CommonDreams: The Betrayal of The Commons

[marmar]

Published on Friday, December 19, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
The Betrayal of The Commons
by Richard Thieme


The cornerstone of capitalism, it has been said, is a handshake.

The legal embellishments that constitute the law books lining the shelves of any lawyer, those laws are footnotes to the many ways people have betrayed trust, betrayed the letter of the law, the spirit of the contract, the meaning of the handshake.

Trust, not money, makes the world go around. Money is an emblem of the exchange of trust. It doesn't exist except as an invention.

And trust has been broken.

Yes, it's all smoke and mirrors, and everyone who looked already knew that. That isn't news. The news, as Alan Greenspan said pathetically in front of Congress, was that the moguls and bankers and investment gurus did not act according to their own self interest. They did not just risky things but insanely stupid risky things and thought they could hide from their karma. They betrayed the trust of one another when they made deals, invented bogus instruments or used good ones unwisely, and they betrayed the trust of all of us. Nor will they pay the penalty they should. They never do. They never do.

Every structure built to ensure trust of those people and their institutions is now suspect. Every one.

We trusted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to keep good books and not take risks beyond their ability to manage risk or ours to understand what they were doing. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/12/19-1