Your Money is My Money

This brilliant piece is a translation of a Dagblad article that appeared 20 July 2012, written by Frits Bloemendaal [http://byhans.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/jouw-geld-is-mijn-geld/]:

How is it possible that one broker can bring down a bank? That one money trader can bring entire countries to the edge of disaster? And that one director with a penchant for gambling can reduce a corporation with many tens of thousands of homes to beggary?

It happens because it can.

At the tops of businesses, and at the moment in public and semi-public institutions, a culture change has arisen in which self-interest, narcissism and unscrupulousness have become the most normal things in the world. That began around 30 years ago in countries such as the US and England, and spread thereafter to our own regions.

One of the worst examples is the American energy company Enron, where managers set up an enormous fraudulent network and filled their own pockets, with the eventual result of the demise of the billion-dollar company. Many thousands of employees and investors were left destitute. In the Netherlands it began with Aegon, where executives like Kees Storm enriched themselves with options worth billions, while their clients were squeezed dry with extortionate policies.

Since then the examples have piled up. The real estate fraud of the Bouwfunds and the Philips pension funds, laid out in the book De Vastgoedfraude [The Real Estate Fraud] by journalists Vasco van der Boon and Gerben van der Marel, mercilessly exposed the mentality of anyone managing the savings of others. Your money is my money, it comes down to that.

It is so much that I can only skim the surface. But no one takes note.

Theft, or gambling with other people's money, has long since ceased to be taboo in financial institutions. Unscrupulousness and shamelessness are virtues rather than sins. In the play "De Prooi" ["The Prey"], about the collapse of ABN AMRO (also such an example), one of the lead characters says, "At Goldman Sachs they choose people who were teased as children." These people want revenge against the world and show no pity.

Journalist Joris Luyendijk, who writes a column about London's financial world for the British newspaper The Guardian, recently quoted a psychologist who coaches banking sector executives. The owners of the banks, he says, are looking for "a psycopath" to transform the organization into "a merciless, money-making and soul-stealing organization." That is the secret of their wealth.

That exploitation has become the norm has everything to do with the nearly boundless freedom of the financial sector.

For years, no one dared to place obstacles in the way of the money machine. Precisely in a sector where so much money literally is up for grabs, there is very strong control needed: checks and balances. Only in the last few years has that realization begun to dawn, but that took a banking crisis that cost the Dutch people alone some 200 billion euro in stalled economic growth.

Whether politicians have the ability to turn the management culture the right way is the question, because for the time being the countries are still dancing to the pipes of the financial sector, and not the other way around.

Breaking News

We're coming to you live with this breaking news: There is no news.

Each day I start my writing process by going to my favorite search engine, Google, and entering "News" and then setting the search parameter to the last 24 hours. This is rarely where I actually find the topic for what I end up writing about, but it's where I begin each day. Usually something that shows up on the first couple of pages leads me to something else that leads me to something else and it's around the fifth something else that the topic of the day usually appears.

Apparently many people use the "News" and last 24 hours or last hour or last whatever search parameters, because the sites devoted to news have developed the practice of posting an ad for themselves as news whenever they haven't posted any actual news for a while. This isn't terribly problematic to the searcher, because it's very easy to see the difference between the actual new story posted and the self-ad.

The self ad reads as: "X hours/minutes ago - [Insert site name] brings you breaking news/top stories/inside scoops/multimedia/all the latest coverage/naked pictures of the President's dog/current affairs/video analysis/etc. from [insert country name] and around the world..."

This morning the first actual story appeared as item number 41: Oooooooo they got me. The clever editors of Viet Nam News posted what looked like a story as their self-ad. (Clicking on the link doesn't take you to the story that begins under the link, just to the first page of the site. Filler posting!)

Item number 50. Fox News. They really need to change the name of their company. Anyway, they posted this:

In exchange for a two-month tax cut, the Senate on Saturday approved a permanent increase in fees attached to mortgages backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).
The idea behind the fee is to encourage more homeowners to get into the private market, as opposed to seeking loans backed by troubled entities like Fannie and Freddie.

Now what actually begins to intrigue me as I read this article is the pattern of attribution.

The remarks included come from "a senior Senate Democratic aide." It's noted that the bill's memo to Republican members pointed out that the bill "had bi-partisan support" and noted that it was an item on the list of suggestions that the President gave to the Super Committee. To use Fox's terminology, that's "code" for, "Don't worry, we're going to blame the Democrats." The bill passed 89-10.

And the article closes with this:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that while the tax cut lasts two months, it will take 10 years for the associated fee hike to drum up an estimated $35.7 billion and replenish the lost revenue. That rhetorical tactic is common on Capitol Hill -- lawmakers frequently say bills are "paid for" when in fact it takes a decade for that to be the case.

Fair enough. So what about this article is tugging at the corners of my brain?

I remember now. The Democratic Senate proposed extending the payroll tax and paying for it by a combination of mortgage fees and a millionaire's tax. They couldn't get the Republicans to agree on the millionaire's tax, so they reduced the term of the tax cut from one year to two months to balance the bill and passed it as a temporary solution.

The Republican House Bill HR 3630 proposes extending the payroll tax, imposing almost identical mortgage fees, pushing through the Keystone Pipeline, lifting pollution-abatement requirements from plants that boil mercury (releasing toxins that kill 8k people a year), and raising the rates on flood insurance.

Since the mortgage fee proposed by both parties is virtually identical, the balance is: Millionaire's tax versus raising rates on flood insurance plus throwing away thousands of American lives forever in exchange for a few hundred permanent jobs.

Yeah, that's what tugged at me about it.

Too Big for Survival?

The UN News Center today announced the winners of the 2011 Supporting Entrepreneurs for Environment and Development (SEED) Awards. The winners:

• A company in Gambia that transforms ground nut shells into fuel briquettes.
• A company in Kenya where women produce aloe-based skin care products.

The awards recognize projects that promote sustainable development as part of a program that "spotlights new locally driven enterprises that have found creative ways to overcome environmental and developmental problems while also creating economic and social opportunities for their communities."

Tia Jackson, on Brandmaker News, has offered a list of 10 sustainable businesses to watch:

• Wash Cycle Laundry does its laundry pickup and delivery on bikes, uses natural and locally produced detergents, and uses high-efficiency machines.
• Sseko Designs creates footwear that hires college-bound women to make their sandals as part of program that funds their university educations.
• Tropical Traders Specialty Foods offers the first certified carbon neutral food in their Royal Hawaiian Honey, and offers Fair Trade honey from Brazil in their Bee Well Honey line.
• Liberty Bottleworks makes aluminum water bottles entirely from recycled aluminum. They're also the only metal water bottles made in the US.
• Bennu sells clothing and backpacks made from recycled materials, using recyled packaging, working with certified plants that offset carbon emissions.
• SunRidge Farms pays employees to bike to and from work, gives employees cloth bags to encourage them not to use plastic ones, and is investing in solar solutions for their facilities.
• Plywerk uses green techniques for photo mounting and the production of art panels.
• Andean Collection makes jewelry that engages in fair trade practices and engages in alternative use activities in Ecuador.
• Thai-Pepper produces teak cutting boards by harvesting the wood from old teak houses.
• Elizabeta Jewelry works with designers who use recycled or conflict-free diamonds and gemstones.

These are what we call capitalist enterprises; they're not just pipe dreams. It is the position of too many in the United States and other countries that the environment is simply to constricting and expensive to take into serious consideration as a part of doing business.

The US Rep to COP in Durban stated that, "We are making progress toward our target of reducing emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020 through an array of domestic efforts, including robust new national fuel economy standards that will nearly double our automobile fleet efficiency by 2025 and the more than $90 billion of investments that we have made in clean energy."

Yet Mother Jones reports that a rider has already been inserted into the Interior Department's appropriations bill, section 453, which would prevent the government from either aiding carmakers in meeting those strict new standards or doing anything further to encourage fuel economy.

Why? As Mitt Romney puts it:

The EPA wants to be able to get in and grab more power and basically try and move the whole economy away from oil, gas, coal, nuclear and push it into the renewables. Look, we all like the renewables. But renewables alone are not going to power this economy. And yeah, I would, among other things, I would get the EPA out of its effort to manage carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles and trucks.

Romney's the one who gets criticized in the Republican primaries for being too centrist.

Really? Or perhaps, as stated by Naomi Klein:

I mean, renewable energy, if you compare it with fossil fuels, you know, it's everywhere. That's the point. That's why it is less profitable, because anybody can put a solar panel on their roof and have energy. And that's why there's such momentum against it from corporate America, because they want huge, centralized solutions, because they're way more profitable. Which isn't to say that you can't make a profit, you just can't make a stupid profit.

A thought: Perhaps it's not capitalist enterprises that can't *afford* to go green. Perhaps it's just monstrously large capitalist enterprises that cringe at any impingement on their insatiable need for profit. It was suggested by one of the Republican nominees last week that "when you're too big to fail, you're too big."

Perhaps when you're too big to respect the planet and your fellow human beings, you're too big.