Need and Greed

--Money, Andy Warhol

When you touch me it's so delicious
That's money, honey
Baby, when you tear me to pieces
That's money, honey
--Money Honey, Lady Gaga

Norbert the Rat
The wonderful, wonderful rat;
Whenever he gets in a fix
He reaches into his bag of tricks!
--Norbert the Rat

--He wants more, don't you, Rocco?
--Yeah. That's it. More. That's right! I want more!
--Will you ever get enough?
--Well, I never have. No, I guess I won't
--Key Largo (1948)
_______________

The subtitle for this article is, "karma is a bad mofo," or more delicately: "comeuppance".

The world runs on need and greed. Even in the World of Warcraft, "Need before Greed describes a rule of looting etiquette as well as the loot setting enforcing that etiquette" (wowwiki). Recent economic events in America were blamed on greed above need, but is that really it?

Ranger was recently exposed to a Madoff "victim" via a six-degrees-of-separation scenario (well, actually two) causing him to peruse the concept of victimhood. There is a personal reason for writing this. For revealing the mentality of entitlement so engendered.

But first some thoughts on the term in the abstract; later, its application in the concrete.

A victim is a resident of the Ninth Ward who has lost his shotgun shack to Hurricane Katrina, forever. A victim is a kid molested by a priest or a trusted family friend. However, today the concept of victimhood is being diluted by virtue of its being applied to those who are not truly victims. We are re-branding greedy investors as victims. (Read here for an ethicist's take on Madoff.)

The first rule of hustlers and con men is, you cannot con an honest men. It was not greed alone that caused our financial problems, but a complete lack of honesty within the financial sector, abetted by government indifference. The dishonesty was on our side of the equation -- you and I were the problem.

Greed may be intrinsic to the human being, but opacity is not. It is not the greed, per se, but the dishonesty (cover-ups) perpetrated in reaching for gain which is unrighteous.

To the greedy, everyone is measured per their capacity as a tool of loss or gain. That is also the crime: The lies + the transformation of individuals into tools -- agents of either gain of loss.

This dishonesty extends beyond the financial sector. The entire political life of this contracting nation is based upon dishonesty fed by greed. We call this dishonest system, democracy. If democracy is dishonest, then our "honest" lives are shams. Our "freedom-loving" policies are shams, as well as the institutions which perpetuate these ideals.

So we have established that the real injustice is obfuscation of one's intent, and using people for one's own benefit (whether that means actively employing them or discarding them.) Lying and exploitation.

Ranger does not play the market, but he knows the Rules of the Game. One does not expect a consistent 10% annual yield on investments, and that is precisely what the Madoff scheme investors made off with. Maybe they were occasionally a little uneasy, but hey, what's to complain about?

Oh, losing all the money you thought you'd have for retirement? O.k., so now you know what its like for the rest of us. Maybe there is some kind of cosmic justice. Maybe, it's just the rules of the marketplace. Certainly, there is justice for Mr. Madoff, who himself had apprehensions of his own divine retribution; his comeuppance came.

The guise in which Madoff was visited upon Ranger concerned an event in which a "Madoff victim" was given preferential treatment, co-opting a previous agreement with another party because, well, the Madoff investor had it so bad, y'know. The event organizer actually chose to contravene a "gentleman's agreement" with the initial party because there was profit to made over the switch, both monetarily and image-wise.

The truth underneath the switch-cum-largesse was profit + an elite collegiality. A profit was to be made by excluding the initial party in favor of the group being able to rub elbows with a "Madoff victim" more a part of their social circle. It was behavior in bad faith, the same bad faith which allowed for a Madoff and all the rest.

The event organizers were disingenuous in their choice of cachet over decency, yet hid behind their posture of generosity toward the "victims".

The only victim in Ranger's scenario was the humble individual who made event plans in good faith but who was excluded, all under the organizer's guise of operating in good faith and even magnanimity.

Bottom line: people who had money to invest with Mr. Madoff may be sorry and suffering in their own way, but they are not really victims. When you make it to the ranks of being able to invest with Mr. Madoff, you are not a victim, not in any traditional sense. You are not innocent; you knew the risks to be had in exchange for your hefty returns.

When one invests in the market, one is not naive. One understands that profit comes with risks -- the risk that all might be lost.

To extend victimhood to Madoff investors and second-home flippers is to allow for the diminution of actual victims. The term "victim" should be reserved for someone truly innocent, who had no hand in their situation.

In retrospect, it is fit that this group remains tightly cohered.

Their karma is ensured.

Profligacy

Wall-E (2008)

Fat and docile, big and dumb
They look so stupid, they aren't much fun
Cows aren't fun

They eat to grow, grow to die
Die to be et at the hamburger fry
Cows well done
--Cows With Guns, Dana Lyons

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures
on earth, where moth and rust consume
and where thieves break in and steal
--Matthew 6:19

Actually this is just a place for my stuff, ya know?
--George Carlin

What exactly are you trying to say?
What exactly am I trying to say?
You's a bunch of fuckin' elephants
--In Bruges (2008)
________________

You've heard it, and perhaps even been guilty of it: "The blasted computer's so slow today;" "They were all out of the rice crisp multigrains at Costco; I had to buy the regular;" "One of the globes was broken -- I'll have to go back to the store," and on it goes.

Most of us do not live in the daily recognition of our good fortune. Our overly consumeristic natures are revealed in the Pixar animation "Wall-E," but the film is more than a diatribe. It shows what we have lost as we have gained, in a dark vision of a humanity hurtling towards -- nothing.

Wall-E [Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth Class] is a decrepit robot sentenced to a lifetime of garbage collection and compaction on a post-apocalyptic earthscape. Even in his limited function, however, he manages to find wonderment among the rubbish, and collects trifles like Rubik's Cubes that strike his fancy. He also watches the musical "Hello, Dolly!," transfixed by the songs of hopeful love.

In his meager lifestyle he has grown to appreciate the simple things, seeing possibility in a junk heap, and has even humanized himself in terms of his yearning toward love -- an exalted emotion we fancy reserved exclusively for the higher primates. He survives by scavenging and self-repairing.

The deracinated humans, on the other hand, have lost their capacity to appreciate material goods, their environment or the companionship of others. They have committed several deadly sins (among these are sloth, gluttony and greed.) Humans consume and destroy, never realizing their bounty.

They are amorphously fat and ridiculously stupid grotesqueries traveling through space in their Barcaloungers on a giant cruise ship spacecraft these 700 years, which many do not even know has a gym and a pool aboard. One wonders what purpose these humans could possibly serve, and the movie asks us to suspend our disbelief on such matters as food and water sourcing.

It is unclear if they are searching for another planet to colonize, farm and exploit for resources, but it is a good bet they will replicate their wastrel ways once there, wherever there is. It is the bleakest vision of a gerontological future in which caregiving will be the main employer. These humans embody George Costanza's beer fridge-in-the-recliner lifestyle, and are sustained by a myriad of assistants.

Buy N Large (BnL) is the company that owns everything and it is a double entendre: the people are by and large hopeless, and if you buy, you'll enlarge. Times are economically bad now, yet many of us are like the Barcalounger travelers, oblivious to a future without accommodation to our needs.

My mother recently shared a story of Officer Tand, the kindly crossing guard at my grade school whom she befriended many years ago, and who had lived through the Depression. He was a bit like Wall-E in that his treasure was collecting bits of rock and shells and gluing them to backboards which he would then decorate with paint. Where others might have seen a chipped stone, Officer Tand saw the makings of a grasshopper, after some cleverly applied pipe cleaners and the like.

He invited us to his house once, where he had cases displaying his creations. He also took joy in giving them away, and I was the recipient of a few.

As she tells his story:

"They were recent immigrants and had nothing at living in NYC, so he and two other families who were evicted rolled up a carpet and carried it across the bridge to New Jersey. They had a wee bit of clothing, some pots, blankets and made a makeshift place to live. So these three families made and lean-to, barely covering themselves. They would make a weak fire in the area just outside and had one large pot into which they would put water and they would all go out like animals looking for anything to eat, e.g. wild radishes, anything at all from a field or garden. There was very little in the pot, mostly water, but they lived (barely.)

Most people today don't know this life, but this was the U.S. less than 75 years ago. "A Week of Hunger" in the WaPo today reported most food stamp recipients deplete their allocation by week three. Larry Brown Harvard School of Public Health estimates it would cost $10-12 billion per year to "virtually end hunger in our nation," a plague which costs society at least $90 billion a year in lost revenue and health and societal costs.

How many days of war funding could eradicate hunger in the U.S.? As the economy pulls more people from the isolated comfort of their recliners, we may put more care into such issues.