The Wealth of Nations (Tolystoy reflects on today's events as he looks across the killing floor.......with music thanks to the Electric Flag.......
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Through the door opposite to the one where I was standing on a Too Big to Fail trading floor that I once visited in New York, the bankers were taking in a large, red, fattened country. Two men were leveraging it. And they had barely brought it in when I saw a banker raise a massive short over his head and strike him. The country dropped down on its belly, as though it had been knocked off all its four legs at once, immediately rolled over on one side, and began to kick with its legs and with its whole back. One of the bankers immediately threw himself on the currency of the country, from the end opposite his kicking legs, took hold of its politicians, bent its populace to the ground, and from the people there spurted the dark red wealth, under the current of which a boy besmeared in wealth placed a tin basin. All the time while they were doing this, the countries people kept fighting, as though trying to get up, and kicked with all its effort. The basin filled rapidly, but the country was still alive and, painfully contracting and expanding its economy, fighting with the might of its culture, so that the bankers had to get out of its way. When one basin was filled, the boy carried it away on his head, while another boy set down another basin, which also began to fill up. But the country kept contracting and expanding it economy, and jerked and spasmed its culture. When the wealth stopped flowing, the banker raised the people of the country and began to flay them. The country continued kicking. The people were flayed bare and began to look like economic slaves and assumed whatever the position given to them by the bankers; on both sides of it hung the shadow of their country. The country continued to spasm. Then another banker caught the economy by a sector, which he broke and sold off off. Convulsions ran up and down the economies sectors.. The other sectors too, were cut off, and they were thrown where all the legs belonging to one owner were thrown. Then the dead country was pulled up to a block and tackle and was stretched out, and there all motion stopped.
Thus I stood at the door and looked at a second, a third, a fourth country. With all of them the same happened: the same flayed populace with pinched tongue and the same kicking back. The only difference was that the banker did not always strike in the right place to make the country fall. It happened that the banker made a mistake, and the country jumped up, bellowed, and, shedding wealth, tried to get away. But then it was pulled under a beam and struck a second time, after which it fell. |
