Do You Dubayy?

I grew up in a different world where places around the globe had different names and seemed to follow different rules from those that they tell us we should follow today. I visited East Germany briefly as a youngster, a place that has vanished as completely as the Soviet Union I once traveled through. When I was a very small boy Goa in India was ruled by the Portuguese, part of their Empire that has also vanished as completely as Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) or Macao. I read the writings of Wilfred Thesiger as a boy and dreamed of a world of Iraqi Marsh Arabs, the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia and the desperate journeys across those empty spaces. Sir Wilfred Thesiger was the stereotypical craggy Englishman able to hide himself among the natives like this:And yet, despite the literature and the wonderment I never did get to the Middle East. My life time was when Arabs supplanted camels with internal combustion, tents with skyscrapers, and became objects of Nouveau Riche derision, them Arabs and their gold faucets and their wealth compared to our petroleum dependent technology. I read the literature, I wondered about the Trucial Gulf States who joined together in an ancient 19th century treaty and promised to trade with Britain and no one else. They made a flag and lived under it.I knew 20th century British soldiers who went to work as trainers for the local army in Trucial Oman, another 19th century pirate nation that signed a truce with Great Britain's Navy and thus became "Trucial" in the weird lingo of diplomacy. And then they became their own nations, the Trucial Gulf States and the seven sheikdoms spread across 250 miles of waterfront in the Persian Gulf became the United Arab Emirates or UAE. We've heard of their capital Abu Dhabi in English, the place that "elects" the hereditary President of the UAE, and we've heard of Dubai where the Emirates' Vice President is "elected" by heredity, but the other five...? I couldn't even spell them never mind say them. They all, the seven little emirates, live in the shadows of oil and prosperity.

We've heard more recently of the huge developments the Emir of Dubai has been encouraging in his country that boasts perhaps 50 miles of coastline and a great deal of sand. And now the developer of the Palms of Dubai (dubayy in Arabic, properly pronounced de-bay, not due-by) is defaulting on his dollar loans, all 60 billion of them. Dubai, unlike big brother Abu Dhabi has no oil so it proposed to be the big bad boy of unbridled capitalist development amongst the little emirates which sit next to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. They built an indoor ski resort in the desert and proposed vast offshore artificial islands of luxury that have all come tumbling down in the credit crunch, default swap chaos of 2008. Dubai is not kind to debtors and foreigners have been abandoning their Mercedes at the airport and flying home before their debts caught up with them. They wanted to escape the 19th century style debtor's jail in use in Dubai.

Now the UAE Central Bank is suggesting it will not pick up the debts owed by developer Dubai World saying the lenders need to be responsible for the money they loaned, and the central bank of Dubai is saying the same thing. Stock markets everywhere were jittery when they thought Dubai's Big Brother Emirate was going to save their financial ass, so what happens next who knows? Bloomberg suggests stocks are ignoring Dubai's problems which, after a few days of sacremongering, isn't too surprising really, especially when you consider how determined they are tot ell us a recovery is under way. The funny thing about all this sudden "Dubai-talk" is that Dubai World owes barely $60 billion dollars, which amounts to far less than the US taxpayer has paid to bail out Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. if you need an idea of how enormous and how powerful the United States is, and could be, just think about what piddly numbers we are talking about here. The United States could bail out all Dubai's debt, including $40 billion of shaky governmental debt, with only one dollar in seven the US government has set aside for domestic bailout spending. Incidentally one has to wonder why we the US taxpayers are being told to bail out fraudulent lenders and wild speculators when these Ay-rabs we love to despise are forthrightly telling their speculators to suck it up on their own.

On the other hand Abu Dhabi can probably cope just fine with whatever economic shambles lies ahead because unlike little brother Dubai, Abu Dhabi has enormous oil reserves and about $630 billion in the bank, saved up for a rainy day. I sit back in my little house in the Keys and I wonder about the world I live in. One load of leaders in Dubai is busy pretending to have money and blowing it all like a millionaire's son on a spending spree at Harrod's while the other leaders in Abu Dhabi are hoarding cash like it's going out of fashion. And us? We savagely decline to cover our own health care needs on the grounds of cost, blow up foreign countries at random and get our people killed defending "freedom"in mountain ranges we can't even name. I can't help but feel the Trucial Gulf States have made more progress in the past century than we have, and whatever the cost of their freedom they have money in the bank to cover expenses like proper capitalists should. And yet all we see are "rag heads" and "camel jockeys" and hateful religious extremists, those Ay-rabs with 630 billion of our dollars snug in their bank.

Freedom isn't having the biggest guns or the baddest attitude. It's knowing how to keep a solid capitalist positive cash flow, while taking care of what needs to be taken care of at home and at the same time cheerfully minding one's own business. How sad it is we need to take a lesson from the former Trucial Gulf States who are at war with no one, provide excellent socialized medicine for all and are now showing us how to demand accountability from bankrupts. I hope when the time comes they will sign a truce with us.