Ari Demopoulos
Overheard in Piraeus Taverna
Animal Husbandry isn’t normally expected to be the fondest desire of bonus-fattened Wall Street bankers jumping ship to the countryside but this caper had mileage for one such miscreant, for as long as it lasted. Zeke the Needle, not his real name, read an article on the Serbian donkeys whose cheese is the most expensive treat in the world, $1,350 or €1,000 per kilogram (around $612 per lb.)
He decided to browse the pages of the American Donkey and Mule Society, ascertain why good ol American ingenuity hadn’t yet created a similar product from domestic Ass. The web is replete with strange yet super healthy cheese from several animals, Mare to Moose to Camel. If pipsqueak Mongolia could build booming sustainable cottage industries, there’s no reason an enterprising Yank shouldn’t have succeeded!
Donkeys would have to be inspected and transported from all over the country to one location, which Zeke tentatively decided would be snowy Nevada, a quasi replication of the vibe at Zasavica Special Nature Reserve in Serbia. That was the easiest bit, finding a piece of land without building permit nightmares became an immediate problem. More farcical still, the United Nations had a claim on the very same property.
Being a math wiz kid, Zeke worked out it would take ten years to build his Donkey Cheese Reserve to a level that could return a smallish portion of his initial investment. Wall Street saavy was of no benefit when dealing with empirical bureaucrats so he finally accepted the reality that half those ten years would be spent in courts and hearings, not excluding FDA inspection followed by expensive, unreasonable demands.
The picture this painted was confirmation that an overbearing paperwork army has taken over America, regulating every facet of life so there’s no room for even the 1%ers to escape scrutiny, constant surveillance or the nanny state’s supervision in all things deemed morally contemptible. Zeke the Needle had not skewered his enemies in the ether and on the trading floor at the Boss’s behest to then be treated miserably.
Greener pastures revealed themselves and a veil was lifted, the only way for a slave of the international monetary system to break free of the clutches of the machine, even for a little while is to join in on new raids of plunder and gouge a big enough asset claim when a fray is over. Zeke did just that, he moved to Goldman Sachs Athens in 2008 and was rewarded with a piece of paper that says he owns an island.
If we were a Serbian Donkey Dairy, we’d put on a double guard, save our Asses!
