Republicans have morality upside down. Santorum, Gingrich, and even Romney are barnstorming across the land condemning gay marriage, abortion, out-of-wedlock births, access to contraception, and the wall separating church and state.
But America's problem isn't a breakdown in private morality. It's a breakdown in public morality. What Americans do in their bedrooms is their own business. What corporate executives and Wall Street financiers do in boardrooms and executive suites affects all of us.
There is moral rot in America but it's not found in the private behavior of ordinary people. It's located in the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump. It's found in Wall Street fraud, exorbitant pay of top executives, financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign "donations."
Political scientist James Q. Wilson, who died last week, noted that a broken window left unattended signals that no one cares if windows are broken. It becomes an ongoing invitation to throw more stones at more windows, ultimately undermining moral standards of the entire community.
The windows Wall Street broke in the years leading up to the crash of 2008 remain broken. Despite financial fraud on a scale not seen in this country for more than 80 years, not a single executive of a major Wall Street bank has been charged with a crime.
Since 2009, the Securities and Exchange Commission has filed 25 cases against mortgage originators and securities firms. A few are still being litigated but most have been settled. They've generated almost $2 billion in penalties and other forms of monetary relief, according to the Commission. But almost none of this money has come out of the pockets of CEOs or other company officials; it has come out of the companies -- or, more accurately, their shareholders. Federal prosecutors are now signaling they won't even bring charges in the brazen case of MF Global, which lost billions of dollars that were supposed to be kept safe.
Nor have any of the lawyers, accountants, auditors, or top executives of credit-rating agencies who aided and abetted Wall Street financiers been charged with doing anything wrong.
And the new Dodd-Frank law that was supposed to prevent this from happening again is now so riddled with loopholes, courtesy of Wall Street lobbyists, that it's almost a sham. The Street prevented the Glass-Steagall Act from being resurrected, and successfully fought against limits on the size of the largest banks.
Windows started breaking years ago. Enron's court-appointed trustee reported that bankers from Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase didn't merely look the other way; they dreamed up and sold Enron financial schemes specifically designed to allow Enron to commit fraud. Arthur Andersen, Enron's auditor, was convicted of obstructing justice by shredding Enron documents, yet most of the Andersen partners who aided and abetted Enron were never punished.
Americans are entitled to their own religious views about gay marriage, contraception, out-of-wedlock births, abortion, and God. We can be truly free only if we're confident we can go about our private lives without being monitored or intruded upon by government, and can practice whatever faith (or lack of faith) we wish regardless of the religious beliefs of others. A society where one set of religious views is imposed on a large number of citizens who disagree with them is not a democracy. It's a theocracy.
But abuses of public trust such as we've witnessed for years on the Street and in the executive suites of our largest corporations are not matters of private morality. They're violations of public morality. They undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy. They've led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.
Regressive Republicans have no problem hurling the epithets "shameful," "disgraceful," and "contemptible" at private moral decisions they disagree with. Rush Limbaugh calls a young woman a "slut" just for standing up for her beliefs about private morality.
Republicans have staked out the moral low ground. It's time for Democrats and progressives to stake out the moral high ground, condemning the abuses of economic power and privilege that characterize this new Gilded Age -- business deals that are technically legal but wrong because they exploit the trust that investors or employees have placed in those businesses, pay packages that are ludicrously high compared with the pay of average workers, political donations so large as to breed cynicism about the ability of their recipients to represent the public as a whole.
An economy is built on a foundation of shared morality. Adam Smith never called himself an economist. The separate field of economics didn't exist in the eighteenth century. He called himself a moral philosopher. And the book he was proudest of wasn't The Wealth of Nations, but his Theory of Moral Sentiments -- about the ties that bind people together into societies.
Twice before progressive have saved capitalism from its own excesses by appealing to public morality and common sense. First in the early 1900s, when the captains for American industry had monopolized the economy into giant trusts, American politics had sunk into a swamp of patronage and corruption, and many factory jobs were unsafe -- entailing long hours of work at meager pay and often exploiting children. In response, we enacted antitrust, civil service reforms, and labor protections.
And then again in 1930s after the stock market collapsed and a large portion of American workforce was unemployed. Then we regulated banks and insured deposits, cleaned up the stock market, and provided social insurance to the destitute.
It's time once again to save capitalism from its own excesses -- and to base a new era of reform on public morality and common sense.
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"And the book he was proudest of wasn't The Wealth of Nations, but his Theory of Moral Sentiments -- about the ties that bind people together into societies."
The second has been lost in pathological corrupt corporatism and egotistic self-absorbed casino capitalism. Smith intuited probably also the green level of consciousness (upward turn of the spiral from orange industrial individualism) and organization which was born in the early 70s and has been reacted against from the old dinosaur corporations and stuck people like Karl Rove who likely never "grokked" the advances of environmentalism, awareness, beyond ego, 2nd wave-feminism, multiculturalism et al of the 60s.
I'm imagining Rove toting around Ayn Rand's "The Virtue of Selfishness" in his tight hand and missing the evolution the 60s presaged, which has only very partially manifested---an important part of this green consciousness is care, compassion, and community, not strict and ruthless self-interest. It includes self-interest but transcends it at the same time. It's time to move to that level, which means curtailing pathological corporatism-capitalism.
Is there a chance you'd go into politics? (I know, I know....)
The implied assumption is that we are independent individuals—individualism not collectivism is quite explicit and operative—and we must act solely out of self-concern. So we can see the origins of the lack of concern for the environment and for society by the business-minded among us.
Since morality (and its partner ethics) has to do with concern for the other and the collective ‘we’, this economic system not having concern for the collective ‘We’ or the other, has no inherent moral requirements.
Robert Reich concludes with “It's time once again to save capitalism from its own excesses -- and to base a new era of reform on public morality and common sense.” It is really capitalism that must be saved?
We should cease complaining about the lack of morality and ethics while at the same time holding in reverence and thus defending one of the chief causes, capitalism. Since we are not independent; since we are inextricably interdependent we mustn’t continue following a system as a way of structuring life that we know is flawed at its basic foundation (see It’s the econoME the complete argument). It is time to save our selves from committing suicide by egoistic capitalism.
This is a line that the current GOP field needs to recite again, and again, and again, and again, and again, until at some point it sticks.
Really?
We buy houses we can't afford, and then blame the problem on everyone else.
Our government buys votes by lowering the standards for buying a house which allows people to buy houses they cannot afford, but we don't blame any of the financial crisis on the government or the voter.
After Dodd and Frank pushed to lower standards for buying a house (which helps create the financial crisis), we then ask Dodd and Frank to pass rules to prevent such a mess in the future! (Yeah, let the fox guard the hen house.)
We run up our credit cards and declare bankruptcy to avoid payment.
We have our government give us free benefits by running up the debt, then we financially rape our children and grandchildren by leaving the debt for them.
Yeah, our people don't have any problem with morality at all. All the bad folks are evil bankers and wall street types. Right, of course.
Right and wrong are now just words
Friedmanite neoliberalism is \premised on negative liberty, meaning society's only responsibility is to allow people to pursue their own interest Accordingly, unfair and deceptive practices are viewed as inherently valuable.
For 40 years, successive administrations have allowed rampant violation of organizing rights, since unionization is seen as market interference. In 1978 the Supreme court effectively opened the door to usurious lending, preempting state usury laws interest rate caps.. Paul Samuelson's gave intellectual justification to free trade's race to the bottom, even if it means setting up shop where worker's right are violated.
Now, rights with no moral or economic justification are proliferating. Legislation like EFCA, allowing workers to decide how to organize, is seen as violating an employers' right to pay a pittance. We can't fully collect taxes owed under current law since its a supposed violation of personal liberty. We've allowed mergers in violation of antitrust laws, costing well paying jobs since enforcing them is market interfence. Likewise, enforcing consumer protecting laws, minimizing fraud and wealth extraction are viewed similarly.
The bursting of the bubble shattered any illusions and the goal has become grabbing public assets for mere pennies, lowering wages and crushing unions via austerity while avoiding prosecution for criminality. Laws intended to prevent this behavior are viewed as irrelevant, at best.
When a system creates hardship and encourages cynicism, selfishness and hatred, its time is over. Period.
- This is the guy who gave GM and Chrysler to the unions!
- This is the guy who calls people terrorists, without so much as a shred of evidence, and murders them with drones!
- This is the guy who signs a law that permits Argentinian-style disappearances and says, "Oh, but don't you worry, children, I will NEVER use it"!
- This is the guy who equates political opponents with the forces of evil for creating Super-PACs and then makes wisecracks about not "unilaterally disarming" when he opens his own for business.
- Oh, yeah, and this is the guy who lectures about the "new civility" while demonizing any and everyone who doesn't bow and scrape before his majesty the Dear Great Leader.
Is Reich in some kind of contest with Krugman to see who can lick the hardest?
Hope for a Change in 2012!
Obama is a joke I cannot laugh at because of the pain the whole country is feeling as a result of his incompetence.
Prediction: You'll pay your taxes in either event
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