacks you frontally and insidiously, mentally and viscerally, and seems unstoppable.
But it’s a slow, agonizing death. Billions of people are squirming in sordid poverty trying to make ends meet; everybody is scaling down, giving up or away whatever they acquired out of greed or pride. And sometimes they give up things they need the most – or rather, it’s taken away from them, like a car, a house, their home, their life. Why? Because they’ve got a loan or mortgage they can’t pay back – usually a Swiss Franc loan.
This is the drama now consuming over 75,000 Romanians who have been baited by the banks with hoopla and big promises based on the unchangeable course of the mighty Franc. It's said that at the time, the banks borrowed billions to appeal to people's subconscious, subliminal resistance and their unbridled temptations: no need for a steady job, low interest rates, hasty approval, trendy deal - stuff that made one feel differently cool, Swiss cool. And to top it off, this was the sole crediting option at that particular time in history. Go figure. The banks had no qualms about it; they scored big time.
Now the fight is on. Two thousand protesters gathered on Jan. 25 in Constitution Plaza in Bucharest, demanding the Swiss Franc loans conversion into lei, the Romanian currency, at the historical rate plus 20% interest. They chanted, “Banks = government legalized loan sharks!” “You’ve got the power, we’ve got the pain!” “Je Swiss Sold Out!”
The government stance is that each borrower should negotiate individually with the bank lender; the protesters’ lawyer, G. Piperea, advised them to approach the banks as a 200-member group because the banks won’t deal with individual clients, which could create an unfavorable precedent for them.
Not that that matters. What matters is that ordinary people are beginning to realize that no contract is ironclad – and now they dare think that everything should be negotiable: What is worth thinking, empowering you, haggling for your rights, wrestling for your well being, challenging even the Almighty to intervene, a prayer that would usher in the ultimate salvation: A financial one! Bursa, a newspaper in Romania, claimed that such a prayer was answered a long time ago by Christ Our Father, who seems to have the key to this thorny issue.
Bursa is a word used ambiguously for the stock market and for grants. Just as systematically ambiguous is the owner and chief editor of the publication, Florian Goldstein, a.k.a. Make (pronounced like saké, the Japanese rice-wine), a moniker borrowed from the great Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale for a funny, whimsical, tragic character, a crossbreed between Hamlet and Yorick. Make conducts his team with esoteric panache, delighting and baffling his faithful admirers and detractors who engage in an upbeat web-dialogue with him.
Make is a devout self-declared fifth-generation atheist, painter, accomplished architect, chain-smoker, non-drinker, excellent bridge player and philosophy graduate. His approach to economy and finance is unorthodox, to say the least. He blames greed and other capitalist mores for the world crisis, which was generated mainly by Christian countries that have reneged on His word – forgiveness. Debt forgiveness.
Shmita, the Hebrew practice of unconditionally wiping out any material debt every sabbatical year, would be His answer. And 2015 is that kind of year. Shmita was meant to periodically reduce the disparity between rich and poor in order to regulate the economy and atomize wealth, so that the social system could evolve continuously and homogeneously without economical crises, hiccups and convulsions. Sound utopic? Well, it isn’t. It’s a sort of an economical fast, he argues, enema and all. Die a little, rise a lot, whet the appetite for new growth.
Make points out that the culprit in this diversity is the polysemantic nature of the word "debt" in the Aramaic language, "tov," employed originally in Matthew. Tov is used systematically as an ambiguous meaning for debt, sin, guilt, wrongdoing. Of the 620 commandments mentioned in the Old Testament and written in Aramaic, three of them forbid interest loans: You shall not lend your brother at interest; you shall not borrow at interest; you are not allowed to be a party in a transaction of interest loans as a guarantor, witness or public notary.
Sure, it would be nice to be able to live and function in a self-regulated world like shmita. The problem is, it’ll only function on a miracle wave: self-inflicted and unanimous. How else – legalized? Can you imagine the field day lawyers would have straightening out the details and fine print of shmita? Bring it on, they’d say. And how we’d spin our plans around the seven-year hitch – the plans, the expectations, the mental torture? But why didn’t Make speculate on this? It’s possible he relied on us to do that. After all, he’s a busy man, having just acquired another magazine, Bucarest Hebdo, written in French and illustrated by him. It's his way of saying "Je suis Charlie."
On Feb. 9, the Swiss Franc protestors did it again, in front of the the capital's Parliament building and in five other cities. They reiterated their claims and chanted the same slogans, asking bankers to be jailed, while one of the protesters declared to a news reporter that he’s trying to talk his fellow Swiss Franc debtors into daily paying their rates to the banks with loose change; make them earn their hefty interests the heavy way.
Two days later that’s exactly what they did, assaulting the bank tellers with buckets full of bani, or Romanian pennies. In a couple of places police crews were summoned to chill the spirits. And so it goes. No signs of shmita yet.
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