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The other day my friend, a real estate agent, came to our cherished evening bike ride in a depressed mood.
“The closing deal, I was counting on so much, fell through today,” he said. It turns out that during the final walk-through, the would-be buyer noticed that the air conditioner unit was stolen from the vacant house.
“But wouldn’t the bank cover the expense of the stolen unit?” I asked naively, then wisely affixed: “After all, it cannot cost more than $3-4,000; a sizeable chunk for the individual buyer but peanut for a bank.”
“You would think so, but no. The bank already wrote this loss off its bad debts, courtesy of the bank bail-out of 2008. The banks got their money back from us, the tax payers, and now they are free again do what they do best: to maximize their potential profit.”
“But that’s what banks are supposed to do, isn’t that?” I responded as a matter of course. My friend put me in place right away:
“Yes, but not without having to worry about the real world market pressure. Before the bail-out they would have tried to minimalize their losses, which is what current market reality would have demanded. But now, having been compensated for their losses, they want to maximize their profit; an unrealistic goal at a time when everybody else is struggling to keep afloat.”
“Everybody,” I finally caught his draft, “you mean the poor and the middle class, not the wealthy and the corporate.”
“You got it my friend,” he said. “The banks and corporations play hard core capitalism when it's time to make profit but embrace socialist principles as soon as they face losses. Once they recover however, they're are right back into bashing the social "welfare" state."
"Hmm", I said eloquently, while he continued.
"The greed of the individual has been damaging enough but now it has penetrated all levels of our social system...., and when greed can govern the most powerful forces in society, without any checks and balances, it can become truly devastating.”
"Hmm", I said eloquently, while he continued.
"The greed of the individual has been damaging enough but now it has penetrated all levels of our social system...., and when greed can govern the most powerful forces in society, without any checks and balances, it can become truly devastating.”
“I hope you’ll make your next closing,” I said, pulling out the smartest thing I could think of.
***
And then, I hear the riots in England. Looting, burning buses and businesses in a country where I thought some of the best mannered, most imperturbable people lived.
“What is going on?” I asked myself. Well, as it turns out, the young and restless simple citizens of England first got angry at the police, but then started to think that they have the right to have what they want, just as the British bank executives got what they wanted in the form of some 80 billion pound bail-out. Somehow they don’t seem to think that the austerity measures that followed the generous banking support, should short change their desire and aspiration, so they started to take freely what apparently they thought should have been rightfully theirs to begin with.
These rioters of England have some very deplorable thought indeed, driving them into alarming, dangerous, and totally unjustifiable actions. But do they have a point; a point they pursue in whatever abhorrent fashion?
They may, and I think that notice should be taken of this possibility!
Revolutions, starting with the French, where thousands of heads fell, the Russian revolution with its own terrifying fall-out, and all subsequent social ebulliences started with some justifiable cause. The French people had no bread when they stormed the Bastille and 2,000 Russian peasants stampeded each other to death for a table clothes, a mug and a loaf of bread during their “Father Tsar’s” wedding procession just a few years before November 7, 1917.
Two events, a small and a momentous one, on two sides of a big ocean, seem to lead to the same root-problem: greed!
It is perhaps time to notice that the poor and middle class cannot be fooled forever with the promise land, the endless opportunities that await the few exceptionally gifted or lucky ones in their ranks.
We need to notice and accept that any further economical polarization of current Western societies may lead to social explosion. We are getting warning signs that the deepening economical hardship around the world needs to be shared equally by all of us: rich and poor, individuals and corporations.
Shared equally? Even more than that! The necessary sacrifices the day calls for should burden the wealthy far more than the poor and the middle class! It may help improving life starting with a stolen air conditioning unit, all the way to wide spread social unrest in the world.
Is there anyone brave and insightful enough to be looking, listening, and drawing conclusions?
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