This morning on "Meet the Press," Tom Brokaw, reflecting on the mood of anger sweeping the country, said it's hard to blame people, given that most everything they've been told about the state of the economy for the past year was a lie.
That struck me. I realized that I simply do not believe anything anybody in authority in the financial world says anymore. I think they lie, and I think they lie knowing that they're lying.
I don't believe in President Obama or his economic team, not because I think they're conscious liars, but because I believe that our political class at the national level are so much part of a culture of lies -- of lying to others, of lying to themselves -- that they cannot be relied on to give truthful, accurate information. Matt Taibbi's outrage piece in the new Rolling Stone really knocks one back one's heels. Excerpt:
The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner -- himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm -- picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets -- the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.
God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system -- transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.
"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"
But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.
Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.
I pulled my Dallas Morning News out of the plastic sleeve this morning, and found out via the lead story on the front page that the mayor of Dallas appears to have deceived voters on what the feds were telling him about the safety of a proposed tollway project -- this, during a campaign over a ballot initiative to stop the project. The mayor's side won -- and now we learn from government documents that the mayor was a lot better informed than he let on at the time.
"We don't torture," said President Bush, who lied. But by now, who is surprised by that?
By the time I got to the end of my reading and digging into the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I had quite literally come to the conclusion that the most sensible default position to have is to assume that anything a Catholic bishop says is a lie, or a half-truth, unless otherwise proven. Truly, if you spent any serious time going through the history of the scandal, it is breathtaking to grasp how easily they shaded the truth, and even outright lied, and not about trivial things either.
It's overwhelming, this culture of lies we live in, and have come to accept as normal. Perhaps the most radical thing we can do right now, today, is to read Solzhenitsyn's 1974 essay "Live Not By Lies," and think about how we might appropriate his insights into how to live nobly in the Soviet system into our own very different circumstance. Here, at the end, is what Solzhenitsyn recommended to his countrymen fed up with the lies, and feeling powerless against them:
So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood--of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies--or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries.And from that day onward he:
Will not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth.
Will utter such a phrase neither in private conversation not in the presence of many people, neither on his own behalf not at the prompting of someone else, either in the role of agitator, teacher, educator, not in a theatrical role.
Will not depict, foster or broadcast a single idea which he can only see is false or a distortion of the truth whether it be in painting, sculpture, photography, technical science, or music.
Will not cite out of context, either orally or written, a single quotation so as to please someone, to feather his own nest, to achieve success in his work, if he does not share completely the idea which is quoted, or if it does not accurately reflect the matter at issue.
Will not allow himself to be compelled to attend demonstrations or meetings if they are contrary to his desire or will, will neither take into hand not raise into the air a poster or slogan which he does not completely accept.
Will not raise his hand to vote for a proposal with which he does not sincerely sympathize, will vote neither openly nor secretly for a person whom he considers unworthy or of doubtful abilities.
Will not allow himself to be dragged to a meeting where there can be expected a forced or distorted discussion of a question. Will immediately talk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda.
Will not subscribe to or buy a newspaper or magazine in which information is distorted and primary facts are concealed. Of course we have not listed all of the possible and necessary deviations from falsehood. But a person who purifies himself will easily distinguish other instances with his purified outlook.
No, it will not be the same for everybody at first. Some, at first, will lose their jobs. For young people who want to live with truth, this will, in the beginning, complicate their young lives very much, because the required recitations are stuffed with lies, and it is necessary to make a choice.
Serious question to you readers -- and help me out with this, because I'm likely to write a column about it -- how can we modify Solzhenitsyn's list to fit our own situation?
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Erin made a point that is common among religious people:
But the point, or rather the question behind it, is a real one. When we decide that religion and morality have no business shaping secular society, is it really fair to come back and complain that the nation has been fleeced by a bunch of lying, unscrupulous people in the financial industry?
Why should we do what is right? Why should we not injure our fellow man? Why should we tell the truth and be upright citizens?
Religious people seem to believe that the only thing that keeps us acting in a good manner is the fear of retribution. If the cops don't get you, God will so you'd better act properly or you'll burn for eternity.
The implication is, of course, that all atheists are immoral savages who are just waiting to catch you off guard to waylay you, steal your goods, burn down your house, and rape your dog. Which has a nice side benefit of not only getting people to act well but keeping them from questioning the Church.
But this is a topic that is ancient. Diogenes Laertius quotes Aristotle, saying the following:
Asked what he gained from philosophy, he answered, "To do without being commanded what others do from fear of the laws."
Indeed, this formed the basis of Socrates' prosecution in the Apology, that by rationally seeking the "good life", he didn't leave room for the gods (or lying men who presumed to know what it was!) to tell us what to do and not to to achieve it.
Surely, then, it is better to inculcate the philosophy behind the law (secular or religious) rather than fear of the law itself. It's not enough to tell people not to do something simply because God doesn't like it. The natural follow-on questions are "How do you know?" and "Why doesn't God like such-and-such?" If you can't answer those questions then your attempt at control just fosters contempt for God and religion, just as our vast compendium of laws covering the most inexplicable things fosters contempt for the law and its enforcers.
And if there is a rational reason behind each and every one of God's enjoinders and proscriptions, then why is religion required to discover how to live a moral life?
Your Name asked:
-Offended our closest allies the way the One has?
-Blamed the earmarks in a spending bill that HE signed on the previous administration, after vowing to stop earmarks?
-Selected numerous tax cheats to the highest appointed positions in the nation?
-Advocated a budget that will result in trillion dollar annual defecits as far as the eye can see?
-etc.
I'm not sure who these allies are that the President has offended; on the contrary, he is obliged to do quite a bit of damage control in that area thanks to the previous administration.
With respect to tax cheats, I think it's quite clear that Senator McCain was fine with them, after all, his pick for VP was one herself.
Ah, but Geoff G., you'll notice I said "religion and morality," not just "religion;" in fact, most of my post that you refer to talks about our loss of a common morality, not of a common faith or set of religious practices. The ancient pagans were interested in the idea that there was such a thing as truth and that it could be discovered by reason; most ancient religions believe that moral truths (as opposed to specifically religious ones, e.g. the Incarnation) were discoverable by reason alone.
Modern relativistic secularism rejects the idea that there is such a thing as "truth" and believes in "truths," e.g., your truth, my truth, his truth etc. Modern secularism also rejects the notion that it is possible to discern moral truths via reason, because modern secularism rejects many of the prerequisites necessary for determining such truths; one example is modern secularism's divorce of one's actions from the consequences of those actions. Examples abound of this sort of thinking, the "magical thinking" that so long as one is true to oneself then any consequences for one's behavior are not only not one's fault, but have little or nothing to do with one's behavior in the first place.
Such "magical thinking" is abundantly clear in the financial crisis. Even today many people in the industry blame the housing bubble collapse, the few regulations that still exist (!) or various political scapegoats for the collapse of the economy. The idea that they were responsible, that their actions lead directly and inevitably to the collapse, is foreign to them--why, they were only doing what any other smart investing company would do, and it's not their fault that circumstances conspired to pull the rug out from under them.
You can certainly have morality without religion. But you can't reject both and still have any sort of moral sanity.
Geoff G.,
Google "Barack Obama" and "Gordon Brown" or "Barack Obama" and "Winston Churchill" for confirmation of how Reverend Teleprompter has p*ssed on the shoes of our closest allies.
"Erin's being sarcastic to make a point."
Erin Manning :
"Yes, and apparently I'm not very good at it. :)
But the point, or rather the question behind it, is a real one. When we decide that religion and morality have no business shaping secular society, is it really fair to come back and complain that the nation has been fleeced by a bunch of lying, unscrupulous people in the financial industry?"
If it weren't for the fact that the 'Party of God' is the primary driver here, yes. In this world, you and yours are very deep in the corruption, and quite happily supported it, right up until Bush became a political loser, and the house of cards collapsed.
And please spare me the 'I'm not one of them'; I expect to get quite bored of that over the next few years.
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