“This is my country; land of my birth. This is my country; greatest on earth. I pledge thee my allegiance, America the bold, for this is my country, to have and to hold.” When Don Raye and Al Jacobs wrote that song, it was 1940 and we were on the verge of World War II. It was patriotic and made us feel good about the place we called home.
I’m not going to try and parody that song to fit today. It would be insulting to the men who wrote it, and it wouldn’t make an impact on most of the people who would read it. They’d just get mad and say I was being a wiseguy…and they’d be right.
I pledged my allegiance. I, and hundreds of thousands of you, pledged to defend my country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Guess what, it wasn’t the foreign ones who got to us; it was our own people; our domestic enemies. It was the people who, at one time, might even have had to make that same pledge. If so, they broke their word, and that, my friends, is something that none of us should tolerate.
At the outset of our economic decline, I thought – along with many others, “I’m certain – that there are a few, very few, greedy individuals who liked to throw million dollar birthday parties for their trophy wives or who liked to own all of the ‘big boy’ toys they could possibly acquire, regardless of who had to pay for it.” I was wrong. I see that now. I was very, very wrong. There weren’t a few. There were many, many who felt that because that had access to money, they could use it in any way they saw fit. No one would question them. They would be accountable only to themselves or others like them, playing in the same sand box, as it were, with no responsibilities whatsoever.
Surprise…Your screwing around in the sandbox affects more than just you; it has an effect on many people. Some might even go so far as to say it has an effect on the entire town, city, state, country, world in which we live. It’s not unlike the “butterfly effect.” Put simply, that means that a small variation in the short term, that is the greed of the few, can have a long-term effect, a.k.a., the economic suicide of the many.
When George Washington mythically chopped down the imaginary cherry tree, we all laughed and thought it a nice story by Parson Weems. When AIG, Citibank, Bank of America, and many, many more, went into the backyard to pluck a few more millions off the money tree, they found that it, too, was imaginary, and the only word they uttered that can be printed in a family newspaper was HELP!
Trying to get into businesses about which you know absolutely nothing as it appears AIG did, and lending money to people who you know are going to default, which is what the banks seemed to be doing, is a certain sign of a slippery slope that will lead us into the depths of depression, both physically and economically. If he can take time from stoking the fires in hell, Ken Lay must be laughing his little Enron head off. Of course, escaping prosecution by dying of a heart attack is a bit extreme.
Don’t get me wrong; I believe that if you have a company that’s very good at doing what it does, it may be able to transfer some of that knowledge into diversification if it has the management team in place that knows how to diversify. Obviously AIG fails that litmus test. For the current chairman and CEO of AIG to then turn around and say to the government that the company is contractually bound to give $165 million in bonuses indicates to me that he is oblivious or ignorant of the meaning of the word, “failure.” Mr. Liddy, let me put it in simple terms: AIG failed to meet its obligations; it did so because it was poorly managed. At what level it was poorly managed, only management knows. For the company to reward poor management with bonuses of $165 million dollars it doesn’t have is one thing; to pay those same bonuses from money given by government taxpayers to help AIG out of its financial dilemma is called stealing. The money given by the government was not a gift to be shared with those who were “contractually” to be awarded bonuses. Those contracts were null and void when management failed to achieve its goals. Now, if that isn’t simple enough for you, let me offer you and all of those who received the bonuses an eight by ten foot cell in which to contemplate the meaning of my words. Do you think that 10-15 years would be sufficient for that contemplation? Oh, and by the way, your families don’t get to play with your bonuses, either.
The banks are no better. Have you ever seen the ads on college campus bulletin boards that advertise credit cards for students? Credit cards are little more than legalized drug addiction. Unfortunately, there are several roads to this addiction. College students get a card but are initially cautious in their use of it. Caution begins to disappear and Mom and Dad are asked for a bit of a supplement. It’s given with a warning to be more careful. Then it reaches the point where one credit card debt is being paid with another credit card. It becomes a vicious cycle. Eventually, this carries over after graduation and because of a little thing called “conspicuous consumption,” a.k.a., keeping up with the Joneses, credit card debt grows exponentially while income increases arithmetically. Banks, wanting to be good citizens, loan money, ergo increased debt. Finally, the bank calls in the loan, forecloses on the house and everyone loses. Is this a great country or what?
Sure, this is simplistic. You cannot approach a problem as serious as our economic dilemma in a thousand words or less. We aren’t even close to seeing the end of this tragic chapter in the life of America. Will we learn from our mistakes? If you know anyone who was around in the Great Depression days, ask them. Of course, they were just kids at the time, but I’m willing to bet that the horror stories they remember from those days won’t sound much different from what people are saying some four score years later.
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