Some thoughts on #OWS and the present crisis. (as of Oct 31)
There are three main ethical drivers in western society. Corporate ethics, focussed on quarterly growth in shareholder value and personal wealth. Political Ethics, focussed on long term health of the whole society and personal power. Moral Ethics, that provide a framework for deciding if particular policies are good or bad.

The current crisis seems to me to be caused by a failure of the political system to keep corporate capitalism in check as the corporate world has bought it and skewed the market place so that risk is rewarded when it works and saved at no cost when it fails. Having created that environment, it's hardly surprising that the corporate world will pursue risk until it fails spectacularly. It will dominate the discussion, framing all the arguments so that it becomes impossible to discuss alternatives meaningfully. I think it's completely inevitable that corporate capitalism will see political power as a potential block and as a potential opportunity. Once it develops enough power via wealth, it will attempt to skew the marketplace by manipulating politics in its favour, both by eliminating the block and creating market conditions that give it free-er rein. And protecting it from failure by promoting the idea of being "too big to fail".

On that basis, Corporate Capitalism will eventually eat itself and when it fails it will take everything else with it. This has happened repeatedly through relatively recent history with the 1929 crash being a typical example. Systemic failures like this tend to be followed by political action that resets the system and introduces regulation to try and prevent it happening again, until Capitalism again grows too large, gains too much control and the cycle repeats.

Viewed like this, I don't see Corporate Capitalism as evil, because it's simply following its set of ethics to their logical conclusion. I don't see record executive salaries as evil because it's simply Capitalism rewarding itself. I do think our elected political leaders have failed in their job because they've allowed themselves to be bribed. And I think both the Corporate and Political systems of ethics have lost sight of any input that might have come from the Moral viewpoint.

So now we have an increasingly frustrated, angry society where large numbers of people have been comprehensively worked over by their political leaders and by the corporate world. And its no longer just the bottom 10% who are struggling and find themselves needing a safety net but the middle 80% who now also find themselves stuck in a depressed situation with no hope of escape.

This doesn't have to end badly, or get worse before it gets better, but I fear the 2011 OWS protests, UK-European Riots, chaos in Greece and so on are just the beginning. Without a truly significant change of tack from the politicians, we'll see a lot more chaos before it resolves itself. And not just empty sound bites like "Change you can believe in", the mindless croney-ism and stupidity that we're getting from Cameron-Clegg-Osbourne in the UK or the endless bickering of Merkel-Sarkozy-Berlusconi et al in Europe. Not to mention the completely barking level of political thought coming out of the US Republican party and most of the US Democrat party.

And unfortunately, this time around, its all happening in the context of the beginnings of real resource limits, pollution in all its forms and an industrial revolution in the BRIC countries as they shift from being primarily agrarian to primarily industrial. Millennial-Apocalyptic thinking is awfully attractive when the problem is so vast. We really, really don't want to go there.

So back to OWS. Maybe its just noise, a symptom, relatively harmless and won't go anywhere. Maybe its the first tentative example of a street level agora that changes democracy completely. Maybe it's the first steps in a full on revolution. I think it's probably the first and it's just the electorate cranking up the noise level and saying "I'm mad as hell, stop it, you're killing me". If that does nothing more than keep the real issues front and centre, it will have succeeded.


It's not just the protesters who think the current system is wrong or has failed. but I'm not sure where suggested solutions are going to come from in a protest movement that is effectively leaderless. So demanding solutions from them may be fruitless. The simple act of their activism may be enough.

Bonus links:-
The post that prompted this. https://plus.google.com/108246942831872943995/posts/HjkTtfM6zY8

An Economic analysis that puts the blame squarely on political de-regulation of the financial system. Negligent Homicide.
http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Ross_Levine/other%20files/Autopsy-4-13.pdf

The Daily Kos on why Activism matters
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/30/1031112/-Occupy,-Daily-Kos-and-the-Democratic-Party:-It-takes-a-village-to-make-progressive-change25 Musley Ln, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 7