A SYMPTON OF DIS-EASE

The new communication technology based on the ubiquitous computer and mobile phone have made it possible for people to react vocally, speedily and with numerical force to things that deeply trouble them. They have the means to be in instant communication with each other and are avidly listening in for others who are like minded. This is what started the process that led to Gaddafi’s defeat. It’s a challenging new feature of our age.

It is also due to this that in the last two or three weeks we have seen the mushrooming of people camping out in large numbers of the major cities of the western world to make a protest. In the U.K. it has led to the closure of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Health and Safety grounds. The chief point of this protest is simply that there is something fundamentally wrong and unjust with the way the western world is structured financially and economically. The “Capitalism” of the kind we have come to know of recent decades has brought chaos and offers no cures. It radically favours the rich. Something very different has to get in to the system to bring us back in balance.

Newspaper columnists and politicians have treated this protesting as a sort of irritating itch by the ignorant, something to be brushed off. I’m not at all sure this is a wise response. It looks to me much more like an irritating rash that actually is a symptom of a serious disease within the financial and economic body. It is saying, “we are all suffering greatly from unacceptable financial behaviour and business practices, and nothing is being done to address that problem – those who have caused the chaos have got off scot-free and are still doing what they did before”. This sort of gut feeling by the “ignorant” is really a little too near the truth to be treated with contempt. It’s not sufficient to say to people, “You don’t understand how things work”. That sort of answer is always a stop to needed change.

Let’s pin point an issue of protest. If I bank my small amounts of money, my return on it is negligible; my account does not keep up with inflation and I get poorer. On the other hand if I put £1,000,000 in a Hedge Fund or Investment Bank (and I would need that sort of money to do so) I am likely to get a very respectable return and get richer. The reason for that is that the Fund will play the market and its price changes with the latest computer tech. by means of which its constant buying and selling of shares etc. will get me a profit. That’s all such an investment fund does – it just makes money out of money. It makes sure the rich get a profit, and of course that the fund’s traders get a nice slice of that profit in bonuses. What it does not do is to take all that financial resource which is at its disposal and put it to good use in investment of a kind that will profit the community at large by building infra-structure or business. Such banking just makes the rich richer. It’s the bit the banks favour – it’s the golden goose (for them, of course, not for anyone else). Such behaviour is rather like a cancer, living off and destroying the body that feeds it. It has escaped the crash and is as alive today as it was before 2008. The rich like it that way, and the investment banks like it that way. Neither is it purely western, though that’s its source.

This is a massive problem because the rich and super rich have increasingly siphoned off more and more of the world’s wealth and hugely widened the gap between them and the vast majority. The politicians seem to have no handle on them. But it all raises a fair question; how do we control greed? The rich seem incapable of seeing their greed, let alone relinquishing it. That’s the question being aired on the pavements of our cities. It might be uncomfortable for the economic text books but it’s certainly not irrelevant!

Once again I’m back to Amos and his sick society.




Bob




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