The Man Who Quit Money (21 page)

Ecstatic though he was, Suelo was not yet, as they say, out of the woods. He jogged through the forest to a campground where he found a gathering of gray-haired tourists picnicking beside their motor homes. Breathless and delirious in his soaked woolen rags, Suelo bounded into their site.

“Hello!” he called. “I need help!”

One of the land yachtsmen glanced up from his sandwich, then continued eating.

Wow,
thought Suelo, experiencing sudden culture shock. He ran to the next campsite.

“Can you help me?” he cried. No one said a word.

At the third Winnebago, Suelo marched right up beneath the extendable awning, dripping and trembling. “I just came across the glacier, I have hypothermia, my pack is gone, and my friend is across the river and he’s going to die. I need help.”

With excruciating hesitation, the campers offered him the backseat in their car, fed him a sandwich, delivered him to the lodge, and drove off. Suelo lumbered inside, his toes squishing
in his boots. Behind the counter was a hearty sourdough type—mustache, flannel shirt, knife on his belt. He would know what to do. But as Suelo approached, the guy gave him a cold stare.

It was the pilot.

Before Suelo could speak, the man rose in anger.

“You stupid idiot!” cried the man. “That’s private property. You have no right being over there.”

Suelo slunk back and fell into a chair like a boy in the principal’s office.

“All you dipshits from the Lower Forty-eight,” lectured the man. “You come up to Alaska for some dickhead adventure and expect us to bail you out when you get in trouble.”

Suelo watched the angry lips move but heard nothing. He shriveled. Just minutes before, he’d slain the dragon, swimming that river to save his life, and now he felt like a runt. He recalled his moment of hitting absolute bottom on that hunk of ice. This was worse. In fact, this was worse than death. Would he never put an end to that nagging childhood feeling of being the weakest? Well, if he could stand up to the glacier, he could stand up to this guy.

He lifted his trembling body out of the chair. He walked resolutely toward the man. He inched close enough to smell him, and to drip water onto the wooden counter between them.

“I don’t care what you think of me,” Suelo said. “I need help. I’ve got hypothermia and my friend is dying across the river. Whatever you think, put it aside and help me.”

Something clicked. The man called his wife to fetch some food and dry clothes. He called a geologist he knew who could operate the cable car. He took Suelo back to the river, and they sent a package of food across the cable, with a note saying to
hang tight, that help was on the way. The geologist arrived and brought an elated Ander back in the mining car. He even retrieved Suelo’s backpack, which had snagged in a thicket. The lodge owner offered them a place to stay while their stuff dried. The next day the owner went out to the cabin, found Suelo’s note of apology, and then apologized himself. He said they’d had trouble with vandals at the cabin, and when he’d seen smoke rising out the chimney from his airplane, he’d assumed Suelo and Ander were the troublemakers.

Safe and warm and dry, Suelo and Ander set out for the Yukon, heading back to the Lower 48. The hero had slain a pair of dragons, another trial on his journey.

“I felt like I was discovering my own manhood,” Suelo says a decade later. “First the physical thing with the glacier. Then with the lodge owner. I realized I’m a man and I can talk to a man face-to-face. No man can humiliate me. I felt like it was kind of a late time in life to learn that—but that’s when I learned it.”

The most important result, however, of Suelo’s experiments with nature and chance through 1997 was a deeper analysis of his longtime spiritual hobgoblin: money. “I’m realizing that anything motivated by money is tainted, containing the seeds of destruction,” he wrote from Alaska that summer. “That’s the struggle—guess that’s why Van Gogh couldn’t sell his paintings—they had to be pure. There is no honest profession—that’s the paradox. The oldest profession [prostitution] is the most honest, for it exposes the bare bones of what civilization is all about. It’s the root of all professions.”

Part Three

. . .

Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work came
from a man’s envy of his neighbor.
This also is vanity and a striving after wind.

—Ecclesiastes

A
T FIRST GLANCE
, the late 1990s would seem the oddest of historical moments to become disillusioned with money, for the mere fact that there was so much of it floating around. After the fall of the Soviet Union, capitalism reigned triumphant, and America embraced it more firmly than ever. While the culture wars raged over social issues like homosexuality and abortion, in the realm of economics, there emerged a peculiar consensus. With Bill Clinton as their captain, Democrats rallied to causes that CEOs had championed for decades. Clinton and a Republican Congress united to deregulate industry, reduce the welfare state, and open foreign markets by reducing tariffs. The result of the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (to deregulate broadcasting), the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (to deregulate banking)—in concert with the boom
in computers and finance—was a historic spike in gross domestic product, stock prices, and corporate profits.

Suelo parted with his final dollars in 2000, the same year that the dot-com bubble peaked, NASDAQ reached its all-time high, and
Forbes
reported, “There’s more money at the top than ever before: a combined $1.2 trillion for the 400 richest Americans, up from $1 trillion last year.” (If instead of foolishly dropping that thirty dollars in a pay phone, Suelo had bought a plot of dirt—and then cannily sold his nano-acre before the crash—his net worth today might surpass one hundred dollars!) At number one was Bill Gates, whose fortune had topped $101 billion, making him the world’s first “centibillionaire.” Meanwhile, his business partner, Paul Allen, was about to drop a cool $100 million for a 301-foot, five-story mega-yacht that housed a movie theater and two helicopter pads. Another significant economic event of that year, in addition to the windfall to whoever found Suelo’s cash in that phone booth, was the largest corporate merger in history, between Time Warner and America Online, to the tune of $152 billion.

A similar boom had occurred in the Reagan years. But back then, the titans of finance—Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Charles Keating, and their ilk—had exuded a whiff of vil-lainy, epitomized by the credo of Hollywood bad guy Gordon Gecko, that greed is good. “In the eighties, maybe, money had been an evil thing,” writes the critic Thomas Frank in
One Market Under God,
“a tool of demonic coke-snorting vanity, of hostile takeovers and S&L ripoffs.” And throughout that decade, a parade of sourpusses—Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, and
their
ilk—had insisted that greed was
not
good,
and that the moral thing was to pay higher taxes and wear a sweater indoors when the weather was cold.

Judging by the performance of those candidates at the polls, only a minority of Americans agreed with them. But in the nineties, with the advent of the New Democrats, the opposition to greed seemed to have evaporated altogether. Bill Clinton allowed his party members to straddle a wide chasm—they could still call themselves progressive when it came to fraternizing with gays and listening to Lauryn Hill’s latest disc, but also be “fiscally conservative” and support NAFTA, legislation that a decade earlier would have been decried as rank colonialism. Business kings like Gates and Richard Branson and Larry Ellison were lionized. “Our billionaires were no longer slave-driving martinets or pump-and-dump Wall Street manipulators,” writes Frank. “They were people’s plutocrats, doing without tie and suit, chatting easily with the rank-and-file…. pushing the stock prices up benevolently this time, making sure we all got to share in the profit-taking.”

At the heart of the new consensus was a belief that money itself carried some wisdom. We all want money, went the reasoning, therefore money is good. And if only government with its do-good moralizing would just butt out, we would all prosper. “From Deadheads to Nobel-laureate economists, from paleoconservatives to New Democrats, American leaders in the nineties came to believe that markets were a popular system, a far more democratic form of organization than (democratically elected) governments,” concludes Frank.

Any pangs of conscience that liberals might have felt about their unprecedented lucre were allayed by a belief that gracious
America was spreading the wealth far and wide. International agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were pumping cash into the Third World to develop agriculture and industry and infrastructure so that all boats might rise with the tide. In 1995, 153 nations formed the World Trade Organization with the goal of greasing the gears of trade, so that even the poorest countries could benefit.

But as the stock market soared and the coffers filled, the consensus began to crack. Critics on both the left and right, from Ralph Nader to Ron Paul, noticed that for all its historic numbers, the bull market wasn’t benefiting the average American. Income inequality, which had reached historic lows around 1970, had crept back to levels of the Gilded Age. Eighty percent of the increase in Americans’ income between 1980 and 2005 landed in the accounts of the top 1 percent.
BusinessWeek
noted that in 1990, CEOs earned 85 times more than workers; in 1999, they earned 475 times more. Globalization thumped the American farm and factory, wiping out middle-class jobs.

And while it’s true that in the 1990s some Americans were taking home more dollars than ever, their raises did not necessarily indicate a larger piece of the pie. Many of the families that maintained the buying power of the previous generation did so not with better jobs, but thanks to the combination of cheap foreign goods and two working parents. The Economic Policy Institute reported that in 1999 Americans worked six weeks more per year than a decade earlier. Full-time jobs with benefits and retirement plans were replaced with temp and part-time that required workers to dig into their paychecks for health insurance and retirement contributions—or forsake them altogether.

As a result, the average personal savings rate slipped into free
fall, and in 1999 it dipped into the red; in other words, Americans were now borrowing money to maintain the standard of living that their parents had paid for outright. Those icons of the nineties—shimmering SUVs and sprawling McMansions—were on loan from the bank. Against the tide of historic corporate profits and stock prices, real wages had receded. A majority of people were not lenders but borrowers, whose net worth was zero or negative. The decade’s prosperity was a facade.

The first revolt came from the left, in the fall of 1999. A coalition of labor unions, environmentalists, and social-justice advocates took aim at the four-year-old World Trade Organization, which was scheduled to convene in Seattle in November. Deaf to the hoorays about the New Economy spilling from politicians like Clinton and pundits like Tom Friedman, environmentalists mistrusted the WTO. It was, after all, an unelected international body with no legal jurisdiction that had nonetheless succeeded in thwarting laws passed by the elected officials of sovereign nations. For instance, the U.S. Endangered Species Act prohibited American importers from buying shrimp that had been harvested with nets that could accidentally kill sea turtles. Asian nations challenged the law before the WTO, which sided with the shrimpers. America was forced to back down.

Organized labor had its own reason for opposing the meeting. One tenet of the WTO’s mission to “liberalize” international trade was to enable corporations to set up shop in other countries. After a century of struggle to establish workplace conditions that we take for granted—a forty-hour workweek, overtime, compensation for job injuries, elimination of child labor—unions saw their jobs vanish as bosses simply shuttered American
factories and relocated to Third World countries that had no such laws.

And so it was that on November 30, an odd mix of hard hats and people dressed as sea turtles, with a healthy smattering of jugglers and puppeteers, blocked the streets around the Seattle convention center, not merely protesting the meeting of the WTO ministers, but actually preventing it. It was not only the most powerful blow to date against the globalization free-for-all, but the most successful economics-driven display of civil disobedience in American history.

Surprising as it is that opposition to international monetary policy could bring together longshoremen and tree huggers, what’s truly peculiar is that similar antipathies were also aligning those left-leaning groups with the far right. In 1994, a member of the John Birch Society, C. Edward Griffin, self-published
The Creature from Jekyll Island,
a six-hundred-page screed against the Federal Reserve. His thesis is that America’s central bank, the Fed, is merely a cartel that with the blessing of Congress has established a legal monopoly that will inevitably bankrupt the United States and all her citizens. Now in its twenty-fifth printing, and translated into Japanese, Vietnamese, and German, the book has become a Magna Carta for gold bugs and Tea Partiers livid about government bailouts and the spiraling national debt. To understand the breadth of the book’s appeal, consider that it got blurbs from both Ron Paul and Willie Nelson. When in 2010 I requested a copy from my local public library, I was informed that twenty-five patrons were ahead of me on the waiting list.

Some may cringe at Griffin’s discovery of socialist conspiracy in every historical event from the Bull Moose presidential run of Theodore Roosevelt to the sinking of the
Lusitania,
the Crash of ’29,
the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the founding of Earth Day. But his plain critique of monetary policy is illuminating and alarming. “The total of this human effort is ultimately for the benefit of those who create fiat money,” writes Griffin, with a flourish oddly reminiscent of Karl Marx himself. “It is a form of modern serfdom in which the great mass of society works as indentured servants to a ruling class of financial nobility.”