Bank Civilization

Ive been reading the Greenfield history and marveling at the Festival of the Bells and the Greene Countrie Towne Festival. History shows the civilization you see out your window is essentially ordered anarchy, the evidence of what millions of explosive units of creativity (also known as people) can build when they are all cooperating in pursuit of their own self-interest. We must nurture and expand this These units are our cities and small towns. Its the lights. Its the vast, cultivated farmland. Its the seeming orderliness of human civilization that was no ones plan, but rather emerges through the bit-by-bit creation of minds. Everything we see was once an idea, and then it was made real through action. We should see precious and awesome complexity, an order that can be observed but never controlled from the outside. The financial industry the dispenser of the needed money set to work, Yet we do not actually know all the data that went into making the social order turn out the way it does. If we cannot know in totality what drives individual choice and human action, we certainly cannot substitute in their place the will of planning agents and expect a better result. There was planning. Plenty of it. Individuals plan their lives. Businesses plan their production. Consumers plan their purchases. The conservative, libertarian, F.A. Hayek said, the economic problem was finding a system that made the best possible use of the various forms of knowledge of time and place that exists in the minds of individuals. Only we know and can shape our lives, mistakes and all. But now, I fear a disappearance of this civilization. The fall of a civilization is the disappearance from memory of an accumulation of knowledge and of values that were once obtained among a people. They have been obliterated not by an apocalypse, but by a general lack of interest in marginal satisfactions, in the things men strive to achieve when the struggle for existence is won. The loss of a civilization is the reverse of that process of cultural accumulation. It is the giving up, as a matter of necessity, of those satisfactions that are not essential to existence. Sometimes nature will for a while impose abstinence, but the record shows that man is quite capable of overcoming such obstacles to his ambitions. The obstacle he does not seem able to overcome is his inclination to predation; it is this institution that ultimately induces a climate of uselessness, of lack of interest in striving, and thus destroys the civilization it feeds upon. Although many people in the banking industry are hardworking and feel badly let down by some of their colleagues and leaders, the former builders of small towns, funders of ideas, risk-takers for dreamers has plundered our plans and is reversing what we call our civilization. Bank of America Goldman, JP Morgan, Barclays, and HSBC - One loses money. Another rigs LIBOR rates. One fiddles an entire nations books. One bilks needy schools and cities. And another helps terrorists, drug dealers and money launderers with their banking needs to create a gateway into the American finances. They brought tens of thousands of Americans to foreclosure court and hawked worthless mortgages to dozens of unions and state pension funds, draining them of hundreds of millions in value. But despite being the very definition of an unaccountable corporate villain, these Too Big to Fail banks are now bigger and more dangerous than ever. It is time to do something about the banking system. While elected officials essentially pretended to get angry, then did nothing, the crisis exposed the truth about who runs the world and it isnt national governments working for the public interest. The problem goes to the culture and the structure of banks: the excessive compensation, the shoddy treatment of customers, the deceitful manipulation of interest rates and seemingly inappropriate contacts with senior regulatory officials. These concerns include the role of political favoritism and campaign money in government decisions, movement of senior personnel between government and the private sector, relatively lax ethics rules for federal contractors, abuse of inside information about government decisions, and other issues. Both political parties in America refused to punish banks for their extraordinary behavior, and there is no war on banks and bankers. Yet there should be. Is it because a 'war' on a concept or notion (such as 'terrorism' or 'drugs' for that matter) is impossibility? In other terms, you cant kill terrorism, in the same way that you cant kill ignorance, greed or bad taste. The current idea has been to hide the destruction of our civilization by borrowing and printing trillions more dollars to prop up the financial mess bankers have created. The press insults them. The mob spits upon them. The public spectacle continues but nothing

really changes. With an apathetic public, there is no pressure on government to behave responsibly. And in a society built on the ideas of today both good and bad future generations will live and our civilization will die. The new civilization will be at the bidding of a powerful corrupt clique, an invisible government which controls our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, and every agency created for the public protection.