Greed

I can't help but be somewhat amused by all the brouhaha over the bonuses that were paid out to the people at AIG. Everyone is so outraged by the unmitigated greed.

The reason that this amuses me is that it is so damned hypocritical. Of course those mavens of the financial industry are greedy. That is the favorite American pastime, being greedy. Get more, get bigger. Bigger houses, more expensive cars and watches (I personally have always choked on the idea of spending several thousand dollars on a watch, when a $25 Timex will keep perfectly good time for years), have a television in every room, have every electronic gadget known to man. And until the current economic crisis, those who successfully practiced this kind of greed were admired, envied, celebrated, rather than vilified. To be rich is this country's idea of the highest good. Not being talented, intelligent, honorable, courageous – though all of these are given lip-service to, and may indeed be admired by some – but being rich. That is this country's idea of "successful."

The outrage we've seen expressed this past week by members of Congress, and by the President, have made me think of Claude Rains' famous line in what is perhaps my all-time favorite movie, Casablanca – "I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here." As the croupier from the next room hands him his winnings. Pul-lease. Those people on Wall Street, in the big banks and insurance companies, should all of a sudden turn into noble, self-sacrificing paragons? That isn't how they got where they are. The businesses they are in have never rewarded nobility, self-sacrifice. As Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric said in a recent interview on public television, "These people didn't choose to cure cancer. They didn't choose to do public service work. They chose to make money."

But then, this is exactly why we need laws that hold such people in check, just as we need laws to hold potential murderers, rapists and thieves in check. They are not going to hold themselves in check. I so often think (and I mean this quite literally) about the end of the nineteenth century/beginning of the twentieth, when the robber barons and others of their ilk were also getting filthy rich, at the expense of the little guy, and the country as a whole. Finally people like Theodore Roosevelt started saying, o.k., enough is enough, and Congress started passing things like the Antitrust Act (which seems to be have been pretty much ignored for the last twenty years or so.) We are there once again; history does, after all, have a tendency to repeat itself. I suspect there will always be people who will do what-ever they can get away with, so the rest of us just have to put rules in place that keep them from getting away with too damn much.

But, it seems to me, we also have to stop admiring these "respectable" scoundrels; and that is a cultural turn-around that I really wonder if we as a country are capable of.