One Response to ““Would we be in this mess if it had been Lehman Sisters?””

1. 1 Cheryl on February 2nd, 2009 4:55 pm

   Despite the obvious temptation to blame testosterone for all the evils in the world, I suspect that there is at least one additional factor at play.

   Women know they have it tough. They adapt by being tough. That means financial discipline along with other types of discipline, to survive in a hostile world that will not reward overt aggression or rebellion as a means of breaking out of the straight jacket given the obvious fundamental distinguishing characteristics of the group being repressed (women and to a large degree homosexual/bisexual/transgender/intersexual who share femininity in some aspect), including smaller size, less physical strength, lower innate aggression, responsibility for birthing and nurturing the young, or obvious feminine appearances and behaviors that are difficult to hide from bigots.

   Personally, I suspect that women and others who share femininity in some fashion have every bit as much capacity for corruption as straight men do. The gender gap may be a wonderful incentive to excel and keep one’s nose clean, but what it really points to is something more fundamental.

   Forever in the US anyway, basically, wealthy straight (at least publicly) white men (or other races as indicated per nation and the institutions they run) have justified their bloated salaries with the whine that they need obscene pay to attract top performers.

   I think the incentive loses its effectiveness when doled out in excess. In fact, I think it becomes downright counterproductive when top executives have these types of incentives negotiated on the way in the door leading them astray:

   1) preferred stock they bought, bargained for, begged or stole to launch a hostile takeover or ride the back of one, that gives them every incentive to employ short-term gimmicks (such as re-sale to the next corporate parasite) that hang together just long enough for them to exercise their options

   2) golden parachutes that activate when they bail out, regardless of the reason, that encourage them to ditch the company and send them in and out of the revolving door from the current governmental regulatory agency or contract holder and back again, making our heads spin and ransacking the treasury

   3) bloated salaries and corporate perks that insulate them from every market-based financial exposure except perhaps their losses at the race track and casinos or the price of yachts and jets and mansions and cruises (and diamonds)

   4) articles of incorporation that give them complete immunity from criminal charges if they break laws to shaft their own workforce or customers, pollute the environment, or kill people with corporate negligence, and allow them to pass on virtually unlimited influence and wealth forward in time through legally unlimited generations of dynastic reign, regardless of whether or not the company is actually working in the public interest (according to the letter and spirit of the original, limited 50 year? articles or incorporation that were later superseded by more expansive legislation) or has become a monopolistic, out of control parasite that suppresses market forces to its own advantage and is destroying the environment while consuming every natural resource in sight

   5) ERISA, and other plum, discriminatory pro-corporate legislation that limits personal rights and expands corporate rights i.e. gives corporations (or their contracting corporations that hold fiduciary responsibility) freedom from trial by civil jury (throws it into administrative court before an appointed pro-corporate judge) and complete immunity from punitive or incidental damages such as attorneys fees, pain, suffering, gangrene, wrongful death etc. in civil lawsuits if they renege on their contracts with the employees they insure or hold retirement funds for etc., and limit attorney’s fees charged to the plaintiff to *$5000 max* taken *from the benefits owed to the plaintiff*, giving most attorneys no incentive at all to provide due diligence to any particular plaintiff and no capacity to hire adequate staff or do adequate research to pursue the case, especially if the benefits owed are less than $5000

   6) central banking system that makes governments around the world and every person ruled by them chronic debtors by always creating national money supply from private debt (based on fractional deposits) that must be repaid with interest, guaranteeing that the majority of governments and citizens are always enslaved by debt to a few very wealthy dynasties who own private banks (corporations) that create debt out of nothing, putting the US government back into the same repressive private harness that it cast off in the revolutionary war

   7) repressive legislation that subverts the principles of the founding fathers, creating secret totalitarian agencies that are employed principally with the task of suppressing domestic and international rebellion against nationally funded but privately controlled empire based on the central banking system that gradually insinuated itself into every corner of the world using profits from fossil fuels, technological development, a feudalistic wage slave system and overt or secret government repression and destabilization of nationalistic governments around the world who refuse to play ball with this corrupt and bankrupt monetary system, i.e refused to fund and proliferate this ‘playboy’ system of foxes guarding the hens

   every other counterproductive incentive doled out to the wealthy (such as the recent dismantling of the banking and investment reforms that were passed into law during FDR etc. administrations, legislation that made slavery and racial or sexual discrimination legal, etc) over time that has been negotiated or legislated and ensconced indelibly into human cultures by totalitarian religions/governments/dynasties and the bigots who run them and the collaborating dupes they took advantage of, to perpetuate the power of a select few groups of paternalistic families who rule without serious personal consequence right up until there is some international conflict or environmental and economic debacle that brings the whole system crashing to a halt such as the one we are currently trying to dig ourselves out from under

   Did you ever wonder how, within just the past 8 years, we saw the entire world go from a place where we were enjoying relative economic prosperity and peace to a world wracked by terrorism, war, and debt?

   How can just about every country, bank, corporation and citizen in the world be basically bankrupt all at once? Where did all the money go? It does not make sense. If we are all in debt to each other, then why have we been unable to negotiate debt swaps to cancel it all out and get back down to business?

   The answer is quite simple.

   First of all, the economic prosperity under Clinton was largely illusory. It was a last gasp of a monetary system based on universal debt that was going into the superheated piranha mode, where everybody is eating everybody else, generating a lot of heat but no solid foundation for growth. Clinton pushed for more globalization than ever at a time where cheap oil was about to become a fantasy and global transportation of goods to take advantage of cheap labor was going to become financially unfeasible very rapidly.

   Al Gore, Mr. Earth in the Balance, was vice president, and we never even saw Jimmy Carter’s solar panels go back on the roof of the White House let alone any serious action towards energy independence or environmental sustainability. Then Gore ran that pitiful, cardboard-stiff presidential campaign in the shadow of Clinton’s disgraceful peccadilloes. It was all basically lip service, or lip gloss? — how did they put it? Lipstick on a pig? Maybe not as bad as the ‘pig’ we just ’slaughtered’, but bad enough.

   The bankruptcy we are currently experiencing globally is based on an exponentially growing mountain of debt that by and large is owed to a few very wealthy families who are sitting on vast tracts of real estate, corporate assets, private luxuries, and US treasury notes and other very safe and secure IOU’s that are backed by the full faith and credit of national governments around the word. The scheme relies on a continually growing population of new suckers to buy into it and a limitless supply of natural resources to feed, clothe, shelter, transport and repress the workers, as workers collectively burn up every natural resource in sight with out-of-control consumption and little to no recycling. Meanwhile the ownership class of corporate directors, CEO’s and central bankers, kept skimming off the top of the economic forest fire, amassing impressive computer files that prove they did in fact win the game of Monopoly, leaving the rest of us bankrupt, including our governments.

   Of course, it did not help that there was so much ‘investment’ in counterproductive schemes like the corporate and wealthy tax breaks that accelerated the accumulation of debt at the bottom rungs, the completely superfluous Department of Fatherland Security, and the invasion of Iraq to install private oil companies where Hussein had tried to keep national control of the oil for so many years (and even tried, at one point, to expand his national boundaries to include Kuwait, since he was never repaid for keeping Iran in check for us all those years and OPEC was undercutting his market share).

   Notably, there is one main thing we can indubitably conclude from the way the recent collapse unfolded. We need to probe the collapse first to see it though.

   First came the fraudulent election of Bush and the bursting of the dot-bomb bubble, followed immediately by 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, the escape of Bin Laden, the invasion of Iraq and the national mood malaise and war/DHS debt that plunged the economy into recession. Despite the installation of all those oil companies onto Iraq, oil prices continued to soar. It was obvious immediately that the US had become a magnet of international anger and resentment, and even ridicule when Bush was elected and proved to be such a dumb ass. But what was more striking is that the economic picture had reversed so dramatically in such a short time despite all that government spending on war. There was no temporary boost from reducing interest rates and printing money.

   We dragged along in recession mode for six years, wondering when the other shoe would drop, while governmental agencies fudged the data to ‘prove’ that we still had some strength left in the economy and plenty of national/international oil reserves too. Then towards the end of his second term we heard about all the mortgages that were in trouble, and people losing their homes to usury interest rates. We were told that greedy, speculative homeowners who wanted a free ride into retirement on the housing bubble bought houses they could not afford on loans they did not understand, it was all their fault. But very shortly after that we learned that the banks who held the mortgages had fraudulently represented them to consumers and re-packaged them fraudulently under the newly loosened federal regulations, and that governments and corporations around the world had invested retirement funds in them without knowing the risks.

   Next we learned that not just national economies, but even state and federal governments around the world were going bankrupt and even Iceland went belly-up into outright rebellion. The only places not devastatingly affected by this malaise were China, where national communism had kept them out of the central banking scheme until very recently and they were not universally bankrupt yet, and nations that were already so poor that there was little industry and thus little international presence on their soil anyway.

   Then around the world, governments began priming the pump with new debt that basically inflates the money supply in an attempt to dislodge the value of capital held in private hands with essentially worthless new currency that competes with the value on the books in the hands of the wealthy, in order to regain some governmental control and lower-levels market function in the economy. Nevertheless, this action has failed, since it basically borrows from those who are holding the capital already and so far has been used to give liquidity back to their friends who were not so lucky and did not profit from the game of musical chairs when the band stopped paying, i.e. Citibank, Detroit, etc.

   Finally, Obama came on the scene and now he is talking about actually buying troubled private assets that may appreciate some day yeah in your dreams (instead of just handing out free money to wealthy people), directly creating government jobs via legislative and executive fiat to put people back to work, and founding alternative energy projects, conservation, recycling, public transport, roads, national health care etc., all the federal schemes that should have been done decades ago to move public infrastructure into the 21st century. Germany and Japan began work on this two decades ago and other industrialized countries followed soon after, but most did not, except in socializing medicine to control costs, which they somehow managed to pull off despite massive lobbying here at home and overseas by US pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

   This unfolding of the crisis in this order, starting with anger and resentment and international violence and consumer-level economic/emotional malaise, then proceeding into official denial by the national government of the US, expanding out to engulf banks within the lower rungs of the central banking scheme, then entire industries, then entire business sectors, then entire economies, then governments, is exactly what one expects if, in fact, the total debt load around the entire world has become so great that the game of Monopoly is basically over and we have to start anew, because there are so many debt/wage slaves with nothing and so many environmental and resource problems from our wasteful infrastructure that nobody can make any progress any more.

   The mushrooming of the crisis to engulf the entire world in this fashion and the intractability of it both point to the analysis I presented, of dynastic gridlock and paralyzing corruption in the monetary system that underlies the entire world-wide capitalist system, is the only explanation that makes sense.

   The fact that the collapse seemed to initiate here in the US which is not only the epicenter of world capitalism but which also enjoys the lion’s share of its benefits, and spread outward around the entire world, indicates that this collapse is not just a fluke of nature. There were plenty of local collapses, remember Japan? Remember Mexico? Remember China? Remember the EU? Lots of economies saw their bubble burst during the Clinton and Bush years, but this bubble here in the US is the one that brought the entire system to its knees.

   Capitalism at its root is a Ponzi scheme based on the principle of infinite accumulation of capital into the hands of a few, and these hucksters of the central banking system (and those who have the influence to piggyback on it) are all sitting in exactly the same position they were in just 80 years ago in the last great world-wide collapse that ushered in WWII.

   The rest of us are all sitting on computer files that prove that we will have to work for the rest of our lives to pay our debts to these hucksters of central banking.

   Meanwhile, the cost of just about everything is going up. Even though oil is temporarily cheap, it is only because the economic activity that was draining the wells has temporarily slowed down. When the boys at the top finish figuring out how to jump-start this bankrupt engine, we will collectively finish draining the wells and burning up the phosphate fertilizer, and then likely have another great world war to prune back the excess population while a few insightful governments convert to solar energy, organic farming, conservation and recycling in a big way, like we should have done 30 years ago or more when it would have been cheap to do so.

   Prediction: within 30 years we will see municipal landfills no longer valued for the natural gas they produce, but rather dug up for the metals and hydrocarbons. We will see trawlers set out to sea not just to harvest what remains of the fish, but also to reclaim that huge patch of plastic that is swirling around in the middle of the Pacific. The longer we wait the harder it will be to reclaim the plastic. In the rush to make everything biodegradable, many plastics are programmed to fragment into tiny particles in the presence of water and ultraviolet light. Will we build filters to trawl with, or just let the ocean turn into plastic soup? Any bets?

   But there are other possibilities. We could have another world war instead, and this one may go nuclear to an extent the last one never even approached. Or perhaps the central banking system will lose public confidence entirely and some form of nationalist-based economics will take root not via communism or tin-horn dictatorship in stinking backwaters, but in technologically advanced cultures that communicate via internet and place a firm, relatively unchanging value on core goods and services so that people can actually plan their futures rather than gambling everything on a stock market.

   Somehow the task is to make the economy and the use of global resources both recyclable and sustainable, without the excesses that drive the system into meltdown and without killing off the majority of the earth’s population to accomplish it.

   Does any of this have much to do with the gender gap? Well personally I suspect that since women have to bear and raise the young, it makes women in general more sensitive to the long-term perspective. But to tell you the truth, I have found that by far the larger disparity in thinking is between the ownership class and the debtor class. My few interactions with the ownership class has proven to me that they are by and large big-tent conservatives who deliberately cultivate public opinion with appeals to ‘image’ that are based on popular myths such as religion and ‘free enterprise’ (would someone please explain that there is no free enterprise, neither is there any free lunch??).

   In communist countries, similar myths abound, on the other end of the political spectrum, but what I have found in common with them all is that they all conspire to keep the work force enslaved to an economic system that workers collectively exert very little control over.

   And yes, almost without exception, the women at the top collaborate with the men to preserve the system of privilege, regardless of whether they actually have executive status or not. Selfish genes seem to want to propagate themselves and their influence expeditiously whenever looked at in the micro scale, and the (very few) wealthy families I have known, regardless of political affiliation, have all played the game in essentially the same way when looked at from the point of view of their own bank accounts. Maybe the conservatives put flags out and bought SUV’s, and the liberals put solar panels on their roofs and pinned rainbow/peace signs on their lapels, but both groups invested retirement funds heavily in the market, just as I did as I was advised by my own employers. The ownership class, unlike me, had the time and connections to protect their investments like lions protecting a pride so they could retire somewhere and hand off money to their children. On the grand scheme I detected very little difference between the liberals and conservatives or the males and females at the top, but huge differences between the ownership class and the peons like me.

   I attribute that similarity at the top to the pervasiveness of the central banking system and the limitations it imposes on all of us, particularly the phenomenon of shrinking savings. No matter what gender or political affiliation one has, if one has to keep running on the treadmill to stay in place, the tendency is to run as fast as possible and forget about anything except what convenient financial vehicles will keep the momentum going after one is wheel-chair bound so one does not fall on the floor in retirement.

   Yes basically even though I recognize that the situation is as inevitable as time itself, I still imagine some alternative or future reality where women (and others ‘tainted’ by femininity such as GLBT) are treated equally, incentives toward corruption at the top are fundamentally clamped below the danger threshold, and participation in top positions is strictly limited to people whose interest and vision includes the enrichment of the entire human race rather than just their own clique.

   Practically speaking though, my limited exposure proves to me that the only populations that have ever successfully implemented such an egalitarian system are exclusively small and usually low-tech. Their system of organization is largely anarchic, in the spirit that hard-core libertarians (with a small l) romanticize longingly. As soon as the available base of people power, natural resources, and technology grows to the point where the culture can begin expanding its influence beyond its own tightly circumscribed geographical boundaries, the dynamics of the tribe are replaced with the dynamics of empire. Repressive government and the stratification of dynasties begins immediately. I doubt whether a maternalistic touch will do anything to change that.

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