None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us

“Never trust any movement that requires large gatherings of its followers to be effective.”

Thus spake the Asshole of the Century in my initial manifesto, a two-sided, one-page Xeroxed declaration to the world, titled “Purity Rules for the New Millennium,” which I stuck in book stores and coffee shops around Chicago, circa 1995. And I still find these words to live by.

I had my spurts of youthful rebellion, where I was carried away by the passions of the crowd. As a punk rocker in the early-1980’s, my friends and I were engaged in a series of running battles with the L.A. police, who for whatever knee-jerk and ill-informed reason, didn’t want to allow hard core punk bands to play music in their town. In particular, I remember the Exploited riot in East L.A. back in 1983, where, in a mix of inchoate anger and primitive glee, I tried kicking in the window of a Bank of America building while a mob of us were being chased by the cops. Of course, the window was made of protective plexiglass, so all I left was a small boot-sized hole about knee-high in the window, an anemic spectacle that only underscored my impotence and cowardice in the grand scheme of things. My angry gesture at The Man, kicking a hole in his bank, only served to make life a little less civilized for the folks in the barrio where the concert was held, proving me to be just another selfish white boy shitting on their neighborhood before returning to my trendier digs on the West Side of town.

From apolitical sports rallies to major social movements, activist or pacifist, left, right, or center, I reject them all. History is one long litany of the tyranny of the mob. From the French and the Russian Revolutions, through the Weimer Republic, all the way back to the vague but ominous threat posed by the Roman plebians whenever they felt that they weren’t being given enough bread by the Empire or that the quality of the gladiator fests and circuses wasn’t to their liking. In fact, popular uprisings tend to follow a common narrative (actually, the most common narrative is that they peter out and fail to accomplish anything at all, but let’s ignore that probability for the moment): The people, through whatever means, overthrow the shackles of authority; they put their own leaders in charge; they become disappointed in their leaders, often deposing or even killing them; then an autocrat takes over, and the people are ruled by an even more oppressive authority than when they began (ex: Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, Khomeini).

Even some of the great, heroic struggles that are mythologized in our school system have their ominous side. It is taken as a given that the civil disobedience of Mahatma Gandhi was a great success, and it eventually led to Indian independence. What is less discussed are the Hindu/Muslim massacres, one of the great ethnic bloodbaths of the 20th Century in which close to a million people died at the hands of those who hated them because they had a different creed, massacres that went hand-in-hand with independence and partition. In essence, Gandhi and the Indian congnoscenti encouraged the common people to express themselves, and then they were shocked that this expression didn’t stop with the people’s opposition to British rule but extended to the hatred of their neighbors (the ones with the funny habits and the different beliefs).

So, to all my friends participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, understand that I am instinctively not an ally. I don’t trust the mob, even a well-meaning one. Education, enlightenment, and the advancement of the human race are accomplished one-on-one, or in small groups, where people have the opportunity to discuss an idea in depth and to ponder its implications. It’s why the printing press may be the greatest invention in the history of our species (rivaling seemingly more urgent advances like fire, or the invention of modern antibiotics), because all books are essentially a conversation between the writer and his reader, and it is this intimacy that makes them so powerful a tool to change the way we think. The mob, by contrast, is only as intelligent as the most primitive dolt that it needs to bring along for the ride. Much like a newspaper is written at the 6th-grade level so as to cast its net over a wide range of potential readers, the mentality of a mob must drop to the lowest common denominator.

But within its incongruous amalgam of complaint, there are elements of the Occupy Wall Street/La Salle Street protests with which I sympathize. For one, I appreciate the high percentage of homemade signs. Last Friday, when I braved the gauntlet of wanna be rabble-rousers in my suit and tie to broadcast my weekly market analysis from the CME trading floor, amidst all the prefabricated placards to “End the Fed” or “Give Us Jobs” was a woman, maybe 40, sensibly dressed and attractive, pointing a large cardboard sign directly at the Board of Trade building (in contrast to most of the other signs pointed either towards passing cars or at the Chicago Federal Reserve building across the street). Her handwriting was relatively small, making it difficult to read, but eventually I made out the following quote, by Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

She stood there, simultaneously meek and defiant, and I loved the fact she took the time to make that sign, quoting some old German who’s been dead for 200 years, dragging the sign downtown, and then spending her Friday pointing it at all the futures traders, the supposed enemy, heading in to work, on the off-chance that one of us would take notice and that the scales would then fall off our eyes, that we’d realize there were other avenues open for us than spending all our energy chasing the almighty dollar. I made eye contact with this woman, briefly smiled, and then walked inside to conduct my weekly dog-and-pony show.

Of course, I am to the financial industry what Stukas Over Bedrock, my old punk band, was to the L.A. music scene, circa 1984. Just as no one would confuse the career of Stukas Over Bedrock with that of Motley Crue, I am barely a blip on the financial radar, a stay-at-home Dad masquerading as an important voice in a suit, who for the past three years has managed to squeak just enough supplemental income out of trading to forestall any immediate need to go out and actually work for a living.

But the comparison with my brief and flailing music career is instructive, because I used to hate Motley Crue. I wouldn’t have cared if they were just another hair band, wasting all their money on Jack Daniels and blow while toiling through another Wednesday night as the support act at Gazzarris. It was Motley Crue’s success that made them a target of my wrath. How dare everyone else not see through their vacancy and their pretty boy calculations. But let’s face it, the youth of Middle America wasn’t about to start playing “Life Like Yogi” (the closest thing we ever had to a “hit,” reaching #5 on the Flipside/Rodney on the Roq hit parade) on their car stereos, even if they all immediately soured on Nikki Sixx. So there was really no reason for me to begrudge Motley Crue their success.

Similarly, I recognize that wealth is no longer created primarily by labor, but by ideas. A hundred years ago, if someone wanted to make something that people needed, he would hire a bunch of laborers to make it for him and then sell this product for a profit. The tension between management and labor was real, because the laborers were actually making the things that management was selling. But these days, labor is a much less important part of the process. We don’t need 10,000 workers in an auto plant; we have machines to do most of the work. We don’t need fifty women on a conveyor belt, sorting cookies into boxes; we might need just one to inspect the work of the machines that took the place of her 49 former co-workers.

When the designers at Apple come up with a new product, the idea itself could be worth billions. The people who figure out the most efficient, dependable way to make this new product are also worth many millions. But the factory workers needed to assemble these phones or computers are really not that valuable, and they are getting less so by the year.

So the people who generate ideas, be it in food, medicine, technology, or even (gasp) banking, will continue to be in increasing demand. The people who have advanced degrees and can facilitate the implementation of these ideas will also be quite valuable. Just below them will be all the service workers that are needed to run our society, from the teachers to the health care workers, and they will also be paid fairly for their work. And skilled labor, like carpentry or masonry, will also have value. But the grunt labor that used to be needed to produce things will be worth increasingly little as the world continues to automate. For now, it may find refuge in Third World factories or on the lettuce fields of the Imperial Valley, but those days are numbered. Even China is in the process of automating, and it won’t be that long until John Deere invents a lettuce picker that will make most migrant farm labor as obsolete as the mule.

This is our great dilemma: That most of what the human race has done to support itself over the past few hundred years, namely physical labor, is no longer worth enough to provide a decent standard of living in the modern world, and we as a society have to find something productive for all these people to do. The solution, of course, is education: We need to raise our children to be able to dwell in the world of ideas, to be the creative leaders of tomorrow. Failing that, we need to give them the scientific and linguistic competence to support the people who have ideas, or they need to be able to teach, to cure, or to feed. At the very minimum, we need to give those folks choosing a life of labor a valuable skill or craft that can’t be taken away by an uneducated immigrant or a machine. This is our future. And all the complaints about bankers are merely a sideshow.

Not that I don’t hate what the banking industry has done to this country. It is appalling. They have centralized political and economic power in a few hands; they have moved capital from the countryside into the seats of power; they have so interjected themselves into the political establishment in Washington D.C. that they have become virtually inseparable from the government. But, sad to say, even if these injustices were all corrected, the unskilled laborer who dropped out of high school would remain just as unemployable as he is today.

In other words, I want to join the fray without supporting the activists and conspiracy theorists who seem to be leading the charge. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to “End the Fed.” For all its flaws, the U.S. Federal Reserve saved us from another Great Depression in 2008, and for this it deserves our thanks. Anyone who thinks getting rid of the Federal Reserve will make our economy more stable understands nothing about our history before the FED was created, a tarnished history littered with repeated recessions and economic collapses. And I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that we all “deserve” a job. In fact, I think it is just the opposite. Even among the employed, there are a lot of incompetent workers who actually don’t “deserve” a job at all. We as a society may not want them to starve, or not be able to see a doctor if they are sick, but the notion that all of the bipedal herd consuming oxygen without offering anything of real value to the world are somehow “deserving” of anything better than a swift kick in the ass is misconceived.

So I won’t be joining all the true believers and their young tagalongs on the street, but I would nonetheless like to do my part in loosening the stranglehold the rich have on our society. And there are many worthy and practical causes to join on this end. But I believe the most elemental problem is how corporations of all stripes have intertwined themselves into the power structure of Washington D.C. And while there are many ways to attack this beast, I would like to throw my weight behind those looking to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case.

To be direct: This ruling, in which the majority of our Supreme Court justices granted corporations the same political and free speech rights as living human beings and disallowed regulations limiting the amount of money these corporations can give to certain political causes, is probably the worst decision by the Court since Plessy vs Ferguson. Citizens United was the capstone on a series of decisions the Supreme Court has made in recent years expanding the rights of corporations. I believe the best way to attack these decisions is by changing the Constitution. In this vein, we need a Constitutional Amendment limiting the rights of corporations. And while there are other proposals out there, I think the amendment should be worded like this:

“Corporations are not people and are not entitled to all of the same Constitutional rights as people. Specifically, corporations are not entitled to the full protection of the First Amendment right to free speech, as corporate political speech may be limited by the people’s legislative representatives. Also, money is not equivalent to speech, and its use in election campaigns may be limited by the people.”

So pass it on, and spread the word. Whatever else they may or may not bring to the table, the Occupy Wall Street folks have stirred up the Zeitgeist, and the time to do something about the increasing concentration of corporate power is now.