Monopoly/Fun Guy versus Vendetta/Anonymous Guy — Separated at birth or just separate universes?

Life isn’t fair, trade isn’t fair, justice isn’t fair and the market system certainly isn’t fair.

That doesn’t mean most people want to give up on the pursuit of life, liberty, happiness, justice and some kind of fair, free market system. In fact most of us would like to have more of the above, not less.

The presence of far-left cadres and signs like “Abolish the monetary system” don’t define or even represent a substantial minority view of the vast, multi-layered, bubbling social organism that is the conglomeration of people who support (or at least have some inquisitive good will towards) the Occupy Wall Street movement.

As has been said many, many times already, there is no central agenda for this movement, no central leadership, no single unifying philosophy so far — except one.

The one thing everyone can pretty much agree on is that the system as it exists right now is broken (of course there is no consensus on how much or little breakage there is) and needs to be repaired.

And that is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is a Good Thing — this sense of positive renewal and the sense that, whether it succeeds or not, the natural human tendencies to fairness and social responsibility can overcome — or at least counterbalance to some degree — the natural human tendencies to cynicism and greed.

As a species, we’ve only been around for 40,000 years or so. Surely we can eke out another century or two. The dinosaurs managed to hang around for more than a million years and they had pea brains. Big teeth but small brains.

(The odds of success aren’t high — never forget the aphorism “Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy” — but it’s still an exercise worth pursuing and there is bound to be at least some shift in the balance of perspective, if not power. Maybe that in itself is a worthy measure of success.)

And that is why this general public sense that things have gone off track has coalesced around anger at the  huge blob of financial, economic and political control that falls under the collective corporate moniker “Wall Street.”

Whether you live in Manhattan or Moosejaw or Milano or Montevideo or Mumbai, you know that “Wall Street” is working for “Wall Street” and its money managers, not for you or the people of the U.S.A. or Canada or Italia or Uruguay or India.

Most people can accept that without too much trouble or resentment. But what people can’t accept — and what is the real driving force behind the anger towards Wall Street — is that Wall Street has hijacked the institutions and mechanisms of democracy and changed the rules to benefit itself at the expense of everyone else.

Apologies to Hannah Tan, but it’s a perspective on the Wall Street bull I like.

That anger isn’t a blanket denunciation of corporations or financial institutions — quite the reverse. People accomplish the most in this world when they work together to achieve a goal. I think that’s one definition of “corporate culture.” I think it’s also an applicable description of the Occupy Wall Street movement.I know honourable people who make a very good living in the corporate world but who are as offended as the St. James Park campers by well-heeled fraudsters and manipulators who cook the books, salt the mine and piss in the communal stewpot, to mix a few metaphors.

It’s got nothing to do with people working hard and making money. Good on ya. It’s got everything to do with people stealing money, pretending like they deserve it and sneering at the people they stole it from.

So the Occupy Wall Street movement really isn’t about seeking some kind of socialist “redistribution of wealth.” It’s OPPOSED to the redistribution of wealth that corporate Wall Street — the so-called 1% — engineered in its own favour over the past half century. The current backlash just wants to level the playing field a little bit. Not claw-backs but no more claw-overs.

Don’t forget that it was Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of World War II and Republican President of the 1950s,  who warned us all in his presidential farewell address against the growing greed and self-serving power of the “military-industrial complex.”

I like Ike: Looks a little like a bald David Letterman … but more relevant.

The Eisenhower speech is a thing of beauty and courage and wisdom and foresight, perhaps even more relevant today than it was when he delivered it in January 1961. Here’s an online link to the written speech and audio track.

And here’s a link to the full televised speech on YouTube.

Here’s one passage to give you a taste:

“As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

“Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”

And here’s the closing of the speech:

“We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

It all sounds so fanciful and naive today. It’s hard to remember that these words were written (at least co-written) and spoken by a man who saw closeup the worst the 20th Century had to offer mankind; a man who led millions of soldiers through a terrible, devastating war to defeat the evil of Nazism; a man who led the so-called Free World against the terror and tyranny of Soviet Stalinism for the better part of a decade; and a man who represented the Republican Party and the American social, political and economic establishment before the likes of Richard Nixon took over. (Ike, by the way, despised Nixon, the grasping vice-president foist upon him by political fixers.)

Wall Street is now more like the crooked casino that has fixed all the dice, cards and roulette wheels in its favour — and then fixed the laws to make us all play in that casino. You lose.

Put simply, Wall Street isn’t playing fair and is so used to not playing fair that it really doesn’t care anymore whether the chumps know it or not, as long as they keep anteing up.

The U.S. financial crisis that kicked off in late 2008 and the current Euro-zone financial crisis are two sides of the same coin and both are representative of the same problem: Yes, the economies of North America and Europe are in trouble, but the “crisis” in both cases is a self-created financial sector crisis — and the banks are being bailed out, not the economies.

The big banks, in both cases, knowingly engaged in dangerous, manipulative lending and investing practices — the dubious Ponzi scheme called the subprime mortgage market in the American case, and the reckless readiness of Northern European banks to buy bonds issued by Southern European countries obviously (to the duly diligent) unable to repay the bond amounts pledged to be redeemed in the future.

Hell, Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs even lent the Greek government billions under the table in 2001 so it could cook the books enough to gain entry to the Euro club. Where’s the censure? Where’s the penalty? Why aren’t Europe’s banks, now stuck with vastly devalued Greek bonds, hounding Goldman Sachs for their money instead of EU countries like Slovakia which had a GDP in 2010 of about $121 billion — only three times  the  revenue, for the entire nation, of Goldman Sachs in the same year — just one year after the American government gave Goldman Sachs the better part of a billion dollars in finacial support?

(Slovakia, by the way, sucked it up years ago and got its financial house in order. No wonder they were resistant to pressure from other EU countries to agree to back an almost limitless pool of Euros to prop up the profligate spending habits of much richer — but much broker — European countries.)

The whole financial sector — from investment banking to venture capitalism — is based on the concept of risk assessment and management. Supposedly the financial institution or corporation uses its expertise to judge the risks involved in any given investment and reaps the rewards or penalties according to the real outcome.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work and that’s the way — more or less, off and on — the system used to work in North America and Europe.

Not any more. For the past decade, big U.S. and European banks made windfall profits by investing in what were rightfully considered “risky” ventures and which thus produced higher returns than “safe” investments.

But when those “risky” investments blew up — subprime mortgages, bad European bonds, etc. — the banks that took those supposedly calculated risks weren’t willing to pay the real price for their reckless practices.

Instead they have gone to the political institutions and organizations in which they have invested heavily to bail them out. Which the U.S. government did in 2009 and which the European Union is going to do (or is it?) in the coming weeks.

According to an investigative team at Bloomberg News, various arms of  the U.S. government in 2009 lent, spent or guaranteed almost $13 TRILLION to prop up the American financial system.

This is (at least in the U.S. and Canada, which use the “short” system) 13 trillion: 13,000,000,000,000.

(If you put a million dollars in a box, it would take 13 million of those boxes to make $13 trillion. It also works out to roughly $40,000 for each man, woman and child in the U.S. — including all the illegal immigrants.)

Here’s a link to a video interview with one member of that Bloomberg investigative team.

When the Euro-zone bailout comes, don’t forget that the money involved is going to end up going to the French, Swiss, German, British and other European banks and financial cartels that don’t want to pay the real price for their greed-induced investment mistakes. (North American investors would suffer too, but the EU doesn’t care about them.)

The billions of Euros involved (a billion in the European “long” system is the same thing as a trillion in the North American “short” system) won’t create a single job or save a single home or small business from foreclosure or bankruptcy.

The government mantra in both cases is that the bailout packages must be put in place to prevent panic, chaos and complete uncontrolled collapse of the worldwide banking system and economy.

A Wall Street protest in the 1920s — before the 1929 Crash, by the way.

If the aim was to protect the people, the governments could (in the case of Europe) or could have (in the case of the U.S.) guarantee(d) to protect the rights and property of individual investors while letting the supposedly “free market” take care of punishing the banks that put themselves in the crisis we are now told is our crisis. It would certainly be a lot cheaper than turning on the soylent green tap to the banks.

But it’s not really a free market, the game is rigged, the rules are made and changed by the people who pay the piper and call the tune, and the only free lunch is that eaten by the people who get to ding the taxpayer, either directly or corporately.

Bernie Sanders — BS worth listening to

(According to the admirably independent and cranky  U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Bank of America got a $1 trillion bailout from the U.S. government in 2009, made a $4.4 billion profit in the 2009-10 financial year, paid no federal income tax and actually got a $1.9 billion tax refund for that same fiscal year. What’s wrong with this picture?)

As someone said recently, “I’ll believe that corporations are people (a reference to a hilarious Mitt Romney quote) when the state of Texas executes one.”

In fairness, I must say that the Canadian banking sector is not in the same position that U.S. banks were in two years ago or that European banks are currently in.

And to be even fairer, the Canadian banks themselves can’t claim credit for that. For the past two decades, Canadian banks have been pushing hard to have the rules governing their operations loosened to the same degree that restrictions on U.S. banks were loosened during the same period.

It was, the Canadian banks said, the only way they could compete on a level playing field with the might of the U.S. banking system.

I would love to know why and how the Chretien and Martin governments of the 1990s and early ’00s managed to stave off the influence of the big Canadian banks and forced them to live within the restrictive, fairly rational, ultimately life-saving rules that kept them solvent and secure through the 2008-09 U.S. banking crisis.

Of course, now the Canadian banks brag about how responsible and reliable they are because they weren’t allowed to drive off a cliff a decade ago.

Most people know all this stuff in their gut and that’s why the current protests have tapped into an underlying pool of understanding, if not total agreement. That majority is probably not the 99% the Occupy Wall Street folks like to talk about but perhaps close to the 90% I heard a couple of little kids chanting about in St. James Park the other day.

I really don’t expect any concrete immediate results to come out of the current round of protests and occupations but the overall effect is still profound and hopefully lasting.

The public discussion has changed tone and focus, people are engaged and seem to feel like they actually have a voice and input into a wider political process, the cheats and carpetbaggers have been put on notice that their actions have not gone unseen.

I also see and hear people slagging and mocking the protesters, but it seems more ritualistic than vitriolic. Granted, there is a lot to criticize and mock about the protests but there’s also a lot to appreciate and applaud.

As someone wiser than I said about Occupy Wall Street: It’s an inclusive movement, no one chooses who gets to participate — you have to take the good with the bad.

We all know there’s bad out there but, for me anyway , it’s a positive sign that we’re taking the good too.

Like every other movement in history, this one will fall apart, be corrupted or simply be absorbed into the political mainstream. But no matter what happens in the end, it has already had a real and (hopefully) positive effect — and at an incredibly rapid rate.

At the very least, a lot of people who were feeling alienated, disenfranchised and victimized can now say: “I stood up. I was there. I spoke and was heard. And I feel a little better about the world today.”