CT Blue

Much has been written about the fact, as reported by the Times, that the banks, not being satisfied with using our money to gamble, are now using it to corner the market in metals, enabled as always by a compliant Fed and Congress. Read the Times article for the details, if you haven’t already. It’s almost comical if it wasn’t so tragic; they have to shift the metal from warehouse to warehouse in order to keep the market cornered. (So, for once, they’re creating jobs, for the guys that shift the metal from place to place) There’s comment here and here, and others scattered around the web, but I want to simply ask a question that I don’t think has been asked elsewhere. Consider this, particularly the stuff in bold face:

Before Goldman bought Metro International three years ago, warehouse customers used to wait an average of six weeks for their purchases to be located, retrieved by forklift and delivered to factories. But now that Goldman owns the company, the wait has grown more than 20-fold — to more than 16 months, according to industry records.

Longer waits might be written off as an aggravation, but they also make aluminum more expensive nearly everywhere in the country because of the arcane formula used to determine the cost of the metal on the spot market. The delays are so acute that Coca-Cola and many other manufacturers avoid buying aluminum stored here. Nonetheless, they still pay the higher price.

(via A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold – NYTimes.com)

So my question is, as the title suggests: Don’t Coca-Cola, Pepsi, the Auto Companies, or the various corporations that still make real things out of aluminum own any Senators? Is class solidarity so strong among the captains of industry that they prefer to get hosed by the banks to turning on the bankers? Can they really pass on the increased costs to their customers without losing sales, given the ever increasing poverty of the masses? Or, do the prefer to absorb the loss rather than put pressure on Congress to give them some relief. Where are the armies of lobbyists seeking to stop this highway robbery?

This weird disconnect between what would appear to be the enlightened self interests of corporations and what they actually do is not confined to their response to rent seeking bankers. It seems that corporations are peculiarly reluctant to advocate for their own self interest when that interest happens to coincide with the interests of the other kind of people; the ones that get born instead of formed at the Secretary of State’s office. Most of our corporations, (think GM, for example) would benefit from a single payer health care system that would relieve them of the cost and obligation of providing health care to their employees. Those costs almost bankrupted GM. But do they ever advocate for a sane health care system that would save them gobs of money? Answer: No. On the other hand, as soon as someone proposes any regulation that might make the air a bit cleaner, or the climate a bit healthier, they’re out in force to stop it, though the financial impact on them is as nothing compared to health care costs.

Personally, I think it gets back to what I’ve often said is the guiding principal of the corporate mind: It is not enough that they succeed, everyone else must fail.