Too Big to Not Fail

Wrong. Too big to avoid failure.

A Hooverville, Seattle Washington, circa 1932 to 1937.

During the financial crisis of 2008, we heard the words, “Too big to fail,” as the greed-infested bankers who broke the economy were bailed out. Repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act in 1999 which separated investment banking from depository banking proved fatal. The law that came out of the hard-earned lessons of the Great Depression were tossed aside. In 1999, Bill Clinton deemed the law, “no longer appropriate,” and claimed repealing it had nothing to do with the 2008 financial crash. Also, he “did not have sexual relations with that woman,” and “never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never.”

Character counts does it not, and now we are living through far worse than Clinton neoliberal economic policies. It’s been a steady, now accelerating slide since Reagan, and both parties landed us here with greed and ignorance in the climate crisis and overshoot with no preparation for the inevitable end of fossil fuels.

The economy boomed under Clinton and I had my most financially successful years as a self-employed graphic designer. Although I long had an awareness that our way of life was unsustainable, I was guilty of looking the other way as the good times rolled. Rolling for me meant anything on wheels from a beautiful Colnago racing bicycle to an outrageous Honda CBX, a six-cylinder, 101 horsepower motorcycle, briefly the fastest production bike you could buy and testament to wretched excess. I loved the damn thing. It got about 32 miles per gallon, a bit worse than many cars of the era.

My love of wheels and speed started young with a 1965 Mustang. A pedal car that is. At just four or five years old, I was already being indoctrinated into an unsustainable consumer culture featuring the peculiarly American worship of cars. Now your car doubles as a surveillance device. Yes, other cultures laud the automobile, but not like the USA where the open road represents a form of self-entitled freedom. However, lurking under my indoctrination was a suspicion over time that we were all being led down a trap. By my teens I could see this was true.

And a trap it is indeed, every purchase a clever form of enslavement brainwashed into us through relentless advertising that ultimately lives as pollutants in the tissues of our bodies.

My father was the best man I ever knew. Born in 1937, the second of five children he was a depression era baby in a poor family soon to endure WWII. His first job was at age 12, setting pins in a bowling alley. With the help of my mother he put himself through college and a graduate degree, an MBA in fine art. The man was hardly a “capitalist” with his passion for painting and teaching, but the realities of the system forced him to compromise. Eventually, he became the head of a fine arts department, a dean of arts and humanities, and finally president at two different arts schools. Along the way he took freelance graphic design and illustration work in addition to his academic responsibilities, and labored endlessly on numerous houses. The houses were forced on us, as my dad ethical to his core, fought battles with those who were not. As much as I loved and admired him, he taught me what I didn’t want.

My father from a self-portrait in 2017. From A Profile of Quiet Courage I wrote shortly after his death.

Thus, our family moved every four years or so, where I became the new kid on the block often meeting sociopaths in training, boys practicing becoming the people my father got screwed by. I could either fight or hide and did some of both.

There are Bill Clintons and Donald Trumps at every level of society. They’re trained in childhood.

With my parents, I watched Nixon resign on TV, a lesson on how sociopaths and their minions rise to the top. Nixon was a saint compared to what we’re enduring now as Trump, his controllers and cowards that go along destroy social welfare, double down on corporate welfare, and destroy environmental law and science, even as the planet burns. People are dying from wet-bulb temperature deaths in India where Narendra Modi like Trump denies climate change. They’re dying in many countries now.

Photo: Getty Images

Yes, they’re dying in America, too, as Europe experiences record-setting heat again. Maricopa County, AZ has seen a tenfold rise in heat deaths in the last twenty years. It is estimated that one heat death occurs per minute now worldwide. Here is the full report from The Lancet. In the meantime, we have attacked yet another sovereign nation, in turn starving countries of fuel supplies and critical fertilizers, further imperiling already stressed agriculture. American farm bankruptcies rose 46 percent in 2025. No worries though, when this unprovoked attack ends with hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and loss to our military and personal well-being, Trump will claim he brought peace to the Middle East.

Of course the fuel supplies being blocked are the very resource that is killing us anyhow. How stupidly ironic.

How many lives have been lost to this malevolent idiot not halfway through his term? We starve Cuba of oil, attack Venezuelan fisherman under the spurious guise of a war on fentanyl, incarcerate and deport agricultural workers critical to our farms with the gestapo called ICE — increasingly failing from the corporate crimes of the Cargill’s and Monsanto’s of this world — and witness Ebola race through the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. Little doubt the elimination of USAID, less than one percent of the federal budget plays a part in that. More research from The Lancet predicts an additional 14 million needless deaths from this alone.

I have written more than once what this administration would bring. Consider The Administration of Death.

Consider more deliberate death by policy if you haven’t had your fill. Sorry, this is truly not what I wish to write about, but here we are stumbling toward extinction.

Trump’s social media posts grow increasingly unhinged. As Freedom 250 approaches, the so-called “Great American State Fair” with stinky musical acts lined up to play, bailed. In reaction Trump posted that he was:

“thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate “Artists,” and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!” He continued: “Two years ago, the United States was DEAD. Now we have the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. I don’t want so-called “Artists” that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy. I only want to be surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN. So, by copy of this TRUTH, I am ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday, Washington, D.C., same time, same location. Only Great Patriots invited—It will be a Wild and Beautiful Celebration of America! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The man is cerebral, this is undeniable.

How shockingly inadequate our protections of democracy have been, but more important is our complete denial of our relationship to the planet. Mother Earth ultimately decides all.

We endure the closure of community hospitals due to the foul mechanism of private equity and expect adults doing teenager jobs for teenager wages to miraculously afford healthcare. Medicaid dependents are about to be thrown off in the millions. And AI rises, guaranteeing further job loss and economic depression as the wheels come off an economy dependent on the fatal consumption of a finite world which pollutes our bodies with PFAS and microplastics that fall in the rain. These are deliberate policies of extermination.

Small community hospitals can fail, but certainly not private equity.

Fortunately, as we’re sickened, we have an endless variety of pharmaceutical choices as autoimmune disorders rise and doctors are reduced to pushers. There are even injections to cure obesity from eating too many Big Macs. BTW, obesity isn’t a health problem, it’s a perception problem. Making us sick is good business. We can’t let Big Pharma fail any more than Big Ag or Big Oil.

You’re little. I’m little. You and I can’t possibly understand what’s too big to fail, can we? Let’s leave that to the Bigs. Or is that Biglys?

It’s go time. Perhaps UFC cage fighters on the White House lawn will convince us.

An ode to better times.