What's Good For General Motors …

Dharmonic Convergence

While I’m not usually given to seeing political events through a mystical lens, I’m thinking the convergence of circumstances surrounding this week’s Nickelsville encampment can only be attributed to a perfect alignment of the stars. We’re just not clever or powerful enough to plan this one.

The encampment, named to recall the Hoovervilles of the thirties, happened to occur the same week of a proposed financial industry bailout that, combined with other recent Hail Mary maneuvers to rescue the economy, may run to over a trillion dollars. The coming depression has led to lowered revenue projections at all levels of government that will put already tenuous human service programs at great risk during the upcoming budget session.

The land upon which Nickelsville sits is one of the four sites proposed by the city for a new 7-acre jail facility. While Real Change is building a No New Jail campaign to challenge the idea that more cops, more arrests of people who are poor and disproportionately black, and ever-expanding numbers of those behind bars is an effective or moral use of resources, the siting of Nickelsville on the Marginal Way land parcel was a happy accident. For security reasons, we didn’t know where the site would be until an hour before we arrived at 4 am Monday morning.

Last night, the Highland Park Action Committee voted to support the encampment until other use can be found for the land.

The Mayor has chosen to pretend that this survival effort — organized by a loose but potent grouping of homeless people and advocates — is just another homeless encampment to be posted for clearance and dismantled in three days. Nickelsville is much more than that. It’s a sign of the times.

God-ray photo by Revel.

How Much Is $1,000,000,000,000 Anyway?

Today's news is that, combined with other bailouts, taxpayer cost of the proposed latest effort to stem the meltdown may top one trillion dollars.

That's One Trillion Dollars.

How much is this, really? A trillion dollars is about one-third of the entire federal budget recently proposed by G.W. Bush. A trillion seconds ago, which is 31,688 years, the Neanderthals were in charge. A trillion days would take 2.7 billion years. According to NPR, "$1 trillion would be enough money to buy about a 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States." A cube of one trillion dried peas would be 198 feet along each edge. A trillion pennies would weigh 3.1 million tons. A trillion dollars is roughly the cost of the war in Iraq thus far.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem like all that much. The combined wealth of all the world's billionaires is just $3.5 trillion. A trillion is just 1/18th of the gross national product for the entire world. Google says there are about a trillion URLs on the internet. The US deficit is already $8 trillion, so what's a trillion more?

My favorite visual comes from The NYT's Bob Herbert.

It's not easy to explain just how much money $1 trillion really is. Imagine a stack of bills worth $1 million that is roughly six inches high. (Think big denominations — a mix of $100 bills and $1,000 bills, mostly $1,000's.) If the six-inch stack were enlarged to the point where it was worth $1 billion, it would be as tall as the Washington Monument, about 500 feet. If it were worth $1 trillion, the stack would be 95 miles high.

A trillion dollars. That's a lot.