Milo Minderbinder

Milo Minderbinder is a character in Joseph Heller’s satirical novel Catch-22. He is a strange combination of a rigidly rule-based thinker and a completely amoral and greedy entrepreneur. The book centers around the activities of an American bomber squadron during World War II, and Milo is the mess officer. He expands a scheme to get fresh eggs for the officer’s mess into a trans-national enterprise. I have been thinking about the character of late, and how prescient Heller was in creating him.

One trigger was reading about automated computer stock trading. Computers loaded with complex algorithms track the tiny second-to-second movements in a stock price and buy and sell the stock multiple times to accrue tiny percentages on huge volumes. A faster than usual automated sale by a mutual fund triggered the “flash crash” last May, when New York Stock Exchange plunged hundreds of points and recovered in a few hours. Minderbinder started out by buying eggs in one country for a penny each, selling them for a few cents more elsewhere, buying them again, and then selling them to the officer’s mess. He eventually put in an order for all the cotton in Egypt, but couldn’t get rid of it because everyone he tried to sell it to had an outstanding order to sell it to him.

That buy-sell-buy-sell aspect aside, I am struck by what a confusing mess the stock market has become at a time when more and more people have based their retirement on their retail holdings in the market. The fixed benefit pension is nearly gone, replaced by casino gambling dressed up as investment. And so we all follow the ups and downs of the Dow Jones Average, the S&P 500, and our own 401k portfolios. Minderbinder co-opted objections to his various betrayals of the Allied cause by giving everyone a share in “M&M Enterprises.” His justification for any exploitation of his comrades is “everyone has a share!” We, too, have been co-opted into the service of corporate agendas, however corrupt, short-sighted, and ultimately destructive, because our comfort in retirement depends upon investor confidence. We can’t rein in the psychopathic idiocy too much, because the Roth IRA is looking a bit shaky and we don’t like the taste of cat food.

Ok, so Kellogg, Brown, & Root had U.S. troops risk (and lose) their lives guarding empty tanker trucks. KBR fraudulently made money per mile trucking “sailboat fuel” up and down the highways of Iraq. Even so, we can’t just declare KBR beyond the pale and yank its corporate charter. Imposing a well deserved corporate death penalty would shake the market, but we all have a share. When Minderbinder hires his own squadron’s planes out to the Germans to bomb his own airfield, the authorities finally prosecute him. He hires a good lawyer and goes free when he points out how much profit was made by the venture. Well done, Milo. Lloyd Blankfein salutes you.

On the subject of playing both sides, Minderbinder strikes again in Afghanistan. A recently released study by the Senate Armed Services Committee shows that the security contracting (mercenary) firms hired to protect U.S. and NATO facilities are in turn hiring members of the Taliban and followers of various side-switching warlords. Those warlords and gunmen are making payoffs to the Taliban and associated insurgent groups. Hey, we’re paying people to shoot at our own soldiers. It’s that legendary American generosity at work.

One M&M scheme reeks of the economist’s fallacy of monetary equivalency. I’m thinking of cost/benefit analyses of occupational safety and anti-pollution measures. You know, where losing a spouse or child is calculated into a dollar value based on lost earnings? Minderbinder needed the CO2 cartridges from the life vests aboard the bombers, so he took them and replaced them with notes of apology and share certificates in M&M enterprises. That is roughly what passes for good business ethics these days.

Catch-22 is an ageless book. I’d recommend it or the very fine (though different) movie version. Heller wrote it in the 1950s, the heyday of hyper-patriotism, hyper-militarism, and the blind worship of capitalism. Wait a sec…