NFMP

NIMBY (not in my back yard) is a well-known acronym for the previous decade. The country needed development and infrastructure, like highways, energy plants, hospitals and sewage plants, not to mention lots of prisons. Of course no one wanted to sit in back road two-lane traffic, or dwell in their own house in the dark or drive an hour to an emergency room or, needless to say, use an outhouse for lack of a hookup to a waste treatment plant. But, someone else’s backyard was always a better site for this necessary infrastructure. Local and state level politicians were in a tight bind as they ducked protests over location while trying to deliver the accoutrements of modern civilization to their constituents. Usually poorer neighborhoods, those without wealth and clout, ended up with the development.

That was so then. Now we have a different movie running from the last reel to the first. We don’t have plans to build much. We can’t afford anything, and may have overbuilt things like prisons, at the expense of things like schools. (In California in the last decade they have built 23 new prisons and one new university.) What we have moved on to is NFMP (not from my pocket). The trend is to be self-absorbed and demand sacrifice, smaller raises to delayed retirement, but always from someone else.

Greece, the center of classical learning four thousand years ago, is once again leading the way. Three people have actually died from mortally selfish actions when violent NFMP protestors threw firebombs at a bank and incinerated the tellers.

The NFMP syndrome is global, or at least that part of the globe that embraces over-entitled, debt ridden growth, which is to say, the entire Western world. From Athens to California from Albany to Iceland and on to France, someone else should pick up the check. In the developed world, where transfer payments and government payrolls are around half of all economic activity, there is a considerable constituency for keeping the cash flow spigot on full. Behaviorists have multiple theories about how present realities become entitlements, how the brain assumes rights and privileges are norms and how their withdrawal triggers feelings of anger and rage.

The NFMP person feels their social contract has been voided. This contract went something like this. We’ll vote in a government that promises to pay us for minimal output. For government employees this meant very early retirement, full health care coverage, unduplicatable pensions (guaranteed through unrealistic investment/payout assumptions), no termination clauses, lifetime inflation protection, etc. Now the promiser of this non-reality, i.e., the government, can’t make good.

Even worse, is that the NFMP person feels that others are receiving even more generous benefits like bailout money, insider stock tips and backdated stock options. This allows the NFMP to cast themselves as the darling of the Western world…the victim. The government that minimizes this reality does so at its own peril. Why do you think the Icelanders voted against the bailout of the Icesave banks? Why do you think the E.U. just forked over a trillion euros to PIIGS? They did so because they saw the depth of anger at those who threatened their NFMP mentality. Governments could go down, politicians could get sent home, governors, senators and legislators could become as unemployed as their constituents. Here, in the U.S., the anger is so real that a quasi-nihilist Tea Party has arisen to start government over.

The NFMP list of bad guys -- bankers, stockbrokers, corporations and politicians -- sounds suspiciously like the Tea Party’s list, doesn’t it? Someone has not just moved the NFMP’s cheese, they have made off with it. This populist rage exposes the unsound entitlement spending embedded in the Western economies.

Unfortunately, there is a large dose of truth in this. The elite of the Western world from Athens to Albany have mimicked the worst of the Russian nobility in the Czarist days. They have looted their countries for their selfish pleasures. Wage disparities, lifestyles, indulgences of the corporate and fiscal elites versus the civil servant are at an unstable disproportion. In the U.S., two-thirds of the gains in wealth in the last decade went to the top one percent of the population. The rich are living visibly large, in essence waving a red cape at a bull. There is no sense of shared sacrifice, no dollar-a-year man needed apply to bail out GM. In fact a part timer there walked away with millions for a few month’s work. The only way to describe the salaries and stock payouts of finance industry executives is thievery. It’s every person for themselves, but the post-robbery getaway car is now a Lear jet.

If the reaction by the NFMPs in Greece, California, New York, and countless other countries and states is as it appears to be, we’re in for a long, contentious struggle.