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Friday, September 26. 2008
Whistling Dixie
“Pain,” the old saying goes, “is the touchstone of all spiritual progress.” It brings a measure of humility that can be a healer of pain. We can acquire tolerance for those who are suffering and acting out in their pain, see all of us in the human race as one, regardless of our individual situations. Pain can bring us to the understanding of one human race, a set of principles based on the ideal that we all have equal parts to play; an understanding that we have but one lifetime and the best road to serenity is through love.Conversely, pain can be an incubator of fear, resentment and hostility, the birthplace for designs of retribution; pain can drown us in a pool of darkness, filled with irrational hatred, blinding us from the truth.
In America, as I suspect in most country’s consumed by their own petty nationalism, that irrational fear and hatred leads us to lash out at the most prominent of scapegoats, regardless of culpability. Saddam Hussein was the scapegoat for 9/11. In the current financial debacle, it will be the CEO’s and other banking industry officers who may have multi-million dollar golden parachutes coming.
There will be a bailout plan in the next few days. Will it bring needed reform? Not likely. It will definitely bail out the financial institutions and quite possibly some homeowners, but it won’t address the core of the problem: unchecked capitalism … no, not capitalism, greed.Greed was the root of the Great Depression, the reason Roosevelt pushed for the Glass-Steagall Act that regulated the financial industries and created the Securities and Exchange Commission, which enforced those regulations.
Greed was behind the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, thereby setting in motion the events that brought our financial institutions—and by association our lives—to this disaster, the full effects of which we will not fully realizes for months to come.
Black Tuesday occurred on October 29, 1929: the stock market crash. The full effects of that crash didn’t culminate for nearly two years as the U.S. economy slid deeper and deeper into ruin. By 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt was elected, America was at its nadir.
Herbert Hoover wanted to let the market correct itself, Roosevelt wanted the government to fix it because, and rightly so, he knew that given their own devices, the “fixers” of their own industry would fix it just enough to suit their own selfish needs.In 1999 the fixers got their way: the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill. Hundreds of billions have been made for them since then, pretty much on the speculation that bad debt would be continually refinanced and repackaged enough so that when it collapsed those individuals would have made their millions and any correction of the market would not effect them personally. And of course it hasn’t. Yet. It depends on whether they get their pieces of that $700 billion pie Secretary Paulson and the Democrats are pushing.
In their hearts, the “Great Satan” for the Republicans has always been The New Deal. Repealing Glass-Steagall was part of stripping away FDR’s long-standing philosophy. Doing away with Social Security is the other piece they wish to be rid of and they’ve got a good handle on that already.
When it was created, Social Security was a stand-alone program, not affected by the federal budget. Since 1966, and especially since 1983, we’ve been raiding it to pay for the national budget, in effect, taking from Social Security, that which made it such a lifeline for our citizens: its money.When politicians can point to Social Security and tell us it’s nearly broke, they can do so with a certain amount of truth. There isn’t as much going into it now as there once was and with the baby boomers retiring, more will be going out.
What no politicians will tell us, not even Dennis Kucinich, is that there wouldn’t be a problem with Social Security of we weren’t raiding the trust to pay for the rest of the U.S. budget.
That is the great lie and we buy into it because we are a nation of greedy, self-centered people. In America, greed always wins because we choose to find the scapegoats and make them pay, regardless of what it costs or how pointless the process.
In a lonely part of my heart the ideal that we will grow spiritually from this persists, that we will once again have politicians doing the right thing to prevent such a disaster. But right now the Republican have a bully pulpit and leaders like John Boehner who holds a press conference and says, “I don’t know what games were being played at the White House, ganging up on Boehner, but they won’t roll over me.”It’s a nice political ploy, especially if you’re a Republican trying to distance yourself from George W. Bush: tie Bush to the Democrats.
Senator McCain is bucking his own party though, siding with the Republican president. Ironically, he is also siding with Senator Obama and that will look bad in an election, especially to the Republican base that is staunchly against the bailout.
This is so fluid, with Congress getting together, plans furtively approved and then his own party, the Republicans strongly sinking them, what’s a candidate to do? McCain doesn’t know whether to stand up, turn about and give the dog a bone; or whistle “Dixie” at Ole Miss tonight. Twenty-four hours ago, he was going to forego the debate. As of now, McCain has chosen to whistle “Dixie.”
It appears the suspension of his campaign is over, if it ever was suspended. Call me cynical, but if Congress and the president could have inked a deal by today (Friday), he could be using it to promote his campaign. As it is, he caved on the debate over having the debate and, to really put salt in the wounds, his stance on the bailout goes against the wishes of at least 80% of the people he’s depending upon to vote for him in November. Ouch! Guess supporting the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill — deregulation — came back to bite him. There will be more pain to come, a lot more. Personally, my bank has been closed by the Feds and sold to another. My guess, buttressed by my over-bearing cynicism, is that the promise we customers don’t have to worry is as empty as this 2-liter Diet Coke bottle at my feet. The hopeful piece of my soul wants to believe it, and believe that this pain will be a touchstone for spiritual growth.
Call me an optimist.
Sad note, Saturday Morning actor Paul Newman passed away after a bout with cancer. He was one of the greats. He was 83.
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