How Small is $13 Billion?

How small is $13 billion? Rana Foroohar, in her Curious Capitalist column recently (Time, Nov 4, 2013) writes of the $13 billion settlement JPMorgan Chase will pay the U.S. government over alleged misdeeds in selling mortgage-backed securities….those wonder things that were a root cause of the 2008 financial deal. The trouble with that $13 billion is that it’s not only nothing to JPMorgan (they earned that same amount in profit in the first 2 quarters of 2013) but Foroohar argues, and I have heard others say the same in the last year, the financial system today is not safer than it was before the great collapse. Today, for example, 5 years after the crisis, only 40% of the so-called big reform law (Dodd-Frank) rules have been established. What’s troubling to me is that these financial problems are both systemic (bank and financial infrastructure of policies and procedures and laws) and personal (JBMorgan has a person as the CEO, Jamie Dimon, not a “system”), and although the “system” hides behind its complexity to do its damaging, not to say also evil, bidding and although the person hides behind the “system” to do the same, both are fundamentally human constructions that can be understood, addressed and changed. Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda writes in her compelling new book, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation (2013), “while structural evil may be beyond the power of individuals to counter, it is composed of power arrangements and other factors that are humanly constructed and therefore may be dismantled by other human decisions and collective actions.” I may not be able to go out today as one person with dismay and anger and change the way JPMorgan Chase pays its fines or does its business, but we together can. We set up the laws (and let’s be thankful we live in a nation of laws even as skewed as they can many times be) and we can take them down and change them. Moreover, we are the stakeholders in the companies that are justifying their actions that are devastating the economic and environmental landscape with being bound by fiduciary responsibility to provide a monetary profit for us. It’s not them. It’s us. We are either doing all this damage or we are allowing it to happen. We need people in business and finance that have the brains for all the complexity to also have the heart to make it right. We need government officials with the wherewithal to listen well and act with courage. We need a people who can smell a rat, stop their own complicity in the mess, stop buying products and investing in companies that have exploitative and unsustainable practices and start electing officials willing to govern (and pay the price of non-election in the next cycle if need be) instead of grandstand.