She asked if their banks really knew who their depositors were, even when their records were not damaged.
They looked puzzled at this.
I ask, Mary said, getting irritated (Frank had been more than irritated), because your banks are often regarded as tax havens, because of their secret accounts. Other countries lose tax money which gets put in secret accounts here. So you’re rich in part because you’re the bagman for criminals worldwide. A kind of organized theft. People are supposed to trust money, but then a lot of it gets stolen, by the very structure of money itself.
Very unfriendly silence at this.
Mary saw that and pressed harder. She might even have stood up if she could have mustered the energy. She might have shouted. It was time for redemption for Switzerland, she told them flatly, keeping right inside the line of civility. Or maybe on the edge of it. All that stuff you want to forget as if it never happened, the Nazi gold, the Jewish gold, the tax havens for oligarchs and kleptocrats, the secret bank accounts for criminals of all kinds. It’s time to end all that. End the secrecy in your banks. Blockchain all your money, and put all your ill-gotten gains to good use. Leverage it for good. Forge an alliance with all the other small prosperous countries that can’t save the world by themselves. All of you rich little countries join together, and then join up with India, follow India’s lead. Create more carbon coins by way of investments in carbon drawdown. That’s the safest currency there is now. Far safer than the Swiss franc, for instance. Stabler. More stable. Your best choice at this point.
Some of them were shaking their heads at this.
You need to join the world! Mary insisted. You’ve always been Switzerland alone, the neutral one.
We joined the Paris Agreement, one of them objected.
And Interpol, said another.
And the United Nations, said a third.
We’ve always been engaged, another clarified.
Okay, Mary conceded. But now, join the carbon coin. Gather the rich small nations into a working group. Help get us to the next world system. New metrics, new kinds of value creation. Make the next political economy. Invent post-capitalism! The world needs it, it really has to happen. And you’ve got to change your banks now anyway, to recover from this attack. So change them for good. Make them better.
Silence.
Mary looked at them. Alp-wasted, yes indeed. A feeling everyone in the room had felt: descend back into the world, after an ascent to that higher realm one encountered in the Alps, an encounter with the sublime— otherworldly, visionary— then afterward exhausted, sun-blasted, clarified. Transparent to the world, lofted into a higher realm. Mary knew she had an intense look she could fix on people, her laser, Martin had called it. She had known it all her life, even in childhood when she had been able to freeze people in place, even her mother. Now she leveled it on these people facing her, and they too went still. Something had set her off— her exploded office, her cramping legs. The Alps. She lasered them.
The Swiss presidents shivered collectively, shaking her off. They looked around the table at each other. Not happy. Not angry. Not panicked. Not dismissive.
They were thinking.
64
Once John Maynard Keynes wrote of “the euthanasia of the rentier class.” This is a very provocative, not to say ominous, phrase. Euthanasia was a 1930s euphemism, one of many phrases used in that period to refer to state-sponsored execution of any perceived political rivals. A century later it still sounds deadly.
But it appears that Keynes used the word only to mean something like putting some poor creature out of its misery by a relatively painless procedure. This is true to the original Greek: in literal translation, euthanasia means something like “a good death.” Dictionary: “The painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable and painful disease or in an irreversible coma. The practice is illegal in most countries.” Mercy killing is one synonym.
First use in written language is in Suetonius, describing the emperor Augustus’s “happy death.” First use in describing a medical practice is by Francis Bacon. Relief from suffering was crucial to the early connotation of the word.
Now, it could be argued that the rentier class is not suffering, and in fact is happily engaged in eating up everything. A parasite killing its host by overindulgence is not suffering. In which case, really the rentier class needs to be executed.
But perhaps it is overstating the case to compare the alteration of certain tax and inheritance laws to execution. Although possibly more than changes in tax and inheritance laws would be required to bring an end to the rentier class, often called “the ruling class.” Still, the concepts get blurred on a regular basis: a shift in social structures is often regarded as a kind of killing. On the other hand, the name for a certain kind of fiscal decapitation is called taking a haircut, which clarifies just how minor and even trivial are most of the financial limitations on wealth that get considered in the neoliberal hegemony.
Euthanasia: “For the good of the person killed.”
Now this is interesting, because capitalism is not a person, and the rentier class as such, though made up of people, is not a person. And as a class it is suffering, one could argue, from guilt, anxiety, depression, shame, a surfeit of everything, a sense of irredeemable criminal culpability, and so on. So to put this class out of its misery would be to relieve the individuals in that class from that horrible psychic burden, and possibly release them to a fuller happier life as guilt-free humans on a planet of equally guilt-free humans.
Capitalism: after a long and vigorous life, now incurable, living in pain. In a coma; become a zombie; without a plan;
