by Muffet
[Via Roger Eberts Journal]
“The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent.“Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.”
So I discover in a piece by Joseph E. Stiglitz in the new issue of Vanity Fair. These facts confirm my impression that greed is now seen as a virtue in America. I’m not surprised by the greed of the One-Percenters. I’m mystified by the lack of indignation from so many of the rest of us.
Day after day I read stories that make me angry. Wanton consumption is glorified. Corruption is rewarded. Ordinary people see their real income dropping, their houses sold out from under them, their pensions plundered, their unions legislated against, their health care still under attack. Yes, people in Wisconsin and Ohio have risen up to protest these realities, but why has there not been more outrage?
The most visible centers of these crimes against the population are Wall Street and the financial industry in general. Although there are still many honest bankers, some seem to regard banking and trading as a license to steal. Outrageous acts are committed and go unpunished. Consider this case of money laundering by Wachovia Bank, now part of Wells Fargo. This Guardian article reports: “The authorities uncovered billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveler’s checks and cash shipments through Mexican exchanges into Wachovia accounts.”
The bank paid fines of less than 2% of its $12.2 billion profit in 2009. No individual was ever charged with a crime. We need not doubt that Wachovia executives received bonuses over the period of time when they were overseeing these illegal activities. Permit me to quote one more paragraph:
“More shocking, and more important, the bank was sanctioned for failing to apply the proper anti-laundering strictures to the transfer of $378.4 billion — a sum equivalent to one-third of Mexico’s gross national product — into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico, currency exchange houses with which the bank did business.”
If a third of the Mexican GNP passes through your bank and you don’t ask the questions required by law, you are either (1) a criminal, or (2) incompetent. I can’t think of another possibility.
[More]
The guys on Wall Street break the law, make billions and spend no time in jail. A fine less than 2% of their profits. That’ll teach them not to break the law! Right.
I wrote about this before. I am not a good enough writer to speak as eloquently as Ebert or as de Tocqueville. But I can quote them. This from de Tocqueville aptly describes where we are today:
There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications amongst such a people has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away, and lose all self-restraint, at the sight of the new possessions they are about to lay hold upon. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune, they lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all.
…
When the bulk of the community is engrossed by private concerns, the smallest parties need not despair of getting the upper hand in public affairs. At such times it is not rare to see upon the great stage of the world, as we see at our theatres, a multitude represented by a few players, who alone speak in the name of an absent or inattentive crowd: they alone are in action whilst all are stationary; they regulate everything by their own caprice; they change the laws, and tyrannize at will over the manners of the country; and then men wonder to see into how small a number of weak and worthless hands a great people may fall.
“A multitude represented by a few players.” That sure seems to describe America today. Those who stand up for the banker’s interests, who work to make sure Wall Street keeps its greed going, who fight for the rights of the One-Percenters, are those who weaken America and make it worthless. Even as they increase their own worth.
Bandits leading the stupid. That is America today. It cuts across party lines as almost all politics – legislative, executive, judicial, local, state, Federal – are substantially controlled by these weak and worthless hands.
We fixed this same problem over 70 years ago. But, as Cipolla states, we had a large proportion of the intelligent then. Now, many of those intelligent have joined the bandit side, gravitating to physical gratifications at the expense of others.
We are now seeing the results when people forget the admonitions of Paul almost 2000 years ago:
For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
