WHY THIS COUNTRY IS DOOMED-The Macro and the Micro

I hope I am being facetious here but I am really worried about the future of this country and it’s not necessarily for the reasons that most people are worried. First let’s look at the macro picture.

Paul Krugman, another NYT writer that I respect immensely, recently had a column talking about the vote on the recently passed Waxman-Markey climate change bill. The bill passed the House by a narrow margin. The reason, as Mr. Krugman points out, is that there are a large number of elected representatives who actually reject the notion that something must be done to reverse the buildup of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, in other words, the whole notion of global warming. I was flabbergasted as I read this. At this point in time, 2009, when the evidence of global warming is so evident, being reported everywhere, here are men and women who purport to call themselves intelligent telling us they don’t believe in the concept of global warming. How did these people get elected to any position of responsibility? How can you take a single word that comes out of their mouths seriously?

As Mr. Krugman points out, these people aren’t just disputing one argument with another, they are wholly rejecting the idea that a crisis even exists. It’s absolutely unbelievable that stupidity of that magnitude is tolerated in the halls of Congress or anywhere else. If we as a nation are willing to put up with that kind of stupidity, we are doomed. The triumph of fundamentalism is anti-intellectualism. Someone is so afraid to admit they are wrong that they willfully choose ignorance and denial. That, to me, constitutes mental illness, and it is apparently rampant among our elected representatives.

Now, the micro picture. As I have said before I have a very unglamorous job as an inside consultant for an energy company. In plain and simple terms I am a telemarketer. Fine, hate me if you will. But I am not selling newspapers or magazines, I am selling energy efficiency. In effect, I am giving away money. For nothing, I will have someone come to your business and let you know if we can help you reduce your energy bills. But it is a very hard job, and it’s made harder by the fact that people consider it perfectly acceptable to be rude, and I mean terribly rude. They have a good time being rude.

If they would take 30 seconds and listen, my company could help them insure the viability of their business going forward. But just like the elected representatives they would much rather remain rude and ignorant. Asking them to think is just too much of a burden for them to bear. I don’t when the country took this turn or who raised the people I call, but this is not the way I was raised. My dad, God rest his soul, would have had no problem admonishing me in public if I displayed rudeness to anyone. As an adult, I learned that courtesy and respect are hallmarks of self respect. You cannot expect anyone to show you respect if you so clearly demonstrate that you don’t respect yourself or others. And yet, this is how the people I call conduct themselves. It’s a miracle they make dollar one. And don’t try to tell me that indications of this kind of rudeness aren’t reflected in other aspects of their lives. It has to come to the surface in other unsociable ways.

Now, I know that these people are pounded by cold callers all day and the market we are working in is the busiest in the world. But that is not an acceptable excuse. How do you expect society to function if people can’t at least be courteous to one another? The spirit of civility that used to be the norm in this country has evaporated. Will it ever come back, I don’t know. Maybe the country needs to go through another depression to discover its civil soul. Maybe when everybody is in the same boat and we realize that we all need each other to make this country function again, we’ll remember that civility matters.

I hope it doesn’t come to that. But at this point in time, I don’t hold out much hope for the immediate future because people prefer to be ignorant. That is actually the most distressing fact. There was a time in the world when you had no choice but to be ignorant. Knowledge was scarce. But this is 2009. The entire world’s knowledge is right at your fingertips. All you have to do is type and click. But people don’t want to do it. Their personal growth is limited by their lack of perception. Their world revolves only around their immediate needs, and change, the only constant in life, is something to be feared and disputed. God help us all.

The End of the First Debacle or the Beginning of the Second

We have just barely begun to turn the corner in the worst financial crisis in 60 years and the big banks are determined to plant the seeds of the next one. They haven’t learned a thing, except that the big brother government they all love to rail against will bail them out of any crisis they create. So the cycle begins anew. The banks are raising salaries again. This may seem like nothing at first glance. The banks have been through a harrowing experience, they have been humbled and they need to bounce back. It’s a truly capitalist phenomenon. It’s also very sad to see.

Anyone who thinks that the big banks recklessness will stop at raising salaries back to pre-crisis level is obscenely naïve. The culture of greed is still thriving. As we begin to put some distance between ourselves and the bottom of this crisis, the old risk taking behaviors will resurface. The so-called geniuses who designed the financial derivatives that brought us to the brink of disaster want another shot at it. This time, they will think they can correct their mistakes and we won’t end up back in the same situation. Their financial models will help them hide the truth that once the dice start tumbling in the wrong direction, they lose control. It doesn’t really matter to them, they feel no responsibility. They’ve never apologized for creating the crisis in which we are now mired. Remember the executives from AIG who blamed the regulations for their failure.

President Obama cannot ignore the implications of this return to normalcy. His biggest responsibility to the American people is to make sure that no later generation of Americans has to go through what we are going through now. The big banks don’t care about us. They are a bureaucracy like any other and the only purpose they serve is to perpetuate themselves. Unless President Obama issues a clear signal the excesses in risk that brought us here need to be eliminated from the system, it is inevitable that we will have to suffer through a crisis like this again at some point. The question will then be, will the United States have the financial ability and the world support we need to pull us through again? When we arrive at that moment in the future, President Obama’s legacy will then be blackened (no pun intended) for all time, in the same way that Alan Greenspan’s has been. That is not the way a man of vision like President Obama should be remembered.

Only in Texas

A policeman in Texas gave a wonderful demonstration today of the lack of self respect that pervades the American psyche. At what should have been a routine traffic stop, an officer felt he needed to subdue a 72 year old great grandmother with a taser gun. The absurdity of the situation was caught by the officer’s dashboard camera. Because the woman was less than fully cooperative, the officer began barking commands at her like a Nazi drill instructor. When the woman had the nerve to stand up to the verbal abuse of an officer who has sworn to serve the public good, she was subdued by the use of a device which disrupts the heart beat of the victim, rendering them temporarily helpless.
The officer’s supervisor was interviewed and stated flatly the officer in question acted properly and that he would have done the same thing. He stated emphatically that you don’t talk back to the police, and that the officer was acting to make sure that the woman didn’t wander into traffic and get herself killed.
There are a couple of things wrong with that statement. First, if a policeman feels he has the authority to treat an elderly woman in such careless fashion, with no consideration for her possible health condition, then that officer needs a little sensitivity training. Second, unless the woman demonstrated signs of dementia, I would assume that there is a very low probability of her willingly wandering into traffic. That renders the supposed reason for tasering the woman utterly invalid.
Granted, the woman in question did not behave like a recent charm school graduate. But that still does not give that officer the right to use such overwhelming force when he is not threatened in any way.
Let me point out something that should be obvious. Lack of self respect cannot be hidden beneath an overinflated ego. If that man was forced to switch places with the woman he so carelessly tasered, he might begin to appreciate the senselessness of his action. I say might, because a man so drunk with power would probably have a hard time assimilating new behaviors.
Just another reason why I never want to go to Texas.