By Tim Gillette, Community Voices 

For the past six months I have been without a consistent paycheck. While I have great sympathy for my fellow workers in other industries, I was not downsized in a company that had a dip in profits. I was displaced (a state term to mean that the jobs are gone from my industry and are not expected to return in the near future) because the speculators left the housing market and the slick mortgage tycoons put people in mortgages that they knew would go upside down. I realize that is an over simplification, but it gets at my point.

Tim Gillette

Whether we understand it or not, our individual actions have an effect on the broader society. If we decide to water our lawns in a drought, we will see a higher cost applied to everyone’s bill because there is a water shortage. When we drive an overly large vehicle, we will see higher gas prices and more smog. When we use fluorescent lights, instead of incandescent, we will see a reduction in energy costs to us and lower electric prices overall because we don’t need a new power plant right now. The intentions, or lack of them, for our actions make no difference. The old physics theorem can be aptly applied here: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

At present, our banks are stinging because they could not reign in their own greed. They are writing off huge amounts of mortgages and loans. The problem is that the consequences of their combined actions not only affects their shareholders, but also the larger society: i.e. the new rules in the industry restrict even the more ordinary sources of credit that help fuel our capitalistic ways, the stock market is falling precipitously, affecting pension funds and retirement savings for millions of Americans.  

I am an open market kind of guy. I like the technologies that have come into being and gone down in price because our market-driven philosophies work. However, we know the way greed can mess up a nation and yet we put no real safeguards in to protect the ordinary people of our society. While greed is a part of the incentive nature of our capitalistic ways, if it is allowed to operate freely without restriction it will always do damage to someone. We saw it in the “dot com” era boom and bust and are yet to experience the fullness of it in the crash of the housing market.

Our track record is poor. Hostile takeovers have consistently made people rich by stripping the rightful retirement funds of the common worker, leaving many with little hope of a comfortable retirement. In the dot com era, we saw retirees that still had pensions lose one-third of the value as greedy people let their passions run wild. In the present day we are once again seeing the speculators making money on the backs of people who are living on a margin. Vulnerable people and the middle class are losing their homes in record numbers because appropriate controls have not been applied until the damage is done.

It is interesting to me that in a society where tobacco was seen as a real danger and dealt with harshly that fraud and greed are allowed again and again to run over its citizens. My fear is that my children’s generation will reap the whirlwind of our bad choices and unwillingness to make hard decisions – to tame our greed.

Yes, I am unemployed. And you could call it sour grapes. But what ticks me off is top executives in companies that are ineffectively managed still receiving multi-million dollar raises and bonuses. There will be consequences for allowing uncontrolled greed to run wild in our nation. 

(Tim Gillette is one of about 10 people in the Savage community who write for Community Voices. This column features a different writer each week and is one of several opinion and commentary pieces appearing regularly in this newspaper.)