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USA Edition | Today Is Sunday, March 21, 2010 |
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USA Edition | Today Is Sunday, March 21, 2010 |
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| The Age of Information Literacy | « Scan Content In The Order It Was Published » | Supreme Court:Oral: Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission | |
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The Federal Reserve -- America's Alternative To Prudence And Responsibility
The most awful truth is that most Americans don’t know or fully understand how seriously their nation, economy and social tranquility have been damaged by by the economic and political elite who remain in power.
Across our nation, in cities big and small — in villages and on farms — millions of American jobs have disappeared. Banks have been freed of making productive loans in favor of speculating and deal making. American business seems uncertain about making long-term commitments. Big media sells us entertainment packaged as if news, while most Americans know little of consequence of their world or their nation. Congress is increasingly serving the interests of lobbyists who finance their campaigns, while the financial elite who sold America down the drain by sending our jobs offshore, and using our monies to speculate, remain in place.
What these issues reveal is widespread failure. Failure of citizenship. Failure of integrity. Failure of ethics. Failure of judgment. Failure of responsibility. Failure of character. What every American knows is that those around them, those they once trusted and those in whom they believe have become failed stewards of the public trust.
And so America is angry — and rightly so.
The problem isn’t that we’re mad as Hell, but that most of us don’t know what the Hell we’re supposed to be mad about.
Americans are angry at what has happened to their country and their livelihoods,. And with good reason. Yet there’s the awful truth that Americans largely don’t know, or fully grasp, how seriously their nation, economy and social tranquility have been damaged. But they are keenly aware that the economic and political elite blithely remain in power. Neither political party has done us right, but both openly try to keep us preoccupied by trivia. All the better to conceal their culpability in bringing us the brink of disaster.
Just as we were inculcated in debt as a means of financing our profligate spending habits, we have been turned angry at one another by powerful voices who seek not to make our lives richer, but theirs. We’re so busy being angry at one another that our own president is not welcome to speak to children in some of our schools. We’re so angry at one another that we can no longer see the value in any views beyond those we hold,– even though we rarely come upon those views entirely of our own thinking.
When we look around our nation today what we see is the wreckage of our excess, our intolerance and our inattention to those things that matter most. It’s not pretty, for across our once mighty nation today, millions of our fellow citizens are job hunting, absent health insurance, evicted from foreclosed homes, or otherwise suffering from the greed, deceit, polarization and intolerance of a nation fast spinning out of control.
It’s our collective irresponsibility that ended the era of suckling at the endless teat of credit. What happened to our heritage of thinking for ourselves? What drove us to treat one another rudely or abdicate our responsibility to seek reasonable solutions to our problems, and respect those with whom we have disagreements?
Whether our national pain subsides, or drives us to greater desperation remains uncertain — for the attitudes and habits that afflict us today are deeply rooted in our institutions, economic habits, belief system, culture and values. The media upon which we rely for information filtered for its fidelity-to-fact are flailing about desperately for a business model while those least responsible among us use their power and influence to sow discontent, hatred and intolerance.
It’s going to take many years, not months, for such simple truths to penetrate a nation held hostage by those who seek to exploit our ignorance and disconnect us from reality. How long it will take for each of us to overcome our own failures will determine how long our national pain, and that of the rest of the world, will endure. The problem is, you, me, all of us, were taken in by a popular but impossible belief that we no longer had to make anything people wanted to buy, or do real work, or take real risks. That we believed, or acted as if we believed such things is evidentiary of our disconnection from reality.
Our most troubling issues are systemic, deeply rooted from decades of failed checks and balances. Nor are they transient — for our problems arise from failed education, failed governance and failure to honor and respect one another. The worst of our nation’s problems today arise from a very different and personal failure — failed connective tissue that once connected us as one people, one nation, indivisible.
While this nation’s degree granting colleges and universities did not set out to make us failures as citizens, they have openly promulgated our pursuit of self interest over our community and national interests. One need look no further than our business schools to see how far we’ve strayed from the America of our grandfathers.
Our nation, and the world beyond, has not been a good steward of public monies nor a responsible manager of national wealth. To some extent we were misdirected by wanting to share in Wall Street’s unbridled greed. Or to become one of the world’s havoc-wreaking bankers whose principal goal was to expand their personal wealth at the expense of their customers, shareholders and taxpayers.
Our failed stewardship has crippled our national sense of right and wrong. For today, small criminals get life in prison while the wealthy and powerful go unpunished. While some rape, pillage and loot our national character and our wealth, our legal system travails over minutiae — but only for ordinary Americans. For those among the power elite do as they like and change the rules our laws to benefit them at public expense.
Is this the America of our forebearers? Not for a moment!
Neither you nor I can change America.
But we can surely change ourselves.
