ADDICTED TO GREED - Republican Mythology

 

"God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive."

Ayn Rand

I think, if you look it up, Sir Francis Bacon is usually credited with the saying, “money is a good servant but a bad master”.  Actually, it was an old French proverb, far older even than the Elizabethan politician and writer, and Sir Francis merely quoted it – and in French, “L’argent est un bon serviteur, mais un méchant maître.” His own original observation (in English) about money said the same thing, but was as prosaic as fertilizer. “Money is like muck,” Sir Francis said, “not good except it be spread.”

"The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind."

Ayn Rand

You see Sir Francis believed in the biblical warning that “The love of money is the root of all evil” (Timothy 6:10) , and that a buck in your hand is worth a buck, but a dollar spread through the economy is worth far more. You buy a loaf of bread and you employ the baker and the driver who delivers it, and the check-out clerk, the farmer who grows the grain...etc.  Economists call this the “velocity of money multiplier effect”, or the VMME, and most economists multiply each dollar spent on bread by six. This is the material logic which – in addition to Judeo-Christian and Islamic morality - justifies food stamps and unemployment insurance.  And yet, today's devotees of Ayan Rand, meaning most Republican politicians, do not believe in the VMME. They believe wealthy Americans should act only out of self interest while the working poor, once known as the middle class, should sacrifice for the good of the nation. Heads the bankers win, tails, anybody who borrows from a banker, looses.  No wonder then that these days, everybody wants to be a banker,  

"We will rebuild America’s system on the moral premise...that man is an end in himself."

Ayan Rand Atlas Shrugged

According to Wikipedia, “A bank connects customers that have capital deficits to customers with capital surpluses.” But in the post “Citizens Untied” world, where a Supreme Court majority can chose to believe that corporations have the same rights of free speech as individuals – and enough money to reduce “Free Speech” to an oxymoron - money has become the master. Five American banks now hold – hold - more than $8.5 trillion in assets – 56% of America's $15 trillion economy.  These mega-bankers practice zombie capitalism, trading their cash surpluses back and forth between themselves, hedging their equity by shifting the money from this pocket to that, paying themselves a bonus every time their computers shift the funds. At some point reality must intervene in this monetary computer game world, as J.P. Morgan discovered back in 2007. And when it does, the destructive effect is suffered by the nation as a whole. Sacrifice might be required, but only for those who cannot afford to live in the fantasy world of 21^st century mega-bankers.

"I will never live for the sake of another man."

Ayan Rand Atlas Shrugged

It brings to mind an observation once made by a very angry young man. He wrote, “There have been gambling manias before... (but) the ruling principle of the...the present mania, is... to speculate in speculation...” The angry man was Karl Marx, and he was writing about the swindle of the moment in September of 1856, the collapse of the Royal British Bank.  It was a fabulous enterprise which seemed solid as granite at one moment and in the next a cruel fraud and a fantasy. And the most interesting thing about the case, besides the moral lessons the father of Communism saw in it, is that the bankers who perpetrated it actually went to jail, however briefly, without bringing down capitalism.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction."

Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged

The Royal British Bank, created in 1849, was innovative. Previously, banking had been a rich man's game. Those with money had banded together to lend to those who could afford to borrow it. But the fortunes created by the industrial revolution were not exclusively blue blooded, and both blue blood and non-blue blooded advanced thinkers in Scotland invented the publicly owned bank, in which small investors with some extra cash could combine their money, and once they had sold L50,000 in stock, could open their doors and begin accepting accounts and lending money to make a profit. In this case the idea belonged to Londoner John Menzies, who suggested the idea to his lawyer, Edward Mullins. They printed up a prospectus, and went looking for investors. But as England was in the middle of a recession (its fourth “Panic” since 1817) they found little money around, until they approached John McGregor, a Liberal Party politician representing Glasgow, Scotland. For the price of ten shares – at L10 per share –McGregor achieved a seat on the board of the bank. He immediately suggested the board hire an old friend of his who had knowledge of the “Scottish style” of banking, fellow MP Hugh Innes Cameron.  A bank started by politicians, for the politicians. What could go wrong?

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."

Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged

Cameron was offered the position of Managing Director of the Royal British Bank. And with McGregor's help, Mr. Cameron obtained a seven year contract which would impress any modern equity or hedge fund manager. The first year Cameron would be paid L1250 (equivalent to $2 million today) , rising to L2,000 a year ($4.5 million today), with an annual housing allowance of L200 (about a hundred thousand modern dollars). Within a few months he had squeezed out Mr. Menzies, buying out the bank's founder with L400 of investors' money. Now there was nobody looking over his shoulder.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans...they were the people who created the phrase "to make money”.

Ayan Rand Atlas Shrugged

From that moment, the bank never stood a chance of surviving. Instead of the L50,000 the law required and which appeared on it's books, at its opening the Royal British Bank actually had no more than L18,000 in its vault. Over the next six years, while the 6,000 depositors supplied the salaries, advances and loans never repaid to the officers and directors of the bank, each of those men became involved in enumerable kickbacks, scams and frauds which removed even more of the  investor's  funds -  about L130,000, (or the equivalent of $247 million today). The whole thing collapsed in the summer of 1856, producing, yet another nation wide “Panic”, which taught so much to the Father of Communism..

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."

Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged

John McGregor was forced to escape  the law by sailing to Boulogne, France. He died deeply in debt in April of 1857.  In February of 1859 the seven surviving board members were finally tried on seven counts of fraud. The jury convicted them of six. At sentencing the judge, Lord Cameron, could have been speaking directly to Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan when that firm lost between $2 billion and $7 billion in the 2007 derivative collapse.  “It would be a disgrace to the laws of any country” said the judge 150 years ago, “if this were not a crime to be punished. It is not a mere breach of contract with the shareholders and the customers of the bank., but it is a criminal conspiracy to do what must inevitably lead to a great public mischief, in the ruin of families and the reduction of widows and orphans from affluence to destitution; I regret to say that in mitigation of your offense it was said to be common practice. Unfortunately a laxity has been introduced into certain commercial dealings...and practises have been adopted without bringing in a consciousness of shame...”

"When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is. And I want to be able to afford the price of admission."

Ayn Rand

Because it was his first conviction, Hugh Innes Cameron could only be sentenced to a year in jail. All the other board members received lesser sentences, and one was only fined a single shilling. The scandal sold a few newspapers, and produced a marvelous pamphlet, “The Curious and Remarkable History of the Royal British Bank showing how We Got it Up and How it went down.” But judging by recent history, nobody learned anything from the affair, or any of the other enumerable “Panics”, recessions and depressions which have stricken capitalist economies once or twice every decade since.  I think we learn nothing because greed makes you stupid, and the mega-bankers and their paid political apologists are purveyors of greed and thus are selling and buying stupidity . And we have known how that philosophy plays out since biblical days. To acknowledge this reality and yet not deal with it is to acknowledge you are a zombie, addicted to greed, and without hope of ever learning a better future. Like Ayn Rand.

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."

Ayn Rand

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BIRTH OF THE BOYCOTT - Social Revolution in 1880.

I can describe the exact moment of conception. On the evening of 22 September, 1880,  Father John O’Malley was sharing a meal with American journalist James Redpath. At some point during dinner the priest noticed that the American had stopped eating. When queried, Redpath explained, “I am bothered about a word. When a people ostracize a land grabber..." And Redpath struggled for a moment, before explaining, "But ostracism won't do" The priest, according to Redpath, "tapped his big forehead, and said, 'How would it do to call it "to boycott him?”  Mr. Redpath wrote, “He was the first man who uttered the word, and I was the first who wrote it.” (Talks About Ireland, 1881) And thus was born another contribution to the English language. Of course the importance of this invention requires a little explanation.

Freed from its incubator in the central highlands of  Mexico, 'Phytophthora infestans' -  the Potato Blight - arrived in Ireland in the 1830’s. By then the humble potato had become the primary food for the 8 million people of Ireland. It could be grown almost year round. It produced so much protein per square foot that a family could be supported on a quarter of an acre of land. But because of this dependence, in the decades after 1845, the blight created "The Starving Time". Each year more and more of the crop was consumed by the moldy blight.  But because it did its work underground, unseen, its ravages could not be realized until the crop was harvested.  Within the next ten years, by 1855,  20% of the population of Ireland had starved to death, and another 20% had emigrated.

The British government struggled to respond to the disaster with church based relief, but politics then compounded the human misery.  Potatoes were molding away in the fields. But wheat, which was growing healthy and abundant in Ireland, was too expensive for the starving Irish to buy,  thanks to the Corn Laws. These were duties (taxes) charged on imported grain into any part of the British Empire. This was done to protect the Irish and English landowners from having to compete with cheap American wheat.  But by 1880, of the four million souls still surviving on the emerald isle, fewer than 2,000 owned 70% of the land. The three million tenant farmers owned nothing, not even their own homes, and over the two previous years their rents had been increased by 30%, and many were being thrown out of the their ancestral rented homes (above).  The very life was being squeezed out of the people of Ireland.  Law and order demanded it.

Meanwhile, most of the largest, wealthiest landowners, those benefiting from the Corn Laws, were absentee landlords, Englishmen and women who hired local farmers to manage their Irish estates. “Captain" Charles Cunningham Boycott was one of these local farm owners/managers. Those tenants who could not pay their rent were evicted by the managers. Those who were evicted usually died. To argue it was not intended as “genocide” misses the point. Intended or not, it was mass murder. Ireland was teetering on the edge of a revolution.

On Tuesday, 3 July, 1880, outside the quaint village of Ballinrobe, County Mayo, three men emptied their revolvers into the head and face of twenty-nine year old David Feerick,  an agent for an absentee landlord.  No one was ever charged with that murder.  In early September, outside of the same village, “Captain” Charles Boycott, called on the tenants to harvest the oat crop of absent landlord Lord Erne. 

“Captain” Boycott would be described by the New York Times (in 1881) as 49 years old; "a red faced fellow, five feet eight inches tall, the son of a Protestant minister who had served in the British Army." He earned his title of Captain not in the military but for his daring attitude in sport. Besides managing Lord Erne's property, Boycott owned 4,000 acres of Irish farmland for himself, farmed by tenant farmers.  The day he called Lord Erne's tenants back to work Boycott also informed the tenants that their wages were being cut by almost half.  The tenants simply refused to work at those wages.

The Boycott family and servants by themselves struggled for half a day to cut and harvest the oats before admitting defeat. Mrs. Boycott then appealed to the tenants personally. They responded to her by bringing in the oat crop before the winter rains ruined it.

On Sunday, 19 September 1880,  Irish politician Charles Stuart Parnell (above), addressed a mass meeting in the town of Ennis.  Parnell called on the crowd to shun any who took over the property of an evicted tenant. “When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and the marketplace, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him severely alone — putting him into a kind of moral Coventry — isolating him from his kind like the leper of old.”  It was the birth of the modern non-violent protest. Unstated, was the reality that this was a religious war, the Catholic south of Ireland against the Protestant controlled north and England.

On Tuesday, 22 September, 1880, a local process server, under orders from "Captain Boycott",  and accompanied by police, issued eviction notices to eleven of Lord Erne's tenants.  The tenants were not surprised. Speaking of Boycott, one tenant told a local newspaper, “He treated his cattle better than he did us.”  The server would have issued even more eviction notices, but a crowd of women began to throw mud and manure and the agent and his police escort had to retreat into the Boycott home. That night, in the house of Father O'Mally, the word "Boycott", as a verb, was invented.  It was put to immediate use.

The next morning, Wednesday, 23 September, a large crowd from Ballinrobe (above) marched to the Boycott home and urged the servants to leave. By evening the Boycotts and a young niece living with them, were alone in the house.

A letter written by “Captain” Boycott was published in the London Times. It made no mention of the raising of rents, only of the refusal to pay those rents. It made no mention of the cutting of salary, only of the refusal to work. It did detail the travails of Captain Boycott and his family. His mail was not being delivered. He was followed and mocked whenever he left his farm. “The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed…”

 Harper's Weekly Illustrated News for 18 December, 1880,  reported what happened next. “A newspaper correspondent first started the idea of sending assistance to Captain Boycott…one person alone promised to get together 30,000 volunteers.  Mr Forester, Chief Secretary for Ireland, at once vetoed the project of an armed invasion…

"It was accordingly decided to pick out some fifty or sixty from the great number of Orange (Protestants) from northern Ireland who were anxious to volunteer. Under military protection (of 1,000 troops) these men harvested Captain Boycott’s crops… The cost of this singular expedition was about ten thousand pounds…” (over $200,000, today).

It took two weeks under military guard for the inexperienced Ulster men to bring in the crop of turnips, wheat and potatoes, valued by Boycott as worth about three hundred and fifty pounds ($8,000).  Mr. Parnell estimated the harvest had cost the English government “one shilling for every turnip.”

Boycott left Ireland with his family on Wednesday, the first of December, 1880,  shrouded in the back of a military ambulance and escorted by soldiers.  His exit had been achieved by nonviolence. He never returned. Some one described his exile as the “death of feudalism in Europe".   Or perhaps, with more hope, the birth of modern Ireland.

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THE GREAT KLUTZ - WILLIAM HUSKINSON

 

I can't make up my mind about William Huskinson. “Tall, slouching, and ignoble-looking”, he was

considered one of the best economic brains in England, a Tory (conservative) member of Parliament.  At the same time he also agitated for liberal issues, like equal rights for Catholics and Jews and election reform. But it wasn't William's contrariety in politics that confuses me, it was the way he kept falling over and off things. While on his honeymoon in April of 1799, a horse fell on him. Two years later he dislocated an ankle. He had broken his right arm so many times it was almost useless.  But was this genial scarecrow just a klutz, or did his bumbling rise to the exalted level of ironic? It was certainly ironic that the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was built only because of the enthusiastic intervention of the sixty year old MP from Liverpool, but it was also the L and M which was responsible for William's brutal demise. When, I wonder, does unfortunate become ironic?

William was effective in English politics because he was almost universally liked. His official biography described him as “extremely agreeable...generally cheerful, with a great deal of humor, information, and anecdote...As a speaker in the House of Commons...he had no pretensions to eloquence; his voice was feeble, and his manner ungraceful.” Still, because of his brains and his sense of humor, people tended to like him - important people, like Granville Leveson-Gower (above), the richest man in England. In Scotland, Granville, aka the Duke of Sutherland , aka the Marquess of Stafford, was reviled for his wholesale evictions of highland farmers, but in England he was respected because....well, because he was the richest man in England, and because of the two things he had inherited from his in-laws - his talent for “absorbing heiresses” (he outlived three wives) and what he had inherited from his third' wife's uncle, the first “true canal” in England, the Bridgewater.

After its opening in 1761 the 39 mile long Blackwater Canal (above) had cut the price of coal powering the linen mills in Manchester by half, while making the first Earl of Bridgewater very wealthy. In 1776 a connection was cut to the river Mersey which allowed the finished Manchester fabrics to be inexpensively shipped out of the port of Liverpool, the transport taking only 30 hours, and thus making the Earl even richer. So it was no surprise that Granville, who inherited the canal in 1803, was not anxious to see Manchester wool merchants build a railroad and cut into his profits. Even with the canal, it cost as much to move the finish garments to Liverpool as it had cost to ship the raw cotton from America. Granville successfully fought the railroad for years, until the Liverpool MP,  William Huskinson, suggested to his fiend that it might be more profitable joining the Manchester merchants rather then fighting them. 

With Wilkinson’s adroit assistance, a deal was struck. Granville became a partner in the railroad. And on Wednesday 15 September, 1830, a gala grand opening was staged for the 35 mile long Liverpool to Manchester Railroad, including a “whistle stop” visit (the very first in history) from the man who had beaten Napoleon, the Prime Minister, one time friend and ex-political ally of William Huskinson, Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington.

As a politician the Duke (above) was the perfect model of modern major General. He gave ground where it cost him little, as when he urged the repeal of laws restricting Catholics. But he dug in against repeal of the infamous Corn Laws. These slapped taxes on any grain exports from England, and just made things worse for the Irish starving from the potato famine. But the “Iron Duke” was a landowner and willing to defend the Corn Laws to the last breath of the last Irishman.

William Huskinson grew so frustrated with the Duke, he resigned from the government. However his resignation had not driven the Duke to back down, and William was hoping the ceremonies around the opening of the railroad would give him a chance to repair his relationship with his old friend Wellesley.

The Manchester and Liverpool railroad was the invention of George Stephenson, who had even manufactured a prototype locomotive – the Rocket - for the system. Stephenson had insisted on two tracks, one westbound from Manchester to Liverpool, and the other eastbound, so the line could safely carry twice as many trains. It was a good idea, but doubled the cost of construction. So Stephenson had saved money by placing all four of the rails equal distance apart.

His rational was that this not only eliminated an enormous amount of grading, but should a train have to carry anything wider than eight feet, it could simply shift to the two center rails, providing more elbow room on either side. What Stephenson could not know was that as speeds increased in the future, passing carriages would create a lower air pressure between them which, which would suck the carriages toward each other. That was one of the things experience would teach railroad engineers like Stephenson. And what happened this opening day, would teach them a few other things.

There were eight separate inaugural passenger trains which left Liverpool beginning at eleven that morning, The Duke's train was first on the eastbound tracks, pulled by the 14 horse power engine named the Northumberland, and made up of a car carrying a band (above), followed by six carriages each carrying 12 to 24 passengers each.  In the carriage just in front of the Duke's sat William Huskinson with his wife Emily, and several important politicians. 

The other seven trains, with about 60 passengers per car, traveled eastward on the westbound tracks, leap frogging the Duke's train, to provide numerous opportunities for all the celebrants to cheer and laugh and stare at the victor of Waterloo as the trains climbed their way the 35 miles uphill toward Manchester.

The trains all paused at Parkside station, an hour out of Liverpool and about halfway to Manchester.

At Parkside (above) the Duke's train stopped, while the Phoenix and the North Star trains passed ("like the whizzing of a cannon ball", said the Duke) with many shouts and cheers. Then it waited a few hundred yards beyond the station. As the water tank of the engine Northumberland was slowly refilled, about 50 men disembarked and walked between the rails to stretch their legs and probably unload their personal water  tanks, in a light drizzle.

William Holmes, the Chief Tory Whip suggested this would be a prime opportunity for William Huskinson to bond with the Prime Minister,  The two men walked the few yards back to the Duke's carriage where William extended a hand. The Duke, happy at seeing his old friend again, grasped William's hand firmly. They were about to speak when a shout went out, “An engine is approaching, take care gentlemen!”  In future decades this would be shortened to either "Look Out!" or "Heads Up!"

It was the Rocket (above), Stephenson's prototype, pulling another train of passenger cars. The driver, Joseph Locke, saw the men on the tracks about 80 feet ahead of him. There was plenty of time to stop, except the Rocket had no brakes. And no whistle to warn anyone on the tracks.  Nobody had thought of it.  Locke threw the little engine into reverse. There was still ample time to avoid injury, unless you were a major klutz –  like guess who. 

All the other men in the way managed to easily escape, either being pulled into the Duke's car, or running the ten feet or so across the tracks. But William Huskinson could not make up his mind. Initially the Duke tried to lift the scarecrow into his car, but William yanked free and started to dash across the tracks. Then, abruptly he changed his mind and returned to the car's side. The Duke shouted, “"For God's sake, Mr Huskisson, be firm!" and grabbed for him again. But William dodged rescue and bolted as if to cross the tracks yet again. 

Some one threw open the door of the Duke's car suddenly, and William reversed course a third time,  and jumped for the open door. He grabbed onto it just as the Rocket smashed it to smithereens. Huskinson, said eyewitness Harriet Arbuthnot, “was... thrown down and the engine passed over his leg and thigh, crushing it in a most frightful way. It is impossible to give an idea...of the piercing shrieks of his unfortunate wife, who was in the car (ahead).”

They dumped the band, because their car was the only one with a flat bottom, and carrying the right Honorable Huskinson on a door ripped off a track side shack, placed him gently aboard. The rest of the cars were then detached, Stephenson opened the throttles full, and the engine, the coal car, the wounded man and two doctors headed for Manchester at 40 miles an hour. 

Crowds cheered as the speeding machine raced past them. It was perhaps the fastest humans had ever traveled, except for the few unfortunates fired from a catapult. At this rate they would have made it to Manchester in less than half an hour, except ….except the clouds opened up and a storm broke upon the desperate mission.  The engine was forced to slow as it was felt the wet tracks could not afford traction.  

As they approached the little village of Eccles, less than four miles from Manchester, the conditions forced them to stop, supported by Huskinson who said he had a good friend in the village, the Reverend Thomas Blackburne. 

They managed to lug William up the steep slope to the village, dropping William a couple of times before depositing him on a couch in the vicarage. The Reverend Blackburne was not there, of course. He was in Manchester, waiting with the crowds to welcome the triumphant voyagers. Mrs. Blackburne, who was home, served tea.

“Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine" noted that back at Parkside station, after much discussion, “The final decision being in favor of advancing, seats were resumed, and we moved on; but ...the whole now wore the somber aspect of a funeral procession. The military band was left to return as it could; I saw them, crest-fallen, picking their way homeward through the mud and mire...” At about nine that night William Huskinson died in a generous laudanum haze - generally considered the first man ever killed by a railroad locomotive.  An inquest was opened the very next morning, but the instant the jury seemed to show an interest in any failure by railroad staff or or it's design, it was pulled up by the coroner. Within a few hours, the verdict was “accidental death”. It does not seem Emily Huskinson agreed.

Half the population of Liverpool, about 69,000 people, attended William Huskinson''s funeral on Friday 24 September,  1830. Emily did not. She never returned to Liverpool again, and died in 1856, never having traveled on a train again. Would you?

Meanwhile the publicity surrounding the accident attracted passengers to the new rail line. In the next year half a million people rode the Liverpool and Manchester line at 7 shillings for the two hour round trip. All future locomotives built by George Stephenson were fitted with hand brakes and steam whistles. And Stephenson never again built a two track line with so little room for error between the rails. 

But the question remains unanswered to this day - was William Huskinson's death merely a  tragedy, or was it ironic? He was, after all, run over by the railroad he had done so much to get built.

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