Letter from Slim Wolfe
Capitalism – January 2009 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Remember when foreign money started moving into Colorado? Back in the late ’70s, when I first arrived, it was common to hear locals say “Don’t Californicate Colorado,” or “If God had intended Texans to ski, he would have made bullpoop white.” So imagine what it must feel like, being a “local” in some place like India or Bali, when all that foreign capital starts moving in to fill a vacuum or just to elbow out the previous local economy. The jobs created by the new money are useful, or even necessary, but the whole scheme isn’t really sustainable, since it depends on global money machinations and distant markets, a house of cards which flip and flap according to whatever liquidity crisis or rumors on the world stock exchanges happen to be current. There’s no connection to your basic food and survival chain, gathering nuts or raising livestock or making shoes for your community. You’re a puppet on a chain, jerking around from paycheck to paycheck, serving a class of people of an alien economic stratum and, maybe, alien religion, culture, and ethnic origin, too.
