Greed, Part Two

You can start to see the cracks. They are running in the streets, the sidewalks, and maybe across your lawn. The cracks are deep, and getting wider, a bit more so each day. “OK Mr. President....you can bail out the banks...You can bail out the automakers. But damn it, if you bail out the guy across the street....well that is just too close to home”. By all means, give my tax money to weapon systems to bomb third world nations, or to the fat cats on Wall Street. Help out a neighbor, a friend...and I say “no”.

This is the great problem with America. We admire, even adore the successful, the powerful. We worship at their feet, and hope that by rubbing up against them, we can feel important. We want to keep their limousines washed and their nice suits well pressed. But we despise the guy that is down on his luck. We loathe his lack of success, and blame him for not achieving greatness.

Some talking head on TV last week...a guy I have never heard of, but obviously someone who is important enough to be allowed to rant on CNBC, left a mark on our nation’s generosity, as he called out the president for daring to offer assistance to those who might lose their homes, or those folks whose homes had lost so much value they were now worth less than they owed. How dare a nation so great stoop to help those poor fools who only wanted a piece of the pie. No, let’s ignore healthcare, let’s ignore the environment, let’s ignore the energy crisis. Instead, let’s make sure the banks are insulated from their mistakes. Let’s prop up our unprofitable companies. Let’s fund another weapon system or foreign war, but let’s draw the line where it gets personal. If the bank has put up the foreclosure sign in the neighborhood, the government ought to stay out of it. Better to let a family be displaced, and join the ranks of homelessness. Let some child have to leave their school and friends, or quit college...or miss a meal.

This country likes to portray itself as generous....as a nation that believes in God just as much as we do the might dollar. Really? Is there not something in the bible about helping those less fortunate? Is there nothing written in there about charity? About the welfare of our fellow man? About social justice and compassion? I admit I am no scholar in this area, and I am constantly surprised by our ability to thump the bible when it suits our needs, and to ignore it when it does not.

The nation is splitting....and it is not just along party lines. In fact, perhaps the whole Republican vs Democrat thing was a smokescreen for the real divisions. There are those that feel the government, the country, should exist to exert power around the globe, to exploit resources and leave the individual to suck at the teat of capitalism. Ayn Rand would be so proud. The market will take care of everything. And that it should....in a place where there is more to a bottom line than profits. Since profit has become the only criteria for success, though, the teat is running dry, or perhaps the milk tastes sour. But...there is the other camp....and they are growing restless. They are tired of America stomping its way around the planet, consuming more resources than any other nation, like a bloated pig. They admire socially conscious companies, who value their employees, and treat their fellow man with compassion, and lend a hand when it is needed. Instead of buying another bomber, perhaps we should set that money aside in case one of “us” needs a buck or two to make ends meet. Or perhaps we can use a few bucks to buy a sack of concrete so we can fill in some of these cracks.

Greed, Part One

I have not written for a bit. I have been digesting and coming to terms with the various things that have happened to our country over the last few years, few months, and now, few weeks. I am left with one overarching impression. We are greedy. We let that greed go on unquestioned, and now, we wear that greed like great chains around our corpulent bodies as we thrash about trying to swim, or, at least keep or noses above the waterline.

There was that movie, I think it was “Wall Street” where Gordon Gecko uttered the phrase “...greed is good...”. I can only hope it was said ironically, but unfortunately, it describes a national mindset. I am not sure what “greed” is, but “good”, it is not. I think greed is in fact more akin to a virus. It has infected our way of thinking, our way of life, and like so many virulent viruses, it threatens to kill its host.

I feel sorry for President Obama. I hope his efforts are successful, but unless we marry his stimulus packages with a bit of self reflection, I don’t think the problems will be fixed. They may fade from the headlines when factories roar back to life, but they will simmer, just below the surface, and I would venture to guess they will re-emerge more threatening than ever.

How is it that we came to live in a place where baseball players make 25 million dollars a year to play a child’s game? Many of us who played in our younger days would pay for the privilege of standing in Yankee Stadium awaiting a routine fly ball to settle into our glove. Why should a movie star command a similar figure for 3 months of work reading lines written by others? Why should the executives that run our top companies pull down tens of millions of dollars in compensation while they make the bottom line more attractive by sending more and more of the work over seas where there are not such greedy folks setting the bar of compensation so high?

A simple question: How much money does it take to live a good life? Is a good life defined by having 18 cars and 6 houses and a yacht? At what point does it become “too much”. At what point do the hard working folks struggling to make their mortgage payments say “give ME some of that”? I fear we are dangerously close to that moment, and it would be good for those in power to recognize that the difference between the top of the pyramid and the base has gotten too dramatic. Sure, if you invent a computer or build a better mousetrap, you should make more than the guy who is content to build the computer or assemble the mousetrap, but in the end, aren’t both jobs important? Isn’t one job useless---valueless---without the other?

The CEO of a major company gets paid well because he “makes money for the shareholders” (of which he is typically one). Making the shareholders happy means he (or she) should be paid handsomely. But what if all that attention to the bottom line led to behavior that was not ethical, or harms the environment in some way, or eliminates jobs? Wouldn’t a better methodology of evaluating a CEO’s performance be to measure how many well paying jobs they are providing to the economy? Isn’t there some way to integrate a company’s commitment to the environment into their bottom line? Why is the only yardstick “profits”? Can’t profits be dressed up to appear beautiful when they are in fact ugly, or even, non existent? But we are greedy. We don’t want to look under the skirt. We happily cash our dividend check....the CEO cashes his bonus check....and somehow the bills will get sorted out later...sort of like....a Ponzi scheme?

The insatiable thirst for more money has had several subtle impacts. It has driven the cost of everything upward, since things worth owning are expensive, or so it would seem in the California real estate market. Often, there is little connection between the value of something and its cost to purchase. $100,000 dresses. Huh? 2 bedroom houses for $1,000,000. Huh? $10 beers at a baseball game. Huh? I guess the US military started all this when they bought $300 hammers.

We stopped asking why things were so expensive and instead simply aimed to make more money so we could buy the overpriced things we thought we needed. Easier to be greedy, I suppose, than to be smart. And if somehow our ability to earn more money was thwarted by the fact that we are not a CEO, or a left handed pitcher, or a movie star...well there was another way: the Credit Card. The ease of getting credit further separated the price of things from their actual value. Houses, cars, diamond rings, Coach and bags....all can be had now. Price is secondary as long as there is room on the credit card.

But you know what?...we bought a lot of stuff that was not worth what we paid for it. Starting with our houses, but surely $60,000 Hummers and $15 hamburgers qualify as well. Meanwhile, since we hated paying taxes, we let our schools fall apart, so we refinanced the house so we could send our kids to private school. It was like paying college tuition for a 5 year old, and then doing it for 13 years until they actually went off to college...where finally we could qualify for student loans and get the poor kid in debt to start their adult lives. But we do want our kids to go to college so they can get ahead (or at least in debt) and lead meaningful lives pursuing the almighty dollar.

As our government attempts to solve our nation’s problems by tossing money out of the empty coffers of Washington DC, like tossing raw meat to a den of starved lions, we should at least consider how we got here, and how to avoid returning. Are we simply starving carnivores awaiting fresh meat....in which case, if there is not enough meat, when do we start eyeing each other? After all, we are not made of money....