“Atlas Shrugged the Porno” vs. “Financial Crisis XXX” by Danny Wylde

I spent the most recent Thanksgiving up in Edmonds, Washington, with my girlfriend and her family. The following day, they decided to show me around Seattle.

We walked along the crowded Pike Place Market, ate some seafood, and fulfilled our obligation to visit one of the fifteen-million Starbucks. Then, on the way back to the car, we came across Occupy Seattle.

Of course I’d been keeping abreast of the protests through social and other online media. But it was my first real, face-to-face with any of the movements.

Being a good, young liberal, I donated some cash to the cause, and then milled around a bit to see if I could figure out what their brand of Occupy was all about.

Truth be told, it was a bit of a stereotype: Northwest hippies giving away art, dancing, playing music, and holding up signs to denounce Black Friday consumerism. All of it was stuff I could hop on board with. But there was a definite lack of concrete allegations pointed towards Wall Street or the government.

Still, I bore my 99% sticker with pride and continued on with my day. I knew that a bank/insurance bail-out had cost tax-payers billions, that corporate greed was sucking us dry, that major news outlets had just reported on Congressional insider trading, and that a financial institution called Goldman Sachs was a bunch of assholes. That alone was enough to piss me off. But I still didn’t really understand how the bail-out went down, or how Wall Street enacted their financial scams, or even what Goldman Sachs did to become such assholes.

Then Saturday rolled around, and I read an article in The Guardian that seemed to narrow down three major demands from the Occupy Movement. They were based on responses from actual Occupy protesters, responses that no major news network (that I know of) had seemed to address, much less clarify. The abbreviated version: get money out of politics, reform the banking system, and remove the loop-hole that allows for Congress to pass legislation on corporations they invest in.

Aside from the last one, the demands seemed to be painted in pretty broad strokes. Why? Because once they started getting specific, the details were really hard to follow. Really hard for an Internet article at least.

I didn’t know what derivatives, speculations, securities, or commodity futures were. So it was a bit hard for me to understand how these banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions pulled off some of the biggest money scams in history. It was even harder to figure out how it had any effect on me.

During my flight back to Los Angeles I had a layover at SFO, where I decided to purchase a book that might explain to me the logistics of the United States financial crisis – the details that I was missing. Griftopia, by Matt Taibbi, and it did just what I was hoping.

Now I must admit that Taibbi wrote his book in a way that preaches to the choir, just as I’m going to continue to do now. He knew his audience: pissed-off liberals like myself who needed some clarification.

I won’t change his tune. I’m preaching to you – the choir.

The reason I think this is still worth writing about is that I was in the choir, and I only knew about two words of the song. Because the song is really fucking long, and complicated, and I know that – from listening to my friends – a lot of other people don’t know the words either.

However, I’m not going to spell out everything. The reason people read blogs and Internet articles is because they’re short.

Let’s be honest. Wherever you are right now, you don’t have the time to get through a novel-length commentary on the fall of insurance giant, AIG. So if you want to be properly educated, go out and buy Griftopia or some other book on the subject. I’m sure there are plenty of them by now.

What I am hoping is that you have the attention span to read the synopsis of two fictional adult films: Atlas Shrugged the Porno and Financial Crisis XXX, because you – the person reading this article – are likely a fan of my pornography, or otherwise someone interested in the sex industry. Otherwise, how the fuck did you find this?

Atlas Shrugged, the book (by Ayn Rand), is not actually a representation of anything in the real world, except for an ideology. However, this ideology is entirely relevant to the current state of the country (if you live in the same one that I do). It forms a narrative that many Americans continue to believe in.

Three years ago, my father asked members of my family to share a poem or story before we opened presents for Christmas. My step-brother chose a fifteen minute monologue from Atlas Shrugged about the merits of laissez-faire capitalism. Three years before that, I read the fucking book so I could understand the prompt to a scholarship essay. Today, The Tea Party all but advocates this book as a manual for economic policy.

If you’ve read the tome, I hope you understand why this is a ridiculous proposition. But if not, let me explain it to as if it were a porno.

Okay, so in Atlas Shrugged the Porno, there are a handful of people in the world who are really, REALLY good at fucking. Let’s call them the Gods of Fucking. Without them, no one could possibly have an orgasm. In fact, without them, it’s possible that no one else would be able to figure out how to fuck. The rest of the world would just talk about fucking, or take their clothes off and sort of fumble around – actual coitus would end in catastrophe.

But, you know, the fumblers want their share of pussy and don’t think it should belong only to the Gods of Fucking. So the fumblers enact a bunch of regulations to ensure that there is pussy for everyone.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world cannot handle this pussy. Legions of pussies are destroyed, infected, and torn apart.

The Gods of Fucking take this as the ultimate sign of their superiority. They gather up the world’s best remaining pussy and head off into the sunset to create a utopia of magnificent pussy. This pussy never stops coming.

Then the number one God recites a seventy-five page monologue about how great it is to fuck really, REALLY well.

Obviously the rest of the world falls apart because they can’t even figure out how to jerk off by themselves.

The moral of the story? We need the Gods of Fucking or no one will ever fuck again. Also, if you keep fumbling really hard every day, eventually you might become a God of Fucking.

As evidenced by Christmas readings and Tea Party message boards, a lot Americans believe they will one day become really, REALLY good at having sex.

Need a translation? We need rich people. And if we work really hard, one day we’ll become one of them.

But there is another narrative backed by real-world evidence. And if it was a porno, it might go more like this:

Financial Crisis XXX: The Pussy (Real Estate) Bubble is a story about a lot of different fuckers and a lot of different pussy. It’s also about pimps. Note: This is only one chapter of Financial Crisis XXX. To be realistic, it would need about twenty-five sequels.

All pussy (real estate) in this story is for sale. But there are very few fuckers who can outright buy a piece. Most fuckers have to get a loan from a pimp (bank).

Now the fuckers with a lot of money can afford a nice down-payment on a piece of pussy. They won’t have much interest to pay on their loan and monthly payments will be pretty low.

It’s just that EVERYONE wants pussy. Not only rich fuckers.

So there are these hoodlums (mortgage brokers) that work for the pimps. Every time they get a loan for one of these fuckers, the pimp gives them a commission. It’s up-front money, so it doesn’t matter to the hoodlum whether or not the fucker actually follows through on his payments.

So what happens when a fucker wants a piece of prime pussy way above his price-range? The hoodlum can do a number of things. First off, he can lie: “That fucker makes tons of money!” Or he can look at the fucker’s past purchases (credit score). Maybe the fucker never bought pussy, but paid for a glass dildo to stick up his ass. Maybe he didn’t make his payments on time for that glass dildo. To the hoodlum, it doesn’t matter. He forges documents, and says the fucker has a great history of paying for every piece of glass that’s ever been up his ass.

Well, the pimp gives out thousands of loans. But he’s not making all his money back right away. It’s gonna take years to get these fuckers to pay. So he starts selling loans to other people, or other pimps. The original pimp gets an up-front fee (immediate money) so that he can keep making loans, while the other pimps/hoodlums/whatever make money off the fuckers’ monthly payments.

But here’s the weird thing. Pimps and hoodlums and regular old fuckers are taking out loans from other pimps just so they can buy loans. So one pimp loans another pimp money. That second pimp will then use that money to buy a loan from the first pimp. It’s all very incestuous.

Also, not every loan is the same. Because all these pimps and hoodlums are making money up front, they don’t actually care that a good deal of the loans are likely to never be paid off. In fact, they’ve labeled a whole lot of them as “toxic.” They know for sure that a bunch of fuckers should have never been buying premium pussy in the first place. There is NO WAY the loans will be paid off. But those “toxic” fuckers also pay the highest interest, and so whoever buys “toxic” loans will get the highest returns… until, of course, the fuckers stop paying.

So pimps are gambling with these toxic loans. They’re betting on how long they can collect money until the fuckers go broke. Pimps think, “Maybe a couple months of good returns and then I’ll sell them off.” Well, at some point, a bunch of pimps are going to be stuck with loans attached to fuckers with no money. At that point, money literally disappears.

There’s another layer to this story, though. On top of this mountain of pussy is a Master Pimp (the US government). He says, “For every loan given to a fucker, a pimp must actually have a certain percentage of money in cold, hard cash.” Regular pimps don’t like this. They want to keep giving out loans and selling loans in order to make immediate chunks of change for themselves. So they convince the Master Pimp to consider their loans as assets. The regular pimps say, “A loan is just as good as cold, hard cash because this fucker will eventually pay up.” For some reason, the Master Pimp accepts this.

Then… most every fucker stops paying. The money being loaned out doesn’t actually exist anymore and it all falls apart. No one has any money, and so no one gets any pussy.

But wait. The Master Pimp has money. He collects it from the fuckers every day (taxes). They have to pay him because that’s how this porno works.

The Master Pimp takes the money he collects from the fuckers and gives it back to the pimps so they can keep gambling. The pimps end up with all the pussy, and the fuckers get nothing… except the privilege to keep on paying the pimps and Master Pimp for the rest of their lives.

Except this isn’t a porno. It’s real life. And way more complicated.

But the nuts and bolts of this scam is that real US citizens put money in the bank, which is then gambled away. Those same US citizens then pay taxes to reimburse the banks for their losses.

Basically, we pay twice to keep our own money. And we lose our property and government-funded, social services along the way.

My example is over-simplified, and only one of many. It is, however, entirely representative of the way our financial system now operates.

Maybe I’m late to the party, and this is all common knowledge. But something tells me it’s not. Something like this: the news anchors, pundits, politicians, bloggers, Tweeters, acquaintances, and even friends that say the Occupy movement is a nuisance and all those protesters just need to grow up and get a job.

“Because with a little hard fumbling, anyone can become a God of Fucking!”

Danny Wylde is a pornographer, writer, and filmmaker living in Los Angeles, California. He updates his personal blog at http://trvewestcoastfiction.blogspot.com