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The real 21st century fix: how banksters even corrupted our instinct for collaboration – and what next

21st Century Fix, a con, bankers, banking, banks, collaboration, conspiracy, corporations 1 Response »

Apr 252013

Rolling Stone, in its latest edition, has this story to regale you with:

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

I suggest you all read it all before we continue. So see you in a few minutes, OK?

Fixing the prices of, well, just about everything, eh? That would, I suppose, include not only sovereign debt, community loans and the cost of things that make the world of manufacturing go round but also, indubitably, the price of foodstuffs too.

Can it get any clearer than this?

Time, perhaps, we resurrected my recent idea to “arrest without bail” and “imprison” banks? This is why we need these two figures – and how they would work:

[...] At the moment, corporations are legal figures with many of the rights and obligations of ordinary people. This is well known and well documented and I shan’t repeat myself here. However, what I would like to suggest is that a serious imbalance does exist as far as depriving the liberty of such corporations to act when under investigation – or, indeed, after being found guilty of certain acts.

Ordinary people, for example, quite often when arrested find themselves summarily deprived of their liberty – and no one questions the process. Apart from the odd legal phonecall or interview or occasional family visit, their radius of action and ability to influence the result is radically reduced. This allows for the police to carry out necessary investigations, untrammelled by the interference of too many interested – and perhaps self-promoting – parties.

This does not happen in the case of corporate entities: mostly, in cases of even quite severe misdemeanour (witness recent high-profile banking scandals around the long-term money-laundering of drug revenues by banks you’d hardly expect to exhibit such behaviours), we generally find such corporate figures – flesh-and-blood people in everything but flesh-and-blood – do not get arrested; do not need to request bail; and never get imprisoned. Their liberty is never deprived; they continue to operate in the meantime; they proceed to make their money as before.

Sadly, of course, we often discover after the event that the potential for being fined for some act or another will have been factored into an annual budget before the crimes in question were committed. A fine, even a large fine, even just the threat of a fine, becomes simply one more operating cost to be contemplated as the logistics of the year are calculated.

And although, on occasions, executives do find themselves accused of specific acts, the processes are so drawn out as to make any sensible adjustment to the direction of our socioeconomic fabrics impossible to engineer. They frequently manage to stay at the top of their hierarchical games, despite the complaints of shareholders; despite the unhappiness of a wider consuming public; and despite the reputational damage this leads to. With their battalions of legal support, these alpha men and women feel secure in their protective silos and bunkers of belief. No wonder they behave as imperiously as they do.

In such cases, not only are the operations of the companies in question left untouched, the ability of their apparently criminal leaders to continue leading remains intact.

My suggestion, then, which came to me as I journeyed – quite appropriately – to the TUC’s founding place, is to engineer two new figures in company law:

the figure of arrest without bail

the figure of imprisonment

How would these work? Well, in the case of the former, arrest without bail would mean the corporation would have to shut down all its operations immediately. Just as a person who finds themselves under the same deprivation of liberty, whilst investigations into probable misconduct take place, so we should be able to do the same to a company. And the mere threat of being able to do this would surely lead to a radical change in how fines and punishments for corporate maleficence were treated and assessed in the future by those who currently quite happily contemplate them.

In the case of the latter figure, the figure of imprisonment, we could suggest that a company might totally cease operations in a similar way once sentence had been passed a posteriori. Under such circumstances, and for a certain period of time only, the company in question could not continue to occupy the marketplace, in much the same way as a person in prison must effectively cut off all connections to the outside world.

The result would be two powerful instruments to make the corporate figure far more like the human equivalent which – in so many cases – it loves to emulate.

Applied in particular to the banking corporations, it would send a hugely important message around the significance of competence, honesty and openness for our shared societies.

As well as, surely, end the terrible cycle of reward for utter failure – a cycle which appears to be the current tonic and reality of latterday capitalism.

I think the evidence of a seriously consistent, deliberate and intentioned sequence of misdemeanours is piling up enough for a real and concerted series of contrary actions to be designed, shaped and implemented.

Don’t you?

A 21st century banking fix in search of a 21st century legal fix. A way of changing radically how banking corporations behave. A way of recovering these astonishing tools to organise the masses, in order that – in potential harmony – different ways of seeing and doing might serve to re-establish some sense of overall sensibility.

If you like – and finally get – my drift, that is.

If you appreciate the measure of what apparently needs to be done.

Feb 092013

The Observer reports tonight on a story which will no doubt run and run (in an equine sense if no other):

Sources close to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Food Standards Agency said it appeared that the contamination of beefurgers, lasagne and other products [with horsemeat] was the result of fraud that had an “international dimension”.

Substitute some of the actors with our friends in the financial services community – even the Financial Services Authority shares the same TLA with the Food Standards Agency – and you’ll see why I’m beginning to get the feeling that horsemeat DNA on a criminal scale bears an uncanny resemblance to Libor fixing on a criminal scale. In both cases, it would seem that insiders have been stuffing outsiders – and the outsiders have been suffering the consequences, generally unknowingly. A mafia is a mafia, however genteel or besuited it may show itself to be. We are, it would appear, in the grip of such mafias.

In fact, to state – as the Observer does in its headline – that the “Horsemeat scandal [is] blamed on international fraud by mafia gangs” is just a tad disingenuous: it may be true, of course, but a) it doesn’t half let the government and the regulatory authorities off the hook of ultimate responsibility and b) it doesn’t half beg the question why whoever’s doing the blaming didn’t realise this any earlier.

The process and sequence of events is exactly the same as that which assailed us during the 2008 credit crunch. All of it essentially down to light-touch regulatory mindsets which believe stupidly in the magical powers of utterly unleashed corporate environments: environments which start out – in our hopeful and ever-optimistic politico-economic models – as virtuous circles of efficient business, only to end up being populated with dysfunctionally greedy individuals, systemic failures no one could have predicted or even – as in this case – Eastern European mafias.

The all-too-predictable result of a hands-off and responsibility-abdicating approach to the business of government and governance.

By trusting the market to run itself, by not inspecting the opportunities for greed and irresponsible behaviours, by believing that organised crime won’t care to get involved in the daily operation of customer choice, these latterday governments of ours are destroying the very integrity of our economic checks and balances.

And that their mentality should argue that customers vote freely with their purchases every day of the blessed week is appalling in the extreme: whilst we cannot take our own personal DNA testers to every prepared meal, and prick them and poke them before every purchase, we are at the mercy of those processes we should surely have every right to trust.

The Independent concludes in the following way its report on the obfuscation currently at play:

‘Bute’ aside, the unlabelled horse may indeed be safe to eat. But that’s not to say that people wanted to eat it, nor, more importantly, that anyone in the food supply system was aware of the existence of what seems to have been a massive undetected fraud.

It was just the presence of an unknown substance – prions that caused BSE (and the ensuing complacency and cover-up) – that led to a collapse in confidence in British farming.

Judging by the events and attitudes of the last few weeks, the lessons have not been learnt.

Not learnt indeed. That is all too clear.

But what’s even more clear to me tonight is that business today, whether white collar or abattoir, needs a massive kick up the backside from about as fearsome and heavy-touch legislative and inspection regimes as we can possibly manage to invent and devise.

If for no other reason than to guarantee the safety of hapless human beings in a complex and interdependent century – human beings who still don’t come complete or supplied with their own portable laboratories.

A market for cheap and easy-to-use DNA testers then?

Perhaps the need is wider than that. Maybe the market that’s really waiting to be exploited is for an algorithmic comparer of prices and products, which automatically suggests the potential presence of fraudulent behaviours in any supply chain.

For until we as consumers get far more access to information about what goes on behind the scenes in such B2B transactions, there is little we can do but to resign ourselves to further and ever-increasing fraud in banking, technology and food products various.

Ada Colau and the “criminal” nature of the Spanish Law of Mortgages

a con, Ada Colau, bankers, banking, banks, Europe, European Union, eviction, mortgages, Spain, Spanish, unemployment 2 Responses »

Feb 072013

Ada Colau is the very best reason you could have right now to get on an intensive course in Spanish, and fast. Why? In order to learn how to hear and understand her fierce and unremitting words spoken ever so gently.

If, however, you already understand the language, you will understand so much more about the world we live in once you watch the following video on the current situation in Spain – a country where unemployment has now topped 26 percent.

http://youtu.be/s_6G-gR3BHo

Here she describes how a representative of the banking community justifies the current Spanish laws as “stupendous” – the same banking community, she argues, which has destroyed the wider Spanish economy, and even led people to commit suicide as a result of its legislation.

And this is how the Financial Times explains the laws she continues to call “criminal”:

Under Spanish mortgage law, which is among the most stringent in Europe, a borrower in default loses their home, and is then liable to repay all of the debt, with the creditor having rights over the debtor’s future income until the debt is settled.

And this is how the same paper relates the opinions of Spanish bankers:

Spanish bankers have long argued that the severe penalties for defaulting on mortgages helps to explain why levels of non-payment have remained low even when unemployment has risen to 26 per cent, as family members help with repayments for those who are struggling to keep up.

And this is the nature of the bailout which the same banking industry is currently receiving from Europe – absolutely shamelessly I might add, and with the kind of hubris which befits the all-too-powerful:

The European Commission on Wednesday approved a payment of 37 billion euros, or $48 billion, from the euro zone bailout fund to four Spanish banks on the condition that they lay off thousands of employees and close offices.

Yes. Ms Colau is right. This is criminal fraud on a massive scale. Whilst the industry in question has no problems with reserving for itself the right to a generous corporate Communism when times are tough (or, put more plainly, when they’ve fucked up big-time), in the same breath it seems to believe this sort of generosity is quite the worst thing an individual could ever have access to. Far better, it would seem, that a bank be able to sustain its skyscraping headquarters than an ordinary person his or her humble family home.

And although Spanish commenters on blogs and social networks seem to think that the violent qualities of their banking industry are most particularly Spanish in scale, I’m truly beginning to wonder if here in the UK there isn’t a terrible underbelly on the point of revealing itself.

Five years in the life of a banker is so much fun, isn’t it?

a con, bankers, banking, banks 7 Responses »

Feb 072013

The Swiss are apparently considering widening their restrictions on EU-worker immigration. The plan is to extend them from those who attempt to come from Eastern Europe to the Spanish and the Portuguese too (story in Spanish here and Google Translate version here). My first thought? It does seem fitting that a country such as Switzerland, so immersed in and benefiting from a financial services and banking industry which has so clearly helped destroy the economies of Portugal and Spain in recent years, should have to deal with the consequences of terrified emigration from the same. As a BBC report from 2012 points out:

Switzerland’s agreement to free movement of people is a particular irony: in 1992 opinion polls showed that one of the key factors in the No vote was a fear of immigration, and of Switzerland being forced to let in too many foreign workers.

At that point foreigners in Switzerland made up 20% of the population. Today the figure is 25%, and the increase is due almost entirely to the arrival of EU citizens. Switzerland has in fact seen much higher numbers of EU workers coming in than many of its neighbours who are full members of the EU.

Remember, we are dealing with peoples from countries where unemployment is rocketing – in the case of Spain, 8,500 jobs are being lost daily. And in large part, this is due to the foolishness of banking types who thought they could beat handsomely the common sense of decades of proper practice. Which brings me to this video from Channel 4. Watch – and be amazed. (Revolted is perhaps a better word, but I’ll leave that up to yourselves to decide.)

So. Here, the taxpayers must pay thrice: once, to bail out a stupid bank to the tune of billions; two, to pay its fines and damages to the tune of hundreds of millions for having required the taxpayer to pick up the pieces in the first place; three, to suffer the savage and unmitigated cutting of otherwise value-adding public-sector services as a result of the actions of stupid banks like RBS & Co.

Hester is spot-on with one of his declarations, mind: this is a cultural thing, it goes wider than banks – and the glorification and pursuit of money are the twin evils which drive it.

Meanwhile, a tweet fleetingly knocked me sideways last night – something I hope is untrue for its rank injustice and disrespect for ordinary citizens. Reporting an alleged statement by Saint Vince Cable on the subject of banking and criminal charges, it went as follows:

Cable on R4 regd RBS Libor fixing & why there was no criminal charges replied “well all this happened 5yrs ago” Well that’s cleared that up!

Indeed it has.

I am – for once – lost for words. (I also see it hasn’t been reported this morning, so either the person who tweeted it misheard what was said or someone’s been furiously spinning behind the scenes.)

Anyhow, in the week a government minister resigns for a traffic lie ten years ago, and whether Cable’s comments as reported are true or not, bankers manifestly continue to reap the benefits of their ill-gotten deeds by avoiding prison due to a de facto statute of limitations I don’t think any of us out here were aware of.

And all this whilst paedophilia, as destructive to an individual as banking crimes are to a nation, is pursued with a finally commendable rigour ten, twenty, thirty or even forty years later.

Does this disgust no one else then? Or is disgust no longer the right yardstick to determine what a society should allow and what it should forbid?

What is there left for anyone to do in order to be able to set the moral compasses of our societies to rights?

These aren’t environments where strivers are rewarded and shirkers are punished. No. These are environments where shirkers reach the dizzy heights – and the strivers simply get crapped upon in full view of an aghast and impotent public.

We have no power whatsoever.

We are powerless, my friends. Utterly without any real control over the directions of our lives.

I’d love to be a banker, wouldn’t you? Must be wonderful to know that in a matter of years, anything you do is wiped clean from the slate.

Except, I suppose, the bonuses you are generally eligible for …

The day that #Occupy entered the mainstream on a tsunami of an admission

#occupy, #occupylsx, #ows, 99 percent, a con, Bank of England, bankers, banking, banks, on a high No Responses »

Oct 302012

This is quite an astonishing story. I strongly advise you to read it in full. It introduces itself thus:

The anti-capitalist protesters who occupied St Paul’s Cathedral were both morally and intellectually right, a senior Bank of England official said last night.

The report goes on to describe what was said in the choicest of ways:

“Occupy has been successful in its efforts to popularise the problems of the global financial system for one very simple reason; they are right,” Mr Haldane said last night. Mr Haldane, the Bank’s executive director for financial stability, was speaking to Occupy Economics, an offshoot of the Occupy movement, at an event in central London.

It also describes what was not said:

In the text of his speech distributed by the Bank last night, Mr Haldane made no reference to the techniques employed by the Occupy protesters.

Our response? Read the whole of the story – and then cry out: “Hallelujah!”

You know what this means, don’t you? The situation is far worse than any of us in the middle-class mainstream of political acquiescence ever imagined. That the Bank of England should now be siding with people who at the time were treated thus is absolutely gobsmacking. Keeping in mind its prior responsibility in the whole light-touch regulation era, it’s about as close as any organisation of its magnitude and weight is ever going to get to providing us with an abject apology.

If it weren’t for that awful hurricane affecting sixty million Americans, even the BBC might give this piece of news the prominence it’s clearly due.

Which reminds me. I received an email from HMV this morning, in all its graphic-laden glory, which encouraged me to click and “see all” of the latest “BBC Kids” offering.

Is it really the moment to be carrying out such campaigns? Does no one really not see – or, indeed, care about – the terrible sense of irony they might generate in those most intimately affected?

How carefully the establishment wishes to choreograph its decline.

Even as it’s that very real 99 percent which they have encouraged and allowed to suffer the most.

A 99 percent which – with the Bank of England’s most recent declarations – clearly, sincerely and inevitably exists.

The big question now is where that all leaves Cameron & Co. In a sense, as beached as any political whale has ever shown itself to be. And by a tsunami of an admission from an institution which stands at the very heart of the establishment the Coalition claims to sustain.

Anyone noticed? Not yet. Not really.

But they will …

How call centres make it easier to say “bye bye bank”

bankers, banking, banks, customer focus, customer service, customers, on a high No Responses »

Jul 062012

Lisa’s right. Here she briefly talks about a silent run on the big banks. All those people going their virtual ways as they phone impersonal call centres which – in other times – cost-cutting and internal customer-focussed banking hierarchies imposed, against our collective will, on us all.

Remember when we used to know who our bank manager was? Indeed, remember when bank managers actually existed? Imagine having to deal with a long-term face-to-face relationship like that as we drummed up the courage to take our life’s savings elsewhere. We never did it, did we? We never even contemplated it.

And now imagine how easy it’s going to become for anyone to propose to themselves the almost revolutionary act of moving their dosh to another institution. All it takes is the simple act of lifting up that phone and dialling that number.

That’s all it takes.

It’s really really nice, all of a sudden, to be able to realise that what was once a shield to protect a company’s reputation from its own customer relations becomes, again all of a sudden, and in our hands, a tool and a sword to re-establish a sense of natural justice.

Call centres make it so very much easier to say goodbye to that company which preferred – for so long – to use data in order that it might understand us, instead of a real interaction between people. And just as their Key Performance Indicators have failed them in their understanding of complex products, now their aversion to human contact is allowing us to easily release ourselves from their branded grips.

Happy times!

At last!

The problem is now much deeper than banks which break the law

bankers, banking, banks, justice, laws, Lib Dems, Lib-Con pact, LibDems, Tories, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jul 052012

A few items this evening. First, MPs have raucously rejected a judge-led investigation into the Barclays Libor-rigging scandal. Rejected, it must be said, in the main, by a Tory-led Coalition government voting on partisan lines – and clearly in consonance with the banking community which funds the aforementioned party thus:

The Conservative Party has become reliant on bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity moguls for more than half its annual income, an independent analysis of Tory finances has revealed. Since David Cameron became Conservative leader in December 2005, the amount of money the City has given to bankroll the Tories has gone up fourfold, to £11.4m a year. Over those five years, the City has donated more than £42m to the party.

There’s also been time for personal and distracting fireworks, of course – the blame for these firmly lying at the feet of a man named George Osborne. To be honest, I’m pretty clear that Libor is just the beginning. A whole lot more is going to come out in the next few months – and possibly years – of weary discovery.

And it is most wearisome. Foolish banking caused our economic misery. Foolish banking provides half the income of the Tory Party. The Tory Party throws even more money at foolish banking. And so the cycle goes on.

You see, the problem here isn’t just lawbreaking. It’s also a question of observing natural justice:

There are two rules that natural justice is concerned with. These are the rule against bias (nemo iudex in causa sua) and the right to a fair hearing (audi alteram partem).

The basis for the rule against bias is the need to maintain public confidence in the legal system. Bias can take the form of actual bias, imputed bias or apparent bias. Actual bias is very difficult to prove in practice while imputed bias, once shown, will result in a decision being void without the need for any investigation into the likelihood or suspicion of bias. Cases from different jurisdictions currently apply two tests for apparent bias: the “reasonable suspicion of bias” test and the “real likelihood of bias” test. One view that has been taken is that the differences between these two tests are largely semantic and that they operate similarly.

The right to a fair hearing requires that individuals should not be penalized by decisions affecting their rights or legitimate expectations unless they have been given prior notice of the case, a fair opportunity to answer it, and the opportunity to present their own case. The mere fact that a decision affects rights or interests is sufficient to subject the decision to the procedures required by natural justice. In Europe, the right to a fair hearing is guaranteed by Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is said to complement the common law rather than replace it.

The issue here, of course, at least in my eyes, is that our corporations, elected representatives, civil servants and other empowered figures are all too clever at getting away with breaking the spirit of the law. You don’t evade tax (illegal), you just avoid it (immoral). You don’t force elected majorities to do your bidding, you just use the markets to downgrade their room for democratic manoeuvre. You don’t fix elections, you just out-gun the opposition in ads, general media support and long-term destructive drip-feed journalism.

None of this is literally breaking the law. To impose your will in the kind of democracies we are now left with, breaking the law is no longer necessary. All you need to do is not observe natural justice.

And no one will remember to say anything.

In my previous post, I suggested we should invent ASBOs for corrupting bankers – not for the illegally acting ones, though; for the antisocially acting ones.

Not the ones we might one day be very lucky to prosecute.

No. Instead, for the ones who under the guise of a supposedly professional occupation will continue to sully and disgrace any concept we might have had of the meaning of civilised behaviour.

And I wonder, after today’s decision by Tory and Lib Dem MPs, whether we don’t need corresponding ASBOs for the political classes too.

For these alpha men and women – those who occupy themselves with business, politics, revolving doors and rotten hearts – have not only been trained by the financial services sector to beg for financial support and kowtow to its every whim; if it were just that, we could still say our Anglo-Saxon legacy might even now be saved. No. In everything they do and everything they think, they mirror money’s natural instincts to invent, undo, fire, inspire fear, abuse, disabuse, bully and trample its way to the top.

Natural justice? Doesn’t exist. All that exists is the letter of the law. And when the letter doesn’t suit, we change the meaning of the sentence.

This crisis isn’t just one of banking and its mores. This crisis is much bigger than that. This crisis is about how the lending and borrowing and paying back of money has become a Mafia-like construction built on the backs of blameless and humble workforces. And anyone who touches it and anyone who is touched by it immediately acquires a relationship akin to that of a drug addict with their pusher.

It’s not just the Libor rates they fixed.

It’s also our concept of civilisation; of humanity; and of how we should conduct ourselves in polite society.

ASBOs for corrupting bankers

bankers, New Labour, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jul 052012

New Labour invented the Anti-Social Behaviour Order:

An Anti-Social Behaviour Order or ASBO (/ˈ æ z b oʊ /) is a civil order made against a person who has been shown, on the balance of evidence, to have engaged in anti-social behaviour. The orders, introduced in the United Kingdom by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998,^[1] were designed to correct minor incidents that would not ordinarily warrant criminal prosecution.^[2] The orders restrict behaviour in some way, by prohibiting a return to a certain area or shop, or by restricting public behaviour such as swearing or drinking alcohol. Many see the ASBO as connected with young delinquents.^[3]

Young delinquents, eh? On the trading floor you mean?

Which is why, in the light of recent revelations, I do wonder if we couldn’t apply the same principle to bankers. OK. So plenty of what they’ve done seems like it could be terribly criminal; but, equally, plenty of what they’ve done, whilst abiding by the letter of the law, might also have led to an equally terrible societal harm.

What we need to do is not just correct one or two bad apples but rip out a whole culture of behaviours from the very heart of a sector; from the very heart of a community.

And sometimes, to achieve this, you do need to physically remove those with unreasonably unspoken powers over such a community’s members. A question of re-establishing a threshold of reasonableness. Wasn’t that exactly what ASBOs originally aimed to do?

So how about it then? Ban those bankers who have acted not just criminally but also antisocially from ever darkening the halls of the financial services sector again. Far better than punishment, surely, in such disagreeable cases, is total and outright excommunication.

Oh, and if you need to understand exactly how antisocial that can get, just talk to the Greeks who don’t have the capital wherewithal to escape the consequences. If there ever was an example of where wealth has the disgraceful freedom to travel whilst labour must stay put in money’s mire, then this, clearly, was it.

The end of the corporate pyramid as we know it?

bankers, banking, banks, corporations, football, in a hole, pyramidal organisations, Spain No Responses »

Jul 032012

In my previous post, I argued that there are considerable lessons to be learned in the corporate world from the Spanish football team’s three-tournament wins on the trot. You can find this piece here. I also expanded and perhaps clarified my thesis a little in a comment to a post from Rick called “What will it take to change the City culture?”. In it, he talks about the need for more severe punishments as well as education if we are really looking to change the kind of ingrained corrupting behaviours such as those it would appear the City is exhibiting. I reproduce my comment below:

I think education can go further than is sometimes assumed. The problem may be the environment, not the process. I posted yesterday using the analogy of the Spanish football team and the moneyball thesis, applying it to modern corporate organisation. The Spanish team used to be very fragile psychologically. Casillas said before the final that this was a generation “educated to win”. In that short phrase, he encapsulated all that can be good about modern corporate structures: a true and honourable recognition of one’s inheritance, a humility in relation to prior legacy. From consistent quarter-final losers to three-time winners is a massive jump. And it wasn’t down to fear of punishment. It involved analysing the strengths of existing culture and looking to resolve the weaknesses. It involved humble people educating humble people to win – but not at any cost.

Where managerialism takes over, and where hierarchies reduce the number of people involved as the tasks get more complex, we get the big-hitter striker syndrome: a man or woman at the top on whom everyone is focussed. A man or woman on whom everything depends. A man or woman who will one day fail; or perhaps, over time, frequently fails – but has the physical presence to convince us they are, even so, actually succeeding; and so deserve the massive salaries they command. Sounds a little like the England football team, don’t you think?

Human beings are learning machines. It’s what they do best. So education has a massive part to play here – but the environment must be right for it to do its job properly. Get the environment right – focussing on everyone instead of just the big hitters – and the results may lead to the kind of collegiate genius of a goal of Iniesta, Fábregas and Silva – instead of the individual brilliance of Messi or Ronaldo. Remember: relying on Messi’s 80 goals, Barcelona lost the Champions League and the Spanish league this year. Relying on six midfielders – instead of four or five and one overpaid striker – won Spain their third tournament on the trot.

I do wonder, however, if the situation isn’t rather more serious than simply learning a useful lesson from the field of football in order to apply it to business. The question this post asks for example: are we witnessing the end of the corporate pyramid as we know it?

Surely we should conclude that well-channelled teams of clever heads will always be more long-lived and successful than one head demanding massive responsibility – and its corresponding reward – as it finds itself atop a lonesome pinhead of a structure. The problem, therefore, is this pyramidal set of relationships. It should be a cylinder – or something rather similar. Open to the world and itself on either side; circular and strong all the way up and down; as flat or as tall as the company culture requires; and with as many clever heads at the complex top of the tasks to hand as – traditionally – get assigned to the rather more humble.

If you think about it, the pyramid which reaches pointy-headed to the sky is actually totally absurd. As the work gets more complex and challenging, we use fewer heads to decide what needs to be done. The chances of committing errors, of stressing oneself into illness, of failing to achieve one’s targets … these are all bound to increase with the traditional pyramid we are all used to.

Surely this is madness.

Surely we need if not a cylinder, at the very least a pyramid without a considerable part of its upper superstructure.

Spain’s football team has shown you can win at football with such a pyramid. Isn’t it now time, in the light of News International, Barclays and those to come that we realise the problem here is traditional corporate organisation?

As Italy, Portugal and even Croatia found to their cost, it’s simply no longer up to the job.

As Western societies are finding to their cost, it’s rapidly leading us down into that City – and perhaps, as I suggest here, also corporate – cesspit of Vince Cable’s.

Not bad people. Not bad communications. Not bad tools. Just bad environments.

Maybe we do all need a change of scenery.

Literally.

Moneyballing 21st century banks

bankers, banking, banks, corporations, football, managerialism, pyramidal organisations, sorted, Spain, Spanish No Responses »

Jul 022012

“Moneyball” is a brilliant film, based on a groundbreaking book. It describes how a small baseball team found itself unable to compete with its richer competitors, and decided to use a system called sabermetrics to analyse with intelligence and data exactly what factors really won baseball matches. This led to the team breaking an all-time record and winning twenty games on the trot.

The key was teamwork. Instead of looking for big hitters, star players and expensive egos, the moneyball system looked to see how several cheaper players might contribute to the job that formerly belonged to just one or two. Not only did the results not depend on the firepower and consistency of that individual – always liable to momentary failure at the worst possible time – but they also built a team spirit which allowed for greater resilience and longer-term results.

Yesterday, Spain won the Euro 2012 by beating Italy 4-0. Iniesta was named man of the match and man of the tournament. The squad of the tournament consisted of ten Spanish players. Perhaps the most notable feature of this list was the exclusion on the one hand of Fernando Torres – Golden Boot for the tournament, a typically expensive big-hitter striker of yore – and the inclusion of Fábregas, the so-called false number 9, on the other.

It’s clear that something changed in last night’s game – and perhaps not just on the field of football. Organisational structures are common to many areas of human endeavour: football is beautiful for many reasons, of course, but – in particular – for how it coordinates systems and individual brilliance. And the lessons we take away with us from Spain’s victory this year are profounder than in the World Cup in 2010.

FC Barcelona and the Spanish national team have often been compared over the past few years: it’s hardly surprising as so many Barcelona players play for their country. But the massive change between 2010 and 2012 – and the logical conclusion to which Spain/Barcelona arrived at in Kiev as they thundered past an otherwise highly effective Italian team – was the dispensing with the need for big-hitter game-changers such as Torres/Villa/Messi – and their substitution with a collegiate brilliance based not, as in the original moneyball, on cheaper players but – rather – on equally expensive players who score goals in organisational teams of movement of three, four or five individuals. Or, indeed, a structure where six midfielders replace the need for any striker.

The advantages? As already explained. This season, Messi’s individual brilliance scored around eighty goals for Barcelona. Even so, Barcelona lost the Spanish league to Ronaldo and Casillas’ individual brilliance and the Champions League to Chelsea’s gritty doggedness and Didier Drogba. And so the playing-field was allowed to be more level than perhaps even Guardiola understood; even as Messi – selfless and humble to an extreme, it is also true – nevertheless stopped, through his very brilliance, the manager from going as far with his system as he might have.

This tournament, Portugal depended on Ronaldo and Nani’s brilliance – and yet lost to Spain under Del Bosque’s stubborn refusal to give up on his system and his instincts.

Last night, Italy were looking to Balotelli and Pirlo to provide the flashes of magic which, in the past, have overturned matches.

They didn’t – and it wasn’t.

A couple of TV commentators argued that Italy had been tired out by their match with Germany.

The truth of the matter is that Italy were deliberately worn down by their Spanish opposition’s collegiate and selfless passing game.

The truth of the matter is that when Torres was brought on in the dying minutes of the game, it was Del Bosque ruthlessly pulling out his estoca and administering the final death blows to an enormously disadvantaged Italy.

Messi and Ronaldo – the Torres of a couple of years ago – are the sorts of reasons we used to watch football. Wait and see if they can pull it off; wait and see if they can show us how brilliant they are. Against all the odds. In the thick of it. But Spain has done something utterly different in its composed game of cat and mouse: the cat is no longer the big-hitter striker playing against defences he is paid enormous amounts of money to destroy. The cat is now a pack of wolves: all working with instinctive understanding; all working via an astonishing synchronicity.

I think it was Casillas who observed before the match – on the point of helping to achieve the footballing grandeur of three tournaments in a row (much as our discreet baseball team did all those years ago in “Moneyball” when it won those twenty games on the trot) – that the Spanish team had been “educated to win”.

And just think what that short phrase actually means – the implications of those few words: in the midst of huge achievement, a recognition of someone else’s legacy; a recognition of heritage; a recognition of one’s true place in a societal world; and an amazing humility which makes the team so much greater in its ability to work together than any individually brilliant players of the past.

Iniesta is better than Messi and Ronaldo because Alba, a Spanish defender, under the system which Spain uses, was able to score one of the most extraordinary goals of modern times. And the goal that Silva scored – a goal whose lead-up simply disintegrated the compact Italian defence – belonged, in the short space of several seconds, to Fábregas and Iniesta too.

Moneyball applied to football in everything but the money.

Now compare all the above to England’s performance, both on the field – out in penalties at the quarter-final stage – and off (more here).

A little unfair, perhaps. And some of you will point to the mess that Spain is in – both politically and financially.

But I’d like to extend the analogy a little, if you will permit me. My thesis is that throughout most of its history the culture (or lack of it) of England’s football team has mirrored Anglo-Saxon corporate institutions. In their individualism; in their top-down hierarchy; in their dependence on managerialist whizzkids who are relied upon by unseeing shareholders to pull the rabbit out of the hat time and time again. The Ronaldos of the corporate world, if you like. The very antithesis of the selfless and communicative collegiate Spanish.

So what can we learn from the Spanish experience – and can we apply it to 21st century banking?

I once worked as a language provider for a Spanish company. This company had perhaps 3000 workers in the area where I lived and worked. A relatively easy job to get contracts? Well, no. There were perhaps ten factories in the group, none with more than 250-300 workers. No one worked at a factory in particular for more than two or three years; even managers got moved around to avoid stagnation, boredom and cliques building up. We had to deal with ten training managers – each with similar criteria, for the company was very systematic in its common culture; and yet each also with a very clear knowledge of individual needs amongst their workforces.

A kind of set of Spanish football teams: small units which moved around; which did the work other companies assigned to humongous big-hitter factories; which shared common services such as management and sales – but where the hard work, the tackling of contracts, was done in an entirely collegiate manner.

Was done so that the many heads were released to do better and more sustainably over time what the highly paid geniuses did in other places.

A system, yes – but a system which also recognised everyone’s individual needs, abilities and rights to be heard and trained up. To collaborate and convene bright ideas; to bring to the surface their occurrences too. To become, in fact, collegiate geniuses in their own right.

Compare the above with the apparent corruption of British banking. Twenty banks, they say. Corporate behemoths where the higher up and more complex the job, the fewer people are involved. Until right at the very top, on that privileged pinhead, we get a pinhead of a CEO running the show on behalf of his or her own.

And all with the excuse that such structures were necessary to preserve the integrity and governance of highly regulated industries. When, in fact, such pinhead structures have allegedly led to an unashamed immorality and lawbreaking on a scale none of us who have worked at the bottom of the pile could ever have imagined.

Now compare British banking – even, more widely, British corporates of a certain kind (though I’m sure not all; not every single one) – and just see what we’ve achieved with this Anglo-Saxon model of “With one leap Jack is free!”.

An English football team which is run like a British bank perhaps? A group of individuals which consistently misunderstands the meaning of teamwork. For teamwork isn’t a question of subsuming the instincts of the many to the diktats of the few. Rather, it’s a question of creating a system which “educates to win” … but not just win – also win honourably, win well, win for the benefit of the many.

So isn’t it time we not only followed the Spanish example in football – applying the principles of moneyballing to our very best players and not just the competent – but also in corporate organisation?

Humility, honour, belief in oneself; efficiency, honesty, simplicity; respect, hard work, truly common goals; and – above all – a humane philosophy which serves to release the abilities of all those “educated to win” …

Sounds a helluva lot better than this, anyhow.

Don’t you think?

“Libor in the Skyscraper with Diamond” (or the mathematics of honour) #barclays #euro2012

bankers, banking, banks, boardrooms, Bob Diamond, financial crisis, fines, football, in a hole, on a high, Spain, Spanish No Responses »

Jul 022012

There’s been a bit of a competition on Twitter to think up #BobDiamondSongs. The first half of the title of this post is my contribution.

But I’m not going to labour the point: all I can say, from my humble position as citizen and occasional voter, is that Vince Cable got it right when he called the City a massive cesspit. In the meantime, all this talk of the financial services sector reminds me of a bar that once used to exist (may still do for all I know) in the northern Spanish city of Burgos.

I think it was called La Bolsa (the Stock Market) – and it had a most intriguing thesis: the prices of drinks varied according to demand. So if, for example, you wanted a whisky and didn’t mind which brand, you looked up at the moving price list above the bar itself and chose the best-priced one at the time of asking; that is to say, the one fewest people were buying at the time.

Brilliant idea, eh? The laws of supply and demand applied to drinking.

I do wonder now, however, if it wasn’t all fixed: they knew which stock they needed to shift and so priced the drinks not in terms of demand but in terms of supply.

Is this what happened at Barclays – and perhaps twenty other banks? I don’t know – and am beginning to not care. I can really truly understand why so many young people chose to drop out and create a counter-culture in the Sixties. That’s exactly how I feel right now. I spent almost seven years of my life working under the top-down heavy governance which my banking employer imposed on us: no social media access; no Skype or chat; no freedom to show initiative; no chance to imagine better worlds. All in the name of the need to follow process and procedures.

And all the time we were being screwed down to our chairs, and were being told that we couldn’t do this or that because laws structured everything we were, the people at the top were screwing the customers and a wider society: fixing interest rates in their own interest; fiddling the books, in fact – whilst the rest of Western civilisation was burning.

All I can say is that I am glad the two football teams in yesterday’s Euro 2012 cup final were from the southern half of Europe.

Those most disastrously affected from what I assume will be an ever-growing cesspit of scandals – to paraphrase Cable – deserve some kind of space where they can remind us of the grand culture, intelligence and beauty they also represent.

So here’s to Italy and Spain – two countries which yesterday added so much to our store of footballing knowledge.

A massive olé from myself, my Spanish wife and my three Spanish children.

____________________

Further reading: a few days ago, I wrote on the subject of tiki-taka and bullfighting. If you haven’t managed to read these two pieces, you can catch up here and here.

The mathematics of honour, indeed. We need more of that.

Not always king, Mervyn

Bank of England, bankers, banking, banks, customer focus, customer service, customers, in a hole, total quality management No Responses »

Jun 292012

This is Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, on the subject of UK banks:

“It is time to do something about the banking system”, the governor said. “Many people in the banking industry are hard-working and feel badly let down by some of their colleagues and leaders.

“It goes to the culture and the structure of banks – the excessive compensation, the shoddy treatment of customers, the deceitful manipulation of a key interest rate, and today news of yet another mis-selling scandal.”

King remarks on the “shoddy treatment of customers” – but in saying that really doesn’t tell the whole story. Like many corporations of a similar size, banks are actually examples of the most customer-focussed organisations in the world. Whilst the Guardian summarises the last two days’ events thus …

Barclays was on Wednesday fined a record £290m for attempting to manipulate crucial interest rates known as the London interbank offered rate (Libor) and the Euro interbank offered rate (Euribor) between 2005 and 2009. On Friday the bank was among four banks implicated in interest swap misselling to small businesses.

… and, by so doing, probably leads the vast majority of the population to shake its head in total moral disbelief, I’m inclined to believe the most important lesson is that all these cases are clear examples of managerialism run absolutely riot:

However, you read it, the crisis shows that managerialism – the idea that some people have the capacity to control large organizations for the better – is wrong. Managerialism is an ideology justifying big pay for bosses, not an empirical truth.

About four years ago I wrote these lines on the subject of a text on total quality management in banking, whilst still working for a bank in a most humble capacity myself:

If only top-level managers read things like this and understood them. (Or maybe they do and I just never can understand where they’re coming from – never appreciate their nuances) [...]

The nuances I mention, of course, I realise now, were that managerialist ideology which was used to justify big pay for bosses. It’s just that at the time I was still naive enough to believe people at all levels in a hierarchy operated with the very same levels of goodwill – when this obviously isn’t the case. To underline what I mean: Mervyn King is absolutely right to say that many people in the banking industry are “hard-working and feel badly let down by some of their colleagues and leaders”. But he is wrong to say that the banks treat customers shoddily.

Or, at least, he is wrong to imply that all customers are treated shoddily.

Managerialism would indicate the internal customers such as executive directors and their immediate reports – as well as to a degree (though perhaps less and less these days) the shareholders too – are treated absolutely perfectly: their bonus and pension schemes; their travel and accommodation perks; their communication tools; their training opportunities; their rights to be rewarded whatever the results … all this and more shows that for some banking customers, banks are, as I already suggested, organisations which know quite a lot about focussing on their needs.

It’s not that they don’t know how to do it, is it? It’s that they choose very carefully which customers they should please.

This quote from my piece from 2008 describes perfectly what I had seen happen in my place of work. Taken from a text by a man called Ronald A Frick, and setting out the struggle it can be to implement total quality management in the context of banking, the following paragraph describes the car crash which – in hindsight – has clearly taken place since then:

A common mistake most companies make is to rely on packaged programs or solutions. High-pressure, short-term, purchased solutions normally fail in the long run. In this approach, there is a flurry of activity in which the employer asks, or begs, employees for money-saving ideas. As soon as the month is over, the employees re-enter never-never land, where their ideas are never, never solicited. Total quality management can affect organizational change and customer-driven service; however, it requires commitment on everyone’s part at every level and a well laid-out strategy and plan to implement the process.*

If you want to know why I find the idea of working for corporations so resistible, it’s because my almost seven-year-long experience of doing so involved supporting the implementation of packaged programmes and solutions; drumming up enthusiasm for brainstorming sessions to generate money-saving ideas; seeing such ideas put on the back-burner by an unconvinced middle management; ignoring external customer complaints; watching money being wasted on a scale the public sector could only dream of; and, in the end, discovering sadly and dispiritingly that the most important customer in the corporation I worked for was the one who earned the fifty percent bonuses.

I believe in total quality management one hundred percent – where everyone, every minute of the day, in a company or organisation is both a customer and supplier of equal importance. But the very moment you get a hierarchy of customers and suppliers – when some become more important than others – is exactly the moment when you allow a director or manager to justify an inefficiency, an injustice or, finally, an illegality.

Perhaps more regulation isn’t the way forward; perhaps packaged programmes and high-pressure, short-term, purchased solutions aren’t either. Perhaps, as a series of communities, a society and a civilisation, we need to recover our ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. To think about the other. To understand that everyone everywhere is a customer deserving of our attention.

That we are all essentially equal.

That we are all, indeed, in it together.

____________________

*The full text can now be found behind a paywall here, though in 2008 when I first studied and quoted from it was still available on the open web.

“Unabashed instruments of capital”

a con, bankers, banking, banks, capitalism, free-market capitalism, universities, university education, unprofessions No Responses »

Jun 282012

I’m wondering this evening, as European ministers and politicians various meet somewhere abroad to agree once more that they do not agree about the euro – and, especially, that they do not agree on how to make it just that little bit more palatable to the markets – whether the markets have any right to determine the future of anything.

The news about Barclays, for example, just gets worse and worse. Whilst in the US, the Justice Department agreed not to prosecute individuals at Barclays when it slapped on its hefty fines (more here with what appears to be original documentation in .pdf format), this evening I discover, as I watch Nick Robinson on the BBC, that there is actually no specific British law at the UK end of things under which the interbank rate-fixing scam could end up being prosecuted. It is apparently hoped in police circles – and presumably in the rest of the country – that general anti-fraud legislation could be used instead. If, that is, the FSA or the police don’t decide to go down the route of the US Justice Department’s unhappy let-off.

I’m afraid on that issue, words are beginning to fail me. There is only a certain number of expletives one can toss in the general direction of computer and TV screens. That maximum number, at least for me, was reached this morning.

Meanwhile, on a slightly separate matter, Norman argues that because universities are populated by Marxist researchers doing their level best to undermine capitalist society, it’s not fair to describe such institutions as “unabashed instruments of capital”. In the light of the Barclays scandal – and what I presume to be the heavy involvement of similar banking institutions in the administration of the latterday student loans system – and whilst there might have been a time I might have been more sympathetic to the position he holds, I don’t think it’s fair to deny the assertion any more. It seems pretty evident now that ever since New Labour introduced tuition fees and extended the requirement to take on student loans, universities have been working hand-in-glove with corrupt organisations to fleece and – whether intentionally or not – socially engineer our youth so that they become accustomed to the idea of acquiring an indebted state for what is often an educationally poor provision of learning resources. As the NUS have recently suggested:

Liam Burns, the president of the National Union of Students, is calling for university lecturers to be forced to acquire teaching qualifications to ensure that students paying tuition fees are getting the most out of their degrees.

With three-year courses now costing up to £27,000 in fees, Burns says universities should recognise that they need to improve the standards of teaching in seminars and lectures, including those delivered by postgraduate students, who are increasingly used as a cheap alternative to professional academics by cash-starved institutions.

So there we have it. On the one hand, a complex price-fixing scam in the banking sector for which no relevant law exists in order to prosecute; on the other, an absence of recognised qualifications for services provided by the universities on the back of a tripling of tuition fees generated to make even more money for both themselves and the Barclays of this world.

As well as serving to prepare their future clients for that slippery slope down to an onerously unending – and long ago socially accepted – indebtedness.

You remember when they used to talk about the military-industrial complex? You know the sort of thing:

Military–industrial complex, or Military–industrial-congressional complex^[1], is a concept commonly used to refer to policy and monetary relationships between legislators, national armed forces, and the defense industrial base that supports them. These relationships include political contributions, political approval for defense spending, lobbying to support bureaucracies, and oversight of the industry. It is a type of iron triangle.

Well how about we start talking about the banking-industrial complex? I really think it’s time we did, you know.

And time we had a Leveson-style inquiry to lay it bare.

This is not just a few rogue traders; a few rotten apples; a few corked bottles of champagne. People have committed individual crimes against society – but the biggest crime committed is systematically against the very concept of the free market.

Our trust in the free market is becoming non-existent – and quite rightly so.

And it’s the banking-industrial complex, and all those who have their snouts in the troughs they fabricate, and here I include the universities and educational institutions which expand on the back of debilitating financial misery, which is finally destroying – where Communism and socialism failed to – any vestiges of confidence in the system it supposedly supported all these years.

“Unabashed instruments of capital”? The phrase is spot-on. Instruments of capital – not instruments of the free market. And their reach and their tentacles and their sad ability to corrupt everyone and everything they touch is what is destroying a civilisation which – in hindsight – only ever achieved a superficiality of apparently radical and thoughtful education.

Two questions for the banking fraternity today

a con, bankers, banking, banks No Responses »

Jun 282012

As per reports this morning, it looks like other banks – alongside Barclays – may have been involved in the alleged interbank interest rate-fixing scam. Two questions, then, for the banking fraternity this morning. First, prompted by a friend’s observation on Facebook:

Where banks are partially or mostly owned by the taxpayer, and where they are eventually found to have also been involved in the scam, will the taxpayer as effective shareholder end up footing the bill for any fines which might be applied?

And second, from a tweet of my own this morning:

If #banks have been manipulating interest rates, does that mean we should all get refunds on mortgages & loans for having overpaid?

I think these two scenarios and questions need exploring and answering. What do you think?

Why banks shouldn’t sell

bad business, bad capitalism, bankers, banking, banks, in a hole, sales, salespeople, utility 2 Responses »

Jun 092012

I worked in a bank for a while in a back-office operation. We didn’t have to suffer the rigours of sales targets – though, of course, we did have productivity goals, measured on an hourly basis.

But, whilst I was still employed inputting data, plenty of people in my trades union were to labour under the pain of selling to customers products that really weren’t needed. Today, the BBC publishes a report on one such example:

Lloyds TSB has agreed to pay compensation after lending a woman with dementia £18,000 for home improvements.

The bank allowed pensioner Jean Hyde to borrow the money in 2010, even though the repayments took almost half her income.

What’s more, when she died, the entire £18,000 was found unspent in her account. There are more unhappy details to this story which the BBC relates – it’s well worth reading in full.

A clear example, if there ever was one, of why banks shouldn’t sell. A revolutionary idea? Hardly. If banks want to occupy such a significant place in our society that any mismanagement should deserve taxpayer aid on the scale recent times have demonstrated, then they need to consider exactly what their business models should be.

In my entirely humble opinion, a bank should operate much as a water company: serving the nation with a basic utility; spending appropriate resource on infrastructures; safeguarding the health and operation of a wider economy; and never ever contracting a single salesperson in positions of high responsibility.

When was the last time you saw – as it attempted tiresomely to get you to change suppliers – a water company’s sales pitch at your doorstep?

When was the last time you saw – as he tried to court a broad publicity on behalf of finicky shareholders in order to justify end-of-year results – a water company’s high-powered alpha-male CEO-type on your television screens?

In reality, the banks have sold us the donkey that real competition and free-market economics can apply to banking services in much the same way as they might truly apply to open-air bazaars. But there is nothing open about our financial services sector these days; nor is there anything which allows them to be allowed to fail without impacting severely on the rest of us.

Therein the massive difference between open-air bazaars on the one hand – and their option of total failure (a necessary consummation of the free-market cycle) – and modern banking on the other.

The solution?

Stop banks selling to anyone – just like a water company, in fact. A bank as a fundamental utility – nothing more nor less.

Stop banks selling anything. Let the public and industry go to them only when the public and industry need them. A total Internet-style revolution. No ifs, no buts, no ads, no push.

Just one more fundamental utility which only takes the risks it absolutely needs to. And which we resort to when the need actually arises.

Why not?

Banking on living in an irrigation ditch?

bankers, banking, banks, Democrats, mortgages, repossessions, representative democracy, Republican right, Spain, unclassifiable No Responses »

May 022012

This story, if true, and I see no reason to disbelieve it, has one of Spain’s biggest banks, in these repossession-ridden times, allowing customers to choose their places of residence from the following items in its website’s drop-down menu (or perhaps we should rename that its “dropping-them-in-it menu” …):

irrigation ditch
gully
dual-carriageway
poor area

Insensitive? At the very least …

Just imagine how someone who’s just lost their home might feel when faced with these alternatives as they update their details.

So now will you believe me that code is fast becoming law?

In the meantime, let’s remind ourselves that there may – even now – exist perfectly legal ways to get around the laws which create injustice. I’m currently reading a short piece by Lawrence Lessig which I recently downloaded to my Kindle. It’s an American equivalent of Dan Hind’s brilliant “Common Sense”, in Lessig’s case titled “One Way Forward”. It tightly and mercilessly outlines how traditional politics has eliminated popular enthusiasm from late 20th and early 21st century practice, as well as defining the implications of such an elimination. It also points us in the direction of a public recovery of the body politic.

Just because current ways of seeing and doing say we must do stuff as per received opinion doesn’t mean we must continue in such a line. As Lessig points out:

[...] as well as the Left side and the Right side, there is an inside and an outside. There are those inside normal government (and their wannabes), who work to direct government policy or at least control government power. [...]

The outside is us. It is the we who have other lives. The we who want to do different things. The we who find basketball or hockey more interesting than congressional politics. Or who believe that an afternoon helping at a homeless shelter or a morning at our church is a better use of our time than going door to door for a candidate for Congress. [...]

But then something happens, and we can’t ignore the inside anymore. And then we start to wake up. Limbs twitch. Eyes open, ever so slightly. An arm moves, then a leg. And a lumbering and clumsy giant finally comes awake.

Yes. The giant Lessig talks of is – exactly – ourselves.

Those of us who might find themselves condemned by a bank to live in a virtual – or, indeed, real-life – irrigation ditch are, actually, uncomfortably powerful. If, that is, we want to exert such a power – together and as one; quite across the traditional party political lines of inside and outside.