Crisis of Character

It is now known that the banks who received such beneficial handouts recently have spent $1.6 billion of that on executive pay and perks. This further underscores my claim that our recent financial and economic situation is not due to some failure of economic or computational skill on the part of the financial leaders, but on a failure of their character...that failure is, in a word, greed. This penetrating analysis is hardly new; but the question remains: why have the steps taken to solve the economic crisis not addressed the source of the problem, viz., the greed and flawed character of the leaders? There was no accountability required when the money was blithely given to these financial leaders; but when manufacturers asked for assistance, they were taken to task for how they made the trip to Washington even though they were asking less than one tenth of what was freely handed over to the Wall Street gang with no reservations whatsoever. It is a well-known phenomenon that we rarely see those faults in others which we, ourselves, have; and this means that the blind eye cast by Congress towards the financial pillagers is owing to the fact that they, themselves, are pillagers too. They can easily gloss over the misdeeds of the Wall Street crowd because Congress is guilty of the same misdeeds as they are...and the corollary is that they suffer from the same flaw in character, greed.

Nor are we helped by the press, whose voice is conspicuously absent in political debates; especially when they think that the ideological options that are open to people are exhausted by the positions that they, themselves, anoint. We need a good stout dose of the very tonic once prescribed by Vince Lombardi for his new team, the Green Bay Packers; we need to become brilliant on the basics. The basics of running a profitable business, the basics of moral character, the basics of civic mindedness, and the basics of authenticity to the religious propensity inherent in Life. We have failed miserably in each of these areas, yet we return to the same methods we have used to find answers; how crazy is that? We started a "no child left behind" initiative and never funded it; we recruit the best of our young to fight in war but abandon them when they come home injured and broken; we spout patriotic themes, yet when looking for a leader we promote the party rather than the country. Our national elections have long ceased to be about what's best for America and are now just a shoving match to see which party gets to spend the treasury. Thinking has become anathema, critical analysis has become treason, and the loyal and honest opposition can be held in a military jail outside the country for no reason at all.

Rule is not about power, it is about optimization; to treat it as though it were about power gives us the very thing we've got...and how has that been working for us?