The United States Treasury -- World's Biggest Debtor
As a nation we infected ourselves with unreal expectations and the illusion that our least significant wants were the equal of our most vital needs.
After a year of monumental damage to our banks, economy, institutions and families, the realities emerging in the aftermath of our embarrassing national disaster are not reassuring. For America’s obsession with pursuing wealth at the expense of our safety and national prominence remains undiminished. This is not a good thing. But given our lust for wealth and disdain for nearly all else, our slowness to accept reality should not surprise us. Reform takes time. Old habits die hard. Only when our will exceeds our weaknesses will permanent change come about.
The era of America’s debt-driven free lunch has ended. Now the piper must be paid.
Early signs suggest you, me, bankers, politicians, businesses, financiers, government, regulators — all of us, everyone — wants to return to business as usual. Reality is ugly and painful enough for us all to wish exemption from its demands and rigors. Thus this nation’s powerful bankers expect to return to their profligate ways using your grandchildren’s money. General Motors, it now seems certain, is to be restored from its recent death with the labor union that helped to drive it into the ground inexplicably its principal shareholder.
What this tells us is that as a nation we are not done feeding at the teat of what’s most appetizing, not what’s most nourishing. Reality demands otherwise — for the great American free lunch has ended. Yet those who pigged-out at the horn of plenty for so long remain strangely undaunted by our national disaster. Their armies of minions loosed upon the halls of Congress demand that the big wigs and fat cats be exempted from reality. Thereupon to return to the feast as millions of their countrymen face deprivation, social diminution, or unspeakable privation.
The message is painfully clear: To the degree that we expect others to change, we err. It is not others who must change. It is us.
Robert Butche
Publisher
Newsroom Magazine
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