Don't Get No Respect

By David Simmons

Time Out Hong Kong recently published a very long article on the five multi-billionaires who own the city, and how that happened. It begins, “There was a time when few people in Hong Kong begrudged the city’s property tycoons. Most citizens respected their disproportionate share of luck and the determined way they had taken advantage of the system. Some even saw them as heroes with superlative acumen. But that was then and this is now.”

It adds: “Whatever the reasons, a new, received public wisdom came into being: Hong Kong property developers are evil, cheating, greedy devils.”

The article spells out in depressing detail how this tiny cabal, with the collusion of the city government and – more recently – Beijing control every aspect of life. Their greed is boundless, their manipulation of the system relentless, resulting in the artificial inflation of the costs of housing, food and nearly everything else, financial oppression of the most vulnerable, and stifling of the entrepreneurial spirit and genuine innovation that once brought wealth to ordinary people, and thereby holding back the economy itself. And all for no purpose but to shovel even more money into bank accounts of tycoons who already have more lucre than all the gods of Olympus (before that particular mountain became part of the euro zone).

Yes, well, we know all this; Hong Kong has always been a microcosm, the logical extreme, of unfettered capitalism. What I wanted to read about was how Hongkongers are rising up, in the spirit of Mohamed Bouazizi, against the “greedy devils”.

Alas, not much in the Time Out piece about that. For, we are reminded, “it takes a lot to get a massive crowd of Hongkongers on the streets. Marching with banners down Hennessy Road is one thing, but controlling a symbolic location with, say, 150,000 irate citizens demanding a change in government policy seems to happen only once in a blue moon.

“And yet ...” hmm, and yet ... here it comes: “And yet it could still happen again if the winds change.”

If the winds change? Do they ever?

As a matter of fact they do. Not in Hong Kong, maybe, but at nearly precisely the same time that article was published, thousands of kilometres away in little-known County Laois, Ireland, a deputy sheriff and his police escorts arrived at a home whose owner had missed some payments. Just another repossession, no different from thousands and thousands of them taking place every day across Europe and North America. Except this time, the citizens said no. 

And the deputy and his escorts went away.

There’s nothing new about repossessions. When we want something for which we don’t have enough ready cash, we borrow some from the bank, and agree to pay it back over a certain period of time, plus a little extra called interest for the privilege of having the use of the bank’s cash. If we renege on that agreement, the bank repossesses whatever it was we spent its money on. It’s a pretty good system, actually, and has worked well for all involved for centuries in one form or another.

But in recent years such simple transactions weren’t good enough for the big banks, and they got mixed up in what is known as casino banking, gambling with other people’s (our) money on “complex financial instruments”, and then, when the money ran out, they stole it through subprime mortgages and other devices, and when that ran out too, they just pretended it was there, and in that rare case when a so-called regulator called in the bet, the big banks said, oh, we don’t know where that money went, hope that’s all right. And it is.

So why isn’t it OK for some little working guy to miss a few payments on his house in County Laois? That’s what he and his friends asked the deputy sheriff. In Spain right now, they’re asking very similar questions. In Athens, they’ve pretty much stopped asking questions, and they’re burning the place down. They think that’s a more promising course of action than Mohamed Bouazizi’s, who burned himself down. That jury is still out; Tunisia now has a nominal democracy instead of a dictatorship, while in Greece it’s the other way around.

Like the tycoons upon whom Hong Kong was built, bankers used to command respect. So did priests, and inventors, and composers, and judges, and even policemen, a few politicians, one or two journalists. A lot of the people in all of those categories still do deserve respect, but it seems the rotten apples are getting more plentiful, or at least more rancid. The big banks are run by felons who reward themselves with multimillion-dollar bonuses while sabotaging the very system their institutions were built on. The Catholic Church looks the other way while its priests molest little kids, artists lobby politicians to stifle the Internet lest they lose a few royalty dollars to “intellectual property violations”, as we journalists are paid not to question authority but to bow to it, to collect our paycheques quietly while never offending an advertiser, to stand by meekly as the drumbeat for war rises in yet another cacophonic crescendo.

Meanwhile the rising ranks of unemployed youth ask, why should we listen to you? Why should we obey you? You follow no rules, you pay no penalties, so why should we? Why should we make our mortgage payments on time; you’d only lose the money and pretend you don’t know what happened to it in the rare case that anyone even asks. If someone actually hires us, why should we do their bidding? Those locomotive-plant workers in London, Ontario, lived by the adage of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, until Caterpillar, one of the most profitable multinationals on the planet, after accepting a king’s ransom in tax incentives, bulldozed them into the unemployment lines. 

The people we respect are those who give more than they take, and in the past such people very often were religious leaders, employers, even bankers. The formula for this has always been clear. Two thousand years ago a wise teacher said, “For everyone to whom much is given, of him shall much be required.”

That’s the law – not one made by a court, or a legislature, or in a sermon on a mount, but a statement of fact, deduced from observation or scientific analysis, like the law of gravity.

Mess with it, and the inevitable consequence is collapse.

So, What’s New?

By David Simmons

The same week that Steve Jobs died, I watched for the first time Inside Job, the Oscar-winning documentary on the systemic corruption that led to the 2008 meltdown. Jobs’ story and that of the organized criminals who control most of the world’s economy seem to stand in stark contrast, yet both are stories of innovation.

The word “innovation”, derived from the Latin verb novare, “to make new”, has a positive connotation. Yet the financial sector has helped perpetuate the global cycle of violence, misery and injustice through highly innovative means such as complex derivatives, bundling of bad loans into so-called assets that later turn toxic, and “creative bookkeeping” – all assisted by politicians too crooked or too stupid to protect the common man and woman from the resulting thievery and concentration of wealth among a tiny minority.

And then there’s Jobs, whose technological marvels redirected the evolution of computing, the driver or facilitator of almost everything modern man does. And yet he too – or at least his Apple Inc – was an integral part of the inside job.

Let’s first debunk the theory embraced by the anti-Apple crusaders that Jobs was not an innovator, since his most successful products were not true inventions but merely cannily marketed versions of existing tools. The same charge could be made against every so-called inventor since the wheel, the spear, the stone hammer, the first fire-maker and the first story-teller (who gave birth to “intellectual property”).

“Invention” is another Latin word derived from a phrase with the sense “bring into being”; throughout history, innovations have been brought about by building on the work of forebears, who built on the work of their forebears.

In fact, such now-commonplace tools as graphical interfaces and computer mice, and the very concept of the personal computer, were either invented or popularized by Apple. The iPod may indeed be “only” a better Walkman, but the operative word is “better”, as the Mercedes S-Class is better than Karl Benz’s 1885 Motorwagen of which it is a direct descendant.

Still, there is a very dark side to the Apple story. The saga of Foxconn and other exploitative enterprises in Asia is well known. Apple’s wealth, now greater than the economies of some entire countries, is built on the backs of what amounts to slave labour, at least by the – admittedly fast-deteriorating – standards of the developed nations that benefit from it. The Jobs cult excuses him of responsibility for this, saying he was at the top of a huge organization, too far away from the sweat and tears of Shenzhen to do anything about it, if he even knew. Such an excuse offered by Signor Francesco Schettino of the late Costa Concordia will likely not take him into calm seas.

But what about the tear stains on the otherwise gleaming aluminum case of the iMac on which I write these words, or the other two Apple devices in my home? For unlike the Jon Corzines and Jamie Dimons and Bernie Madoffs of the financial “industry” (did Al Capone ever call himself an “industrialist”? Probably), Jobs did not simply steal his vast wealth from old ladies’ pension plans; we “consumers” willingly gave it to him.

There is no point fretting about this. Humans are animals, and though we like to think we have evolved far from the jungle, we still prey on those less fortunate than us, and are preyed on by those above us. We will do anything to prolong the survival and enhance the quality of life of ourselves and our families; the migrant workers diving to their deaths off the roof of Foxconn are collateral damage in this process.

So we are trapped in a system of situational ethics, or malleable morality. The ruling elite no longer even pretends to subscribe to the kind of moral code most ordinary working people do, and this trickles down through society, robbing younger generations of their hope for future progress, or even of enjoying the perks their parents did, in a more enlightened and egalitarian age.

Fewer and fewer seem to bother swimming against this tide. I see this every day in my workplace; the newspaper industry, at least in my experience, used to be far more joyful because everyone from the senior editors to the copy runners took pride in their part of the “daily miracle” of publishing the paper. Where I work now, the few of us who still care about quality journalism are frustrated by the majority who don’t.

But then, like most of my colleagues, I’m not an innovator. I’m a consumer of innovations, and their victim – part of the 99%.

Given the legacy of modern innovators, maybe that’s just as well. For as a wise king wrote three or four millennia ago, “There is nothing new under the sun.”