Flame and shame

There is something utterly compelling in the image of the forest fire and its savannah cousin, the brush fire. This is the element by which we learned to roast our food. By allowing us to keep warm in winter, it facilitated our movement northwards to these and other climatically challenged places. The way the fires start, the importance of underlying conditions to their spread and the speed and deadly unpredictability with which they move, all lend themselves to wild imaginings and ripe analogies.

Take the recent forest fires in Arizona and elsewhere. Because of prevailing conditions, they were large and almost impossible to control. Near the town of Show Low, two of them merged into what was described as a “35-metre high wall of fire, advancing on a two to three mile front, leaping natural and artificial fire breaks”. This fire alone consumed many hundreds of homes and 700 square miles of forest. That’s equal to 2% of Ireland. And there were others, in six other US States, all potentially as devastating. Indeed, they were so vast that their smoke merged from state to state, an enormous pall that might well lower temperatures on a national scale...

It is impossible to resist this enormous conflagration as a metaphor for what is unfolding in American, and by extension world, capitalism. We should worry because, just as those forest and brush fires block out the sun and hoover up oxygen, the pyres of capitalism will suck the energy, and perhaps the meaning, out of Ireland’s fledgeling economic recovery. We are, after all, as the present Tanaiste proudly put it, closer to Boston than Berlin. A time may come when we will choke on that.

The present problems may seem to stem from accounting and auditing irregularities designed to maintain, and if at all possible boost, earnings and share prices. This is done to satisfy investor demand, but also to boost the earnings of chief executives, many of whom are paid on the basis of results. Since they often hold extensive stock options to boot, boosting the value of shares increases their own net worth.

There’s Arthur Anderson, Enron and more recently WorldCom. Others cascade in their wake – a domino effect of almost cataclysmic proportions for champions of American corporatism, not to mention pension funds.

By way of example, it has emerged that WorldCom inflated its profits in a $3.8billion accounting fraud. Imagine! And nobody knows how bad it will get, because nobody knows how deep it runs.

It’s hardly surprising that the bould President Bush, not to mention senior members of his team, has been huffing and puffing about low morals in high places and the need to imprison the guilty. And chief executives and analysts are now being equated with crooks (by comedians, for example) much like lawyers and estate agents.

But what’s happening runs deeper. There’s now a fundamental loss of faith and confidence in America. Writing in the Irish Times, Conor O’Clery described the WorldCom collapse as “the tipping point, the event that brought all the corporate frauds and deceits to a critical mass”.

In our conflagrational metaphor, this is analogous to the point where the forest fires converge. Something far bigger and more dangerous is created. Those fighting the fires told of trees exploding, of sparks cascading hundreds of metres, of uncontrollable and unpredictable outbreaks, of homes and villages and stock being consumed, of hell on earth.

The easy explanation is individual corruptibility and greed. But many are now arguing that it runs deeper. Will Hutton, writing in The Observer, described it as a matter of systemic deformation, caused by a “conservative ideological barrage, now a generation old”. You could call it Reaganism, or Thatcherism, or free-market fundamentalism – the argument that everything must be pro-market, pro-business, pro-shareholder.

As is clear from the recently published Ansbacher report, we have our indigenous frauds and scandals as well. And they didn’t need the ideological underpinning of monetarism or far-right conservatism. They grew up all on their own.

It is true that the late Des Traynor was the greaser of the wheels, and it is clear that many of his clients were in the dark as to what he was up to. Others didn’t even know accounts had been opened in their names. But all in all, the degree to which pillars of society were complicit in tax evasion has surprised many.

For at least a generation, we had a cash culture. Nod and wink. What the tax-man doesn’t know... And many of those yelling for revenge on the wealthy paid cash to plumbers, electricians, housepainters and mechanics for their services. Some of those making most noise themselves got paid ‘off the books’. Meantime, not only was the Government, and therefore the people, defrauded, but businesses who paid their employees’ taxes and who charged VAT were driven to the wall.

This sense that we can have whatever we want is part of the kindling for these massive frauds and corruptions. Sometimes you’d really be tempted to move to another planet, like America’s Pilgrim Fathers. But then a lot of what is wrong with America today can be traced back to their ancestors and their successors’, ‘rugged independence’, a trait celebrated by Mary Harney in her Boston or Berlin speech. Why destroy another planet? Why bring our failings onto an interplanetary scale?

No, we have to find solutions in our own world. These fires are all our own.