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It was amusing to see President Obama
try to align himself with the OWS movement. The genial Millard Fillmore
update asked them not to "demonize those who work on Wall Street."
Of course, demonization proceeds from the failure of this president and his
appointed agents in authority to subject those who work on Wall Street to the
laws that mere mortals are supposed to follow in money matters. Hence, those
who work on Wall Street appear to be something other than mortals. And since
their work (on Wall Street) has had a malign influence on the common weal,
some might leap to the conclusion that they are malevolent non-mortals, i.e.
demons.
In
this early stage of the convulsion rocking the western world, especially here
in the USA, a peaceful ambience rules. That is because a game is being
played. We played the game in 1968. It goes like this. You get people to turn
out in the streets. The idea is to promote the right of public assembly as
much as to make any particular point. (In fact, banners advocating all sorts
of gripes appear.) Eventually, you get a lot of people in the streets.
Feelings of happy anarchy sweep the crowd, a feeling that something special
is underway, that the usual rules of everyday conduct have been suspended, in
a good way. The crowd basks in the sunny glow of its own mass, happy
solidarity. Everybody is behaving splendidly - more to feel good about.
After
a while that gets boring, especially for young males with a lot of
testosterone surging from loin to brain. They want to do more than bask in
the radiance of their own righteous wonderfulness. They want to engage their
large muscles, even if in the service of an idea, for instance the idea that
they have been swindled. It is at first a vague idea, but large. But pretty
soon it coheres emergently: swindled out of our future! Yes, it is so.
Thousands of demon-like beings upstairs in the curtain-wall towers around Zuccotti Park, people wearing neckties and cultured
pearls in warm offices with cappuccino machines down the hall, are at this
very moment setting loose trading algorithms that will swindle us out of our
future! You can see them up there at their evil, glowing screens!
That's
when the yoga acrobatics and the hat crocheting are put aside and the street
people - their ranks swollen into a horde-like meta-organism - start to
express things beyond the right of public assembly. Something unseen goes
through them, perhaps like the pheromone that transforms a field full of
grasshoppers into a ravening swarm of locusts. Being people, they cannot take
wing. But they can press forward and up against things, and they can surely
break the glass in those sleek curtain-wall buildings (so much for
"transparency") beyond which the bankers sit cringing in their
expensive clothing.
Surely
we are heading toward a moment like that. The bank employees upstairs must be
getting a little nervous, anyway, just glancing out the windows at the
moiling mob below. This is apart from the tensions internally roiling the
banks themselves, not to mention the entire networked system of global
banking, with all its fissures and cracks, as the merry-go-round of debt
flies apart under the centrifugal force of insolvency. Come to think of it,
these events could not have correlated more perfectly. Just as a horrific
accident in finance is about to happen, a ready-made revolutionary mob is
conveniently parked outside the pilot-houses of the world's great money
vessels, so as to receive the crews directly into their open arms after the
smash up.
President
Obama could have changed the outcome if he had actually believed in change.
He could have told his attorney general to enforce the securities law. He
could have replaced the zombies at the SEC and told the new ones to apply all
existing regulations. Before last year's election, he could have used his
legislative majorities to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and reinstate the
Glass-Steagall act. He could have initiated the
process of deconstructing the giant banks back into their separate functions
- so that banking once again worked as a utility rather than a launching pad
for colossal frauds and swindles. Not only did he fail to do any of these
things, he didn't even talk about it, or try.
Obama
has a lot of nerve claiming to support the Occupy Wall Street movement. He
should be one of the objects of its ire. I'm not even sure Obama will get to
finish out his term of office. 2012 looks like a complete horror show in the
making. The way world money matters are lining up this fall, some kind of
debacle seems unavoidable, much worse than the 2008 fiasco. The normal
political channels are clogged and sclerotic. Our institutions are failing
us. The cast of "candidate" characters across the political
spectrum convinces nobody that they can manage this republic.
The
weather may determine the mood of the OWS crowd. If they don't go apeshit in the next two weeks, my guess is that the
nation will hunker down into a dire, melancholy holiday season followed by a
desperate winter leading to a raucous spring of political transformation -
not necessarily of the best kind.
For
the moment, we seem to be waiting for the proverbial first broken window
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