THE PRICE OF CRONY CAPITALISM

THE PRICE OF CRONY CAPITALISM

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 23, 2008

"Where's the outrage?"

Senator Bob Dole during his losing 1996 campaign for president.



Everything I've read from Dr. Donald Farr’s Network makes sense, and clearly people responding are very concerned with high gasoline prices, falling real estate values, declining graduation rates, and the sub prime mess with nobody seemingly in charge, not to mention that water, not oil, is the most pressing crisis.

Some, in the case of people like Dr. Farr living in California, have monumental problems, as they are essentially in a separate nation with one hand tied behind their backs.

I have three perspectives on this problem. One is the home, another is the school, and the third is the real problem, the leadership, which is nonexistent.

Home and school get all the attention as if parents and teachers are truly responsible for poor guidance at home and poor performance at school, when all the prescriptions from the leadership are iatrogenic, or worse than the problem in the first place.

Leadership has been disintegrating for more than one hundred years now and everyone in society across the face of the earth is suffering for it.

You cannot lose 20 million people in the hot wars of the first half of the 20th century and another 20 million in the COLD WAR of the last half and not suffer systemic societal problems.

We little people who pay for these wars with our lives and our capital have multiplied in number while only a few have multiplied in wealth.

In the early 20th century, there were a few hundred millionaires. Now, there are tens of millions of millionaires, and a few thousand billionaires.

War does this because war destroys the moral fabric of society when people are given license to let loose and send caution to the wind.

Meanwhile, the orchestration of these wars are always by people who have an ax to grind or suffer from the nostalgia for empire as did Churchill, Stalin, and yes, Mussolini and Hitler, as well as Emperor of Japan Hirohito.

Typical of our reactionary American style, the sinking of the Lusitania got us into World War I, and Pearl Harbor into World War II.

Behind these two Great Wars were men of devious motivation and duplicitous minds. But we little people are trained to go along with our masters, and we do.

Society is like one giant organism that breathes collectively with the same instinct for survival as if in the caldron of hell, which the 20th century happened to be.

It is hard to imagine that in 1900 there were less than one billion people in the world. It took 50,000 years to reach that number, but a mere hundred years to increase to nearly seven billion and counting. War does you see. The population explodes and explodes and explodes because the instinct for survival is the nervous tic.

This mechanism has been demonstrated since the beginning of time.

When war comes, the fragile nature of society fragments. Morality is always in the mind of the times, not in any sacred book or institution. That morality is a response to human crisis, which is always a fabrication, and predictably, each crisis is followed by monumental change as everything is breaking down, reforming, and not necessarily for the better.

Little people who had little before the crisis have even less after, but those that orchestrate these crises always share in the spoils.

This goes on in plain sight but none of us notice because we are busy blaming each other or blaming our parents or teachers or our children, never the leadership.

Leaders have us waving the flag, listening to their rhetoric and promises, clapping our hands, and believing their every word because it doesn't cost us anything, now. The cost is always later when nothing changes for the better, always for the worse, and always at our expense.

There is always an explanation by the leadership why things go awry, and always we had a significant role in why they went awry.

That is not quite true. No, not quite true at all. The leadership sometimes takes us off the hook and redirects our focus on to someone else to blame for our plight, but certainly never the leadership.

When I was a boy, not only did Catholics not divorce neither did Jews nor most Protestants. It was not because there were so many happy homes but quite the opposite. Divorce was not approved of by society. Not being able to maintain a marriage was a sign of weakness, or something being wrong with you. "For the sake of the children seldom came up," that was an invention later on. Certainly, no one would openly live together in "sin" in those days.

Now, everything goes, but is there more happiness, better functional relationships, more intimacy between people, more of a commitment to a common cause? I don't think so.

I would sense from what I have experienced in counseling more than 1,000 married couples in my professional career, and many others living in various shades of togetherness that people today are not happier but more anxious.

And that is where leadership plays its trump card of having everyone chase money, careers, celebrity, technology, narcissistic indulgence, and always on the ball of deception. .

War and chaos give people permission to let it all hang out, and once out of the genie there is no way to get it back.

I've written about the 1960s but that was only a pimple on the ass of society. Woodstock was one thing, but children in their innocence listened to loud music, slept and made love in the mud, smoked pot or whatever, as they were lost in defiance because there was no control; no direction; no consistency, and no loyalty, more importantly not even to themselves.

Why do you think people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison died in their twenties? They were sacrificial lambs on the altar of hedonism in the hippie movement that wasn't going anywhere.

But strangely, in going nowhere, Hippie's knew the Vietnam War was a sham, and somewhere deep in their soul young people found the courage to say, "Hell no, I won't go!"

Four presidents were complicit in that war: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, two Republicans and two Democrats, and so it isn't the party that makes the difference.

How could you expect children to be loyal when their parents weren't loyal right under their noses, and flaunted it as if they were invisible?

They saw their parents lie, cheat on their income tax, make merry with their friends, lose control and forget how they behaved under their children's eyes, and then expect children to behave not as they behaved, but as they said they should behave.

In my long life, I have seen corruption, duplicity, chicanery, malfeasance, and betrayal by leaders who had much in common with Judas. Some of them got away with it, some of them are still flying high today, and a few had their wings clipped, but only trimmed a little. And I'm only one soul in the firmament. Like you, I read about them every day.

This is brief note but I'm going to mention a controversial subject.

My heart goes out to every child that was ever molested by a Catholic Priest, but my heart also is angered by the stupidity of the Church, its arrogance, and its flippant apology in Australia, as if the apology of a pope means anything when priests are meant to behave as eunuchs once they become ordained. The church created this hell and its leadership now gives its Dante's definition.

Predator and prey are both victims in a society orchestrated by leaderless leadership.

Only yesterday, I was listening to my son and his friends blaming the Mexicans and African Americans for everything from high gas prices to the lack of jobs, to so many people on the dole, while not being responsible and on and on.

I have had the privilege to be in leadership positions and I will tell you one aspect of leadership that leaders share in common and that is the consummate skill to find convenient scapegoat to deflect criticism.

Currently, the economy is in trouble for mainly errors committed by Republicans and Democrats, who have had sweetheart arrangements with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when they were in banking or real estate or government, or lobbying government, or in some other connection with the current sub prime fiasco.

The other day listening to C-span, a caller called in and said, "I lost my home. I make $9 an hour and my real estate broker closed a contract for me for a house costing $238,000. How could he do that?"

He could do that because people like secretary of treasury Henry Paulson, formerly head of Goldman Sachs investment bank with close ties with Democratic-dominated Fannie Mae turned a blind eye, as did several other investment banks.

Paulson didn't want anything to jeopardize his abundant salary then, and now he doesn't want to ruffle the feathers of investment bankers too much.

Democrat Jim Johnson was CEO for Fannie Mae in the 1990s and made $9.5 million a year on this crony capitalism.

You could say how could this guy making $9 an hour expect to be able to afford a house costing $238,000? He couldn't, in fact he didn't have a clue. "I was caught up in the euphoria," he said, "when the broker said, 'Not to worry,' everything will work out okay, besides, if you get into trouble, you can always sell it for more than you paid," so stay cool.

While little Jimmy or Johnny, Sally or Sarah is not behaving in school, and parents and teachers are on the rack for their poor performance, people in power have done a number on everyone and you can go all the way back to the First World War for evidence.

If you have watched the three-hour PBS series "The War of the World," you know this historian gives ample proof that the First and Second World War were both mistakes.

What is your point Dr. Fisher?

My point is that there is no point in pointing fingers at ground level. Most parents, even single parents are doing the best jobs they know how. Most teachers are doing the best job they know how as well. As for the children, they are caught in the confusion between home and school where parents and teachers are trying to solve problems they did not create. That is my point. Leaders create the culture, and we all behave blindly to its dictates, and suffer for the attention.

Leaders don't talk about school being fun, creative joy, and expressions of individualism. They talk about jobs, careers, high incomes, and all the material fruits that they deem so important at the expense of all the spiritual pursuits that make us human. Ironically, they get great assistance in this smokescreen from the church.

Parents and teachers are trying to do this but with little help from a leadership that keeps putting everyone in the soup. That is why I say we are pointing the finger at the wrong people, the wrong situation, and for the wrong reasons.

JRF