Financial Farce

A few weeks ago on Bill Moyers’ Journal he had as guests two correspondents from Mother Jones. He gave them an entire hour. The net of what they had to say was that, although at some point in the near future it might appear that legislation making a serious attempt at putting an end to the out of control nature of our banking system - including its periodic need to collect on its socialized risk positions - might be promulgated, anything that might appear will be a sham.

The reason for that fact, these two men said, complete with pretty detailed and compelling documentation, is the fact that it matters not which legislative branch one considers, which of the two parties one submits to scrutiny, or specifically which name of our elected representatives one might examine, one overarching fact controls what happens: if you are talking about anything to do with the financial system, that system owns the governmental apparatus intended to regulate it. That system also owns the human components of that governmental apparatus, lock, stock and barrel.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when today, the first day of the new law protecting all of us from the credit card industry, I heard on NPR that that new law is again, just a sham. Various obviously unacceptable practices - having been exposed over time in much the same way as the practices of the food industry were exposed several generations ago - have been made illegal. Even the fully owned minions of the Banks ultimately couldn’t stand up to the pressure and scrutiny that 24% interest and bank-induced penalty charges brought to bear upon them from the electorate.

But wait, I thought I heard someone say. The Industry, the financial industry cries, can’t sustain itself without those charges.

Where one might want to interpret that as the fact that the banks had a predatorily faulty business model, they assert that they have been unfairly singled out and denied their just and due pounds of flesh. And they are already way ahead of us.

NPR told me this morning to be on the lookout for a wave of new, capricious and most likely unannounced fees, much like the airlines various new fees.

Look for higher annual fees. Look for fees for inactivity. Look for fees for minimum acceptable usage (from the banks’ point of view). Look for fees for higher than acceptable usage (from the banks’ point of view). Look for fees for having been in a foreign country and not using your credit card. Look for fees, for sure, for having been in a foreign country and having used your credit card. Look for fees for having visited an airline web site that sells tickets for travel to foreign countries. Look for surcharge fees predicated on the fact that you have in a given time period (one calculated by a new variable time usage algorithm) accumulated an excess number (from the banks’ point of view) fees.

And there is no law against any of this, and there won’t be until the din from all of us who live in the mudsill of our society begin to make the lives of our “elected” (or is it “elect”) representatives uncomfortable enough to perpetrate another sham.

And so it goes.

Johnnie Reb

I learned this song from Lavine. I talked about all of that in Screen Saver. That also included some discussion of the Nick Manoloff chord wheel.

If the video is unavailable try this link to my web site. If you go to this link, you will need to hit "pause" on the player for a minute or two to let the download get ahead of the player.

One Thing Is Always Constant

In previous posts concerning the latest round of our national and ongoing air travel security debacle I have noted that those people who work for the intelligence apparatus – as was also true in the case of the project manager for the Columbia, who just didn’t want to hear that bad news one of her engineers was trying to tell her about the fact that the shuttle couldn’t get back through the atmosphere – are all getting their paychecks every pay period and are accumulating their retirement funds and are getting their high quality health care.

Now we have the Toyota accelerator debacle. I just heard some musing about “where was the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in its oversight of this problem?” The problem, after all, dates back to some Lexus cars in 1999. But until Toyota finally had to buckle in the face of an avalanche of incidents and 19 deaths, the silence has been deafening.

I think we can without a doubt say that those people – the NHTSA – have all been and are continuing to get their paychecks every pay period, are accumulating their retirement funds and are getting their high quality health care.

How nice.

The River

I have spent a significant part of the last two years getting something “off my chest” and “out of my system”. When I was finished, I, at least, was pleased with the result. That effort had become the book that I always said I was going to write, and it got named Screen Saver.

But I had forgotten. Bruce Springsteen had accomplished the same thing with elegance, and he only needed to use four minutes and fifty nine seconds:The River.

Sadness

When I left IBM I was too young and too poor to retire. I waited until later when I was older and too poor before I retired.

In the first phase of my post IBM life I didn’t get very far from IBM. That was because the only post IBM way of earning a living that I was able to find in the short time that I had available for that discovery process was to be an IBM Agent.

Being an IBM Agent was something like being an Agent for an insurance company. The similarity was that, like an insurance company, IBM was a huge international corporation that wanted to reduce or eliminate as much direct sales expense as it was possible to eliminate without losing some semblance of loyalty from that replacement sales force.

For years that had been a work in progress. In Screen Saver I recount a number of stories about that ongoing process, including the time that I spent getting on a plane at LaGuardia or Newark every Sunday and returning from Atlanta every Friday. The week that that traverse allowed to take place in Atlanta had been filled with work on a three person task force which was trying to figure out how to sell new business solutions (small value-added computer systems) through some channel other than card carrying IBM employees. It was odd that the answers that the task force came up with ended up being my third-to-last IBM job and my first post IBM way of earning a living. Those answers were two things: independent businesses to be constituted as IBM Agent Firms and a new IBM function called the Complementary Resources Manager – an IBM employee whose job it was to provide for the care, feeding and IBM interface to those Agent Firms. I was the first CRM in Spokane and I later became the IBM New Business Agent Firm in Seattle.

As things turned out, the Seattle endeavor probably would have been successful, both for me and for IBM if IBM had not perceived itself as being in the process of going out of business. That meant that the expense of nurturing a brand new business long enough to become successfully independent was not an option and what probably needed to be a three to five year transition plan became an aborted one year. IBM tried to dress the abandonment of the Agent Program in its best go-to-meeting clothes, but I had worked for the company for too long to fall for that artifice. So after a year of being an Agent firm with four employees I went to being a loosely affiliated IBM ally with no employees who made more money from consulting and technical writing than I made from the IBM relationship. Ultimately we migrated to being soley a consulting and technical writing firm.

But during that start up year, the full twelve months of the non-diluted IBM Agent relationship, I had a lot of support from IBM. That support included office space for me and my employees in the IBM building, a monthly non-recoverable stipend for each of my sales territories, a variable payment for just taking the responsibility of the territory and commissions for whatever IBM goods and services we sold to our customers.

All of those payments added up over a little time to a surprisingly significant monthly payment from IBM. Those payments came to me in the form of a monthly check from IBM. For whatever reason, it seemed like a good idea to have my business bank account close to the IBM office. The closest bank was a small branch of US National Bank – at that time still a Portland business, and as an almost native Portlander I had had a US National Bank account in my previous life – so it just seemed natural to do business with them.

The branch was in a quaint, old, not many storied building that had somehow evaded the all too prevalent downtown Seattle wrecking ball. After US National, for whatever reason moved from the location it became a Starbucks. It was on the corner of 6th and Seneca.

I had two contacts. One was a dithering young woman who was, she assured me, my Personal Banker. The other was the Branch Manager. I didn’t have much contact with the Branch Manager, but since I was the CEO of a member of the small business community, a new customer, and it was turning out, a fairly significant depositor, my “Personal Banker” had made sure that I had been exposed to that level of executive bank contact.

The Branch Manager was a quiet-spoken, rather slight of build African American. In my little contact with him he seemed to care about his customers, know a lot about his business and how it might be of service to people like me and was credible when he said that if I ever needed help beyond what my Personal Banker could provide that he was ready to serve. I believed it and that was a tribute to his credibility. There are a lot of glad–handers in positions such as his; I felt that he wasn’t one of them.

But that is all told to set the stage for my short, sad tale.

One late mid afternoon I needed to go over to the bank to make a deposit. I left the IBM building and crossed over to the bank, tried the door and found that it was locked. The bank was closed for the day.

The sidewalk, being in the middle of down town, was fairly busy. As I turned to go back to IBM, and as I brushed by a few bustling passers-by I became aware of a person a little farther away from me than those that were immediately around me as I turned from the bank doorway.

I didn’t really look at him, but I must have glanced in his direction. Because I formed the immediate impression that he was a he, not a she. Somehow, because it was downtown and he was coming directly toward me, I formed the immediate impression that he was begging.

As the word “no” was forming for articulation, one additional random piece of data was added to my fairly amorphous grasp of the situation. The guy was African American.

Before I could say my incipient word he spoke. “We’re closed for the day, but the branch down two blocks is open until six.”

“Hey, thanks” I must have said. I never really knew because in that split second I recognized my “Personal Banker’s” boss, the Branch Manager of the bank.

As I walked down Sixth Avenue to the other branch I was unable to stop the instant replay of the whole just-completed encounter. And it always ended the same. And before long the only thing that remained, playing over and over and over until I wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and not come out until it stopped playing was the same thing.

The only thing that remained, the only memory, the only real and tangible image being flashed by my personal screen saver then, and even now as I write this, was a look of utter and profound sadness.

This Will Be - Mercifully - Brief

Here are two things. They are related, at least in my mind, probably in no one else’s mind, but related for me. Call them threads in a larger, much more heavily threaded cloth of tragedy; call them key elements in the “decline and fall”; call them what they are: stupidity and cynicism. Whatever you call them there is a stench rising from them, although, to the cultured stench detecting nose, they differ slightly.

Abject Stupidity: A majority of Americans have no idea what the larval health care bill contains – as neither do I – but they are “agin” it. I’m not “agin” it.

Cynical emulation of being principled: The republicans have found nothing in anything the new administration has proposed that they can favor. So they say. The facts are, they have a super minority with which, armed with the blanket threat of filibuster, they can bring down a presidency. They hope to then replace it with one of their own.

How nice.

The Bath At Cluny

There are a number of Roman ruins spread around France. Among them are the remains of a coliseum at Bordeaux and the still-being-used coliseum/bullring at Arles. But my favorite is right in downtown Paris. It is the Bath at Cluny. It is on Boulevard St-Germain not far from where Boulevard St-Germain bends to cross the river at Pont de Sully and becomes Boulevard Henri Quartre.

The Romans built it sometime in the early centuries of the first millennium, and, after they left it was turned into a monastery or convent, I never can remember which. Actually I can’t remember whether it was turned into either of those things. But it was turned into something other than a Roman bath, and that something – whatever it might have ever been - caused the then residents to install stained glass windows. I really like stained glass windows, which is odd because I don’t have any affinity for churches or religion.

Actually I have developed a great deal of affinity over the last few years for the cathedrals of Europe. Except for London and Brussels the only cathedrals I have ever actually seen are all in France, but it sounds more impressive – to me at least – to claim affinity with the cathedrals of all Europe rather than just those of France; and cathedrals, I have been told, are churches, although they have no similarity to the down-at-the-heel things that are called churches and are on offer in the United States; and I really like the Cathedrals’ stained glass windows. Even though Cluny has stained glass windows I don’t think it was ever a cathedral.

So that is what is imbedded in the beginning of this little drop of drivel.

I really wish that Blogger would let me, or I could figure out if it does let me and I am just too stupid to figure out how, to put my pictures where I want to put them.

But I guess campared to the implications of the new republican super minority in the US senate, or the bothersome realization flowing from the fact, that, thanks to the strictly constructionist five judges on the supreme court, we won't even get to choose who to send back to Washington to get bought by the lobbyists, my problems are really trivial.