Call me depressed, but the world isn’t changing as quickly as some of us would like. The great value reset of 2009 has reached the shores of 2010 and momentum is stalling. Can you feel it? Can you feel the great hum of the universe grinding to a slow crawl, the interior mechanics succumbing to the ebb and flow of CHANGE?
You see, as long as there is money in doing nothing, producing nothing then change will continue to come slowly, in fits and starts. We saw change over the last year didn’t we? A new president, radically different from not just the previous occupant of the White House, but radically different from the last several “leaders of the free world.”
Are We Complacent Again?
And that was just the beginning. Our politics was widely seen as broken and then of course, our economy, a financial train wreck waiting to happen, burdened by byzantine government regulation and arcane wall street wizardry, coupled with entitlement programs that define the term unsustainable.
And yet, a year later, and it seems our appetite for change has dwindled. Are we already overstuffed? Or were we force fed so much talk of change, without the accompanying action to back it all up, that we simply stopped listening?
I hope not and yet there are ominous signs that that is exactly what is happening. As long as there is money in nothing, than that is what exactly will be produced. Risky experimentations of the past year, of which we need more, not less, have lost their sheen.
In Government? Lots of Money, for Nothing
- A massive financial stimulus program the effects of which even the Administration has acknowledged have not met their lofty projections
- A health care overhaul that has bloodied the party in power and exposed huge rifts between in their caucus, and which, even at this late date, is hardly assured from being put into law
- We are still fighting 2 “hot wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq. And even as Iraq evolves into something of a success story, the situation in Afghanistan has devolved into a total quagmire. Obama is sending 30k additional troops there. Obama campaigned on ending our entanglements, but will certainly end his first term with more American troops in the field
In the Private Sector? Lots of Money, for Nothing
- TARP, TALF, AIG, BofA, Merrill Lynch, GM, GMAC, Citigroup
- The US government, backed by the US taxpayer, put up many billions of dollars to prop up the above firms. For what?
For This…
Banks Prepare for Big Bonuses, and Public Wrath
Everyone on Wall Street is fixated on The Number.
The bank bonus season, that annual rite of big money and bigger egos, begins in earnest this week, and it looks as if it will be one of the largest and most controversial blowouts the industry has ever seen.
Bank executives are grappling with a question that exasperates, even infuriates, many recession-weary Americans: Just how big should their paydays be? Despite calls for restraint from Washington and a chafed public, resurgent banks are preparing to pay out bonuses that rival those of the boom years. The haul, in cash and stock, will run into many billions of dollars.
Money for Nothing! It’s the American way, once again at least. We came so close to a full and total re-examination of our values, our processes, our thinking, our philosophies. And this was a bi-partisan moment. This wasn’t about Republicans and Democrats, this was, for a very brief time, a moment that Americans had set aside and asked to be led. For one time in a generation, we said enough and demanded more from our leaders. And they failed us again. They failed us with their inability to punch through. Their connections, authentically built, were wasted. And that, as they say, was that.
We have the leadership we deserve.
But there is a change coming. It’s building slowly, in fits and starts. It ebbs and flows. Like a great river threatening to engulf a river valley once again, that tidal surge will gather. But for now, it will have to be in hibernation. New leadership is coming. Tomorrow’s leaders are being prepared and tutored today.
They have an entirely new vocabulary, and they have a value system untainted by our current crop of non-leaders. There time will come, but it will just have to be delayed a little while longer.
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Change is a great thing to talk about. In an election cycle, talking about how you’d do things differently than your predecessor makes for good soundbites. But once an elected official is in the chair with the full knowledge he lacked (or ignored) the status quo becomes one’s friend. It’s the same with individuals. Change is scary, inconvienient and, well, different. It takes more than desire to stay the course of change. Add a powerful inertia like money and the odds of moving any progressive program forward dwindle. How many New Year resolutions have already been abandoned?
.-= Peggy´s last blog ..“Yuck” factor hits a new market: soda fountains =-.
Somehow I feel there’s money in doing nothing for the extremes of the population. The rich get stimulus packages and all sorts of bail outs because there’s no way we can let them fall (or maybe we’ll let just a couple of them fall to see how it feels) and then for the poor, there’s more medicaid, medicare, food stamps and whatever their version of a bail out is. But what happens with what’s in the middle…is there money in doing nothing for the more than 50% of people who constitute the middle class or whatever we choose to call what’s in between the rich and the poor?
.-= Lav´s last blog ..Every day is the anniversary of a moment that changed your life =-.
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