The Price of Everything...

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Two things conjoined randomly today: a piece in the Guardian online - I assume it was in today's Observer, but we haven't ventured forth for a print paper today - and a link that Joe sent me to a piece in The Conversation: an estimable online journal I've referred to before. The first refers to US author Sarah Jaffe's book 'Work Won’t Love You Back', in which she outlines the precarious and fragmentary state of the contemporary world of work and essentially how the world seems to hold the least socially valuable occupations in the highest esteem whilst treating the most essential as somehow inferior and unworthy of appropriate remuneration or security: viz the 'gig' economy etc. The second is about revenge: that of an online crowdsourced kick-back at Wall St. and that sub-class of traders known as 'short-sellers'.

In the financial world, brokers and traders earn big bucks and are looked upon as shining exemplars of the beauty of the capitalist system. Unlike in the real world, where those of us who do (or did - retiree speaking) essential jobs are generally treated like second-class citizens at best, or for the most part, like shit. Short sellers are the Del-boys of the trading world: they borrow people's stuff in the form of shares; sell that stuff on in the hope that the value of that stuff will drop, and then buy it back at a lower price than they paid for it, in order to give that stuff back to its original owners, and pocket the difference.

Sound dodgy? Perfectly legal. But morally untenable, as their activities and the knock-on effects of them can effectively destroy companies by artificially pushing their value down: a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. This can of course go wrong, and like any bookmaker knows, you have to spread and lay off your bets to ensure you don't shoot yourself in the wallet; but generally it's a way of making money out of nothing: in other words, a kind of allowable fraud/gambling thing. Just the sort of business that our current government and PM think is the backbone of the country and laudable in every respect.

The problem with a system that is otherwise opaque to those not in the club and which relies on said inside knowledge to succeed, is when someone from outside that club who understands the system decides to play the gamblers at their own game and test its 'fairness'. Enter the cyber Robin Hoods et al who, knowing that a certain company, evidently dear to their collective hearts was being shorted, decided on actions that pushed the share price of the company up by 1700% in less than a month (read the original article for details on how) and resulted in $6 billion losses for the hedge funds and short-sellers involved.

Knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing: one thing this world sorely needs, is for more positive action in turning the tide on the excremental flow of greed that is currently the driver of everything, but which is rapidly sucking the very life out of us and our planet: a situation that cannot be allowed to continue. Examples like the one above and allusions made by Sarah Jaffe to online Labour activism as being the natural way forward to stem that tide should be at the forefront of our consciousness as we move forward, past our current virus-laden impasse. Biden in the White House stomping on the fossil-fuel industries is a good start: we need to follow his lead on that, healthcare, benefits and God knows what else, to reverse the damage that the short-sellers of this world have done to us.

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