irish and cantona

'Red' Will' Danaher, "So, the IRA's in this too, huh?"

Hugh Forbes, "If it were 'Red Will' Danaher, not a scorched stone of your fine house be standing."

Michaleen Flynn, "A beautiful sentiment."
-- John Ford's, The Quiet Man

There's no denying this world is full of prejudice. And if you spent some time in non-industrial areas of this planet, you'd find one of the greatest prejudices is against rural farming folks from city slickers. South America, Africa, Indonesia, you hear the urbanites level similar charges, "lazy and stupid." Amongst renown political thinkers, in Europe and America, where rural life has mostly disappeared, you'd be hard pressed to find a good word for farmers over the past couple centuries, most took Marx's view of the "idiocy of rural life." Probably, the greatest exception was Jefferson, and there is many reasons for this, but one of the biggest was Jefferson's view that a small farm provided the population the economic power and independence they needed to be democratic citizens. But Jefferson's yeoman farmer republic passed from scene well over a century ago, and in the industrial age, America never found too great an answer to replace the elegance of Jefferson's small farm economic democracy. Maybe unions, but workers quickly replaced farmers in prejudice, and in the last four decades as Wall Street and the bankers sold-off American industry, it was met with little opposition, particularly from the servants class which replaced it.

The Irish were well behind much of the continent and the US in industrialization, in fact, it's been the last several decades that the nation really began to industrialize. So, we can look at Sinn Fein's little late response to banking events as maybe a remnant of a still slower rural life, but they certainly make up for it with a little Irish flair and it looks like the government will fall.

But this begs the question, what's the excuse for no American response to our banking crimes? How long the list brothers and sisters if we were to charge "economic treason," filled with the most illustrious Democrats and Republicans of the past several decades. How do we begin the long road to justice? How do we begin the discussion on reforming democracy, and what in the 21st century is the Jeffersonian equivalent of the yeoman farm, providing economic independence necessary for democratic citizenry?

The Guardian has a piece(tx yves) on football legend Eric Cantona calling for an organized banking panic. The whole concept has a beauty in its turning on its head the historical view of panics. It also can start people questioning what really is banking and how is it reformed so that its decision making is much more widely spread across society? How do we make banking more democratic? One can judge from the response of the spokeswomen for the French Banking Federation that it makes officialdom nervous:

"My first reaction is to laugh. It is totally idiotic," she told the Observer. "One of the main roles of a bank is to keep money safe. This appeal will give great pleasure to thieves, I would have thought."

But what of the thievery that is modern banking mademoiselle? Isn't it all our responsibility to not be victims? And understand brothers and sisters, the first reaction to any establishment against a threat is to make it ridiculous, "to laugh." Mr. Cantona is on to something.

Check out Move your Money for an American effort.