Lately, especially since the Federal Reserve’s mandated audit information started coming out, there’s been a term I’ve seen a lot in the media that the Zombie Rights Campaign needs to address (and correct the record upon): ‘Zombie Bank’

This particular slander against the Differently Animated is showing up everywhere.

From noted Lefty blogger Atrios:

Zombies Aren’t Merely Corpses

They feed on brains.
So Paul Krugman’s prediction of zombie banks creating a drag on the economy has not come true. The reality is, in fact, much worse. Krugman foresaw zombie banks that didn’t lend due to capital concerns, preventing the recovery from getting off the ground. We’re seeing plenty of that, but we’re also seeing zombie banks actively prey on the economy through the foreclosure process in an effort to repair their balance sheets. The zombie banks aren’t just failing to boost the economy, they’re actively sabotaging it.

I need to eat.

BRAIIIIIINZ

Over at Fire Dog Lake, David Dayen used the term:

Precisely. There were enormous social costs from the financial meltdown. Those are ongoing, and the bailout didn’t fix them. They merely propped up zombie banks which are still insolvent, and extended the suffering of regular people.

Even those nonconformists at Corrente have been caught bashing the Differently Animated in this fashion:

You can pump all the blood you want into a zombie, but it’s still a zombie

This particular usage is especially bad since it seems to conflate Zombies with Vampires, or some other blood-draining type of Undead. Let’s try to keep it straight, people!

So where does this ‘Zombie bank’ term come from, anyway? Wikipedia has at least one possible origin:

A zombie bank is a financial institution that has an economic net worth less than zero but continues to operate because its ability to repay its debts is shored up by implicit or explicit government credit support. The term was first used by Edward Kane in 1987 to explain the dangers of tolerating a large number of insolvent savings and loan associations and applied to the emerging Japanese crisis in 1993.[1]

In all honesty, I expect it’s less a reference back to an earlier age of financial perfidy and more a sign of the times; Zombies are ‘in’, as in, ‘popular to shoot at’, and thus villainous entities are seen by the general population to be Zombie-like, having been suitably conditioned against the Differently Animated to start with.

How is this harmful to our clients? Well, aside from the guilt-by-association angle I allude to above, where the word ‘Zombie’ is gradually stretched beyond its ordinary (and already grotesque) bounds of prejudice to encompass any and all forms of wickedness, it’s also just confusing and inaccurate language. How, precisely, is a ‘Zombie bank’ like a Zombie?

According to the very definition Kane, and this is key, a ‘Zombie’ bank is a bank that has zero net worth (or less) but has not been allowed to die.

Do you see the distinction? Kane forgot that Zombies have, at least temporarily, ALREADY died.* His ‘Zombie’ banks are not, in fact, Zombies, as they have never died in any meaningful sense – and are not, therefore, Undead in the first place.

The term ‘Vampire’ bank would be more accurate, in that these institutions have a desperate need for additional amounts of a resource (capital instead of blood) normally used by the ordinary (i.e., ‘Living’ banks), but even here, the word ‘Vampire’ would have to be carefully construed to be akin to vampire bats rather than Nosferatu and his ilk, because, again, ‘Zombie/Vampire’ banks have never died. (Matt Taibbi has often referred to Goldman Sachs as a ‘vampire squid’, showing that at least some commentators have noticed the closer resemblence to vampiratical behaviors)

What term would the ZRC prefer? Well, from a Zombie Rights perspective we’d be satisfied merely if people stopped confusing the Undead with anything and everything they personally disapprove of. From a linguistic perspective, however, we should search for a more accurate pejorative term. Parasite bank? Leech bank?

Regardless of the more accurate terminology one might eventually settle upon, one thing is clear: ‘Zombie banks’ are not Zombies. Their dishonest nature and sneaky treachery are profoundly un-Zombielike (even the most strident Anti-Zombie campaigners like George Romero portray Zombies as honest in their goals and upfront in their methods), but even more basic than that, a Zombie bank would have to have died, and then revived, in an externally obvious and fundamentally different manner than the living.

These institutions have not remotely done that, and in fact have taken great pains to avoid doing so in the future.

We didn’t pick the term ‘Differently Animated’ for nothing, folks. If these banks were remotely Zombie-like, we’d work on their behalf. They aren’t, and we don’t, and we wish the larger blogosphere would notice the difference as well.

*Some of the larger Differently Animated community often labeled as Zombies, like the individuals seen in Boyle’s work, haven’t technically died either, but they have been radically transformed and reorganized and no longer function biologically in a similar fashion to ordinary Living people. At any rate, they’re closer to Zombies than a ‘Zombie bank’.

Tags: Journamalism

This entry was posted by John Sears on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Zombie Media, ZRC News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.