Big is bad. Small is fighting back. Mutual is the answer.

Banks…..George Osborne has caught the public mood says Treasury source

In the US late yesterday afternoon, an organised demonstration took place in the lobby of Bank of America. The folks there weren’t wearing hoodies and carrying placards saying ‘Smash Capitalism’. Every one of the 600 is (or was) a homeowner in the Washington DC  area. Their organisation is called Bill the Banks.

The reason I applaud this (and abhor the clowns who’ve been occupying Barclays over here) is because these are real people whose real lives are being ruined by bare-faced globalist greed – not the SWP with a few students swinging from the chandeliers. Bill the Banks is designed – using the American verb ‘bill’ – to make the banks pay up for the social damage they’ve wrought. Rather than mincing about like Julian Assange and making increasingly empty threats about leaks of BoA data, these unfortunates pitched up and said, in the nation’s capital, “Enough is enough”.

Most of America is asleep as I write (Tuesday 13:15 GMT) so I’ve no idea what the outcome of this gentle riot was. But you can find out more about it at this site, Make Wall Street Pay. There is no Dave Leninspart syntax, only the odd clenched fist. There is no yelling, just an avalanche of facts. It is an exemplary organisation showing how anti-banking protest can be carried out rationally, effectively, and with dignity.

Over in the UK, meanwhile, the battle lines are being drawn at a regulatory/reform level. A Treasury source told Reuters yesterday that no banker should get too smug about the outcome. I’m grateful to Reuters for this information, as my Treasury mole retired last year and is yet to be replaced. But the Reuters take on things is interesting:

‘”If anyone thinks that the Treasury has had anything but an open mind on what the Commission might report, then they are indulging in wishful thinking,” the source told Reuters.

Osborne’s comments at the weekend shed further light on his combative stance. He defended Mervyn King — governor of the Bank of England, after he called for urgent reform of the industry and warned about the risk of a fresh financial crisis.’ See The Slog piece on this here.

The Slog has said for some time that the Chancellor is a far, far better judge of the national mood than Cameron. My sense is that George Osborne is preparing to make a shrewd political move…and is basing that on having taken the wind direction of public feeling.

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We could well be seeing the beginnings of a big power transfer here. Financial and economic meltdown will act as a catalyst I’m sure, but even so it is going to be drawn out, messy and – potentially – very nasty.

I’m not just referring to BoA demos. I’m taking about fossils like GM, bailed out for nakedly political reasons. The ageing giant sells cars most of the world doesn’t want. It’s already cost the US citizen a fortune, having milked itself for years before then. A year into the mission, it’s in a parlous state again: shares are at the lowest point since its IPO – the ‘I’ in that I assume being ironic – and nobody knows what to do.

I’m talking about Washington. It just posted its biggest ever deficit (again) and has a debt today that uses up 15% of all tax revenue in the States….this at a time when rates are at rock bottom levels. A return to even 3% would double that first percentage. Think about it: one third of all tax intake going to pay past debts run up by pea-brained Presidents and uncompetitive multinationals.

Would you give a triple A to that sovereign State? Yet another reason why Bernanke wants to sit firmly on the rates-gusher.

I’m talking about internet pirates that make the Somalian variety look veritably Gilbert & Sullivan by comparison. Not the loons who send us pidgin-English porn every day suggesting our wives aren’t fulfilled, but people like Microsoft, Google (now being sued by this site for taking ads here without my permission), Orange, and Newscorp via Apple. As Eben Moglen (an American free-software passionada) noted in a recent uk column:

‘The internet can be completely controlled, filtered, monitored and surveilled, giving power the most overwhelming conceivable advantage over freedom…..Which way the network behaves is determined solely by the software that comprises it. Freedom of the press, information and thought itself are now “implemented” rather than “declared”, “protected” or “guaranteed”.’

Trust me, the bloke’s got this spot on: Washington has already wimped out of Net neutrality. The Murdochian gargoyles could wind up winning the Web. (They already have in Australia).

I’m talking about banks holding a gun to the head of government – as The Slog posted recently. This post – Time to Decide, Banks v People – has now attracted 4,200 hits worldwide – that’s big for me. Somehow – and it’s been a slow burn – this has tapped into a very big seam of disgust and resentment.

Something is starting to happen here, and we need to strike while the iron’s hot.

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As long as there is no socially benign culture binding it together, big is always bad. It doesn’t matter whether this is the Internal Revenue Service, Google, Microsoft, BoA , the TUC or Tesco: no culture = no limits. I spent over 30 years observing it in both good and bad forms, and there is no denying the universality of the rule: Waitrose employs smart people who care, and Tesco employs rabid monopolists who don’t give a toss how many communities they pillage. The difference is apparent from the second you walk in the door, and gets increasingly obvious when you examine their real (as opposed to stated) policy objectives.

Politically, in our current setup there is no strong-culture Party to mirror these examples. By and large, the Conservatives trust business and are wary of the People, while Labour puts a naive, ignorant trust in the People – and is wary of all business. But neither has a culture beyond power-worship, and that’s as malign as a culture can get.

The only thing all our MP-represented Parties (including the Greens) have in common is that they are Biggist, in the sense that Ms Harman is feminist: they cannot see the world through any medium other than this cloudy prism. Tories like big banks and big media, and Labour likes big Departments and big Unions. It tidies up the whole contact thing, you see: when you need the money, an’ all.

This is the single biggest factor that leads me to keep banging on about the irrelevance of Left v Right. Accepting that as a construct for Western socio-political thought today is exactly the same as watching the shower scene from Psycho, and saying “The knife did it”.

We can’t explain a new situation by blaming elements of the past. And I really do not think we are looking for a better wheel here. We are simply in search of a genuine alternative that will serve us better in many cases from now on. Working cultures that produce more than enough for everyone, reward talent, and help society rather than bankrupting it.

The model, I increasingly believe, is the mutual model: the only one to date that has never failed. And I don’t mean by that, ‘no mutualist organisation has ever gone under’. Of course they have, because the world is full of people who are consummately incompetent. I mean that no mutual department store, grocer, bank or building society has ever asked the taxpayer to bail it out.

Now you cannot say that about either State industries or Banks. Historically, they have been as badly managed and fiscally draining as each other.

I’m not calling for everything to be mutual: mutual societies tend to share the proceeds in an existing sector, whereas we need a constant stream of entrepreneurial wealth-creators trailblazing new sectors. But I am calling for a number of socio-public sectors to to be mutualised.

Hold your breath, because this is the radical part. The Biggies I would mutualise are the Civil Service (including the Revenue), Education, Health (with an open-market competitor), retail banking, water supply, transport, local/community government – and all remaining quangos like The British Council.

No more monopolies. No more cosy fatties. No more civil servants paid by government ( civil service departments would be employed by mutual societies, not the taxpayer). No more bailouts. No more gold-plated pensions. No more pin-striped FCO idiots. No more monopolist troughing. Everyone accountable to the Members. And far, far lower taxes.

Now, anyone imagining that the current Humphreys, Kinnocks and Coulsons would wear this level a playing field really are away with the fairies. To get this into our system, we need a powerful political movement that will remain committed to the mutualisation (as opposed to privatisation) of vital social administration and distribution.

This movement should be itself mutually capitalised. It should have mutualised media that support its aims – a project I’m trying to develop at the moment, for which all ideas will be gratefully (nay, desperately) appreciated.

It should not set out to destroy democratic politics, the capitalist motive, or the forces working to protect our nation from genuine threats. But it should present a viable, more balanced and far less costly alternative to the big globalists, the big moguls, the big mandarins, and the big monopolists.

As a starting point, its aim should be the removal of all monied influence from the business of politics. Once we have cut the umbilical cord between powerful money and political Parties, then and only then will we be able to move towards social honesty and the original Benthamite ethic: the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Whatever your politics or nationality, what I’m talking about here is a more open society, a more equable society, a more creative society, and greater accountability. It doesn’t require bitter and twisted revolutionaries – just determination, and continued access to a free internet.

Pass this piece along wherever you want – no accreditation or links required. And thanks for reading.