High Office and Criminal Conduct

When this maladministration showed its true colors, by refusing to acknowledge authority of the International Criminal Court to prosecute offenders in this country, maybe I was not the only one to see we were in trouble. Now I have company in recognizing that bad character is affecting this country in its most basic operations, and its well-being. Stealing from the public has become a way of life to deregulated industry, and those funds are not being put back into our economy.

Unfortunately, she describes moral underpinning as the old "Protestant ethics" (white men is understood in this sentence) and deplores diversity - ignoring the rapacity with which the western world has treated the rest of the world. Her main point, that greed without the rule of law has deprived our formerly prosperous society of its operational system, however, has validity.

No more are there wise men at the top, who take pride in running an honorable financial world that makes the world safe for everyone. Those who took their place, as the moral principles of the country also fell, were the new wise guys, often up from nothing and replacing the idea of public service with greed and ignorance. Analysts say that we have had more corporate scandals in the last five years than during the entire 20th century.

The new book The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy , by longtime investment counselor and wise man David Smick, has intellectually taken apart this distraught era. His title, of course, plays upon Thomas L. Friedman's well-known book praising globalization, The World Is Flat. But Mr. Smick takes issue with this. To him, the world is curved, uncertain, with no one really knowing what is ahead unless we rethink our principles.

He finds that "our leadership must reform today's dangerously flawed financial architecture." It is, he says, "a tale of greed, hypocrisy and sheer folly," in which the young brokers and investment bankers created their own private markets. As the banks repackaged individual loans and mortgages for the global market, banks moved further and further away from the borrower "or any need to worry about whether he or she would repay a loan." In short, the money-crazed wise guys of the new world cared only for themselves, and in the end, of course, lost themselves, as well as everything else.

The elements of its own destruction are evident in this wistful classic punditry op-ed, which insists that some of the creators of systemic injustice were noble and we need to have their kind back in power. There is much to be gained by plowing under the elites that simply kept out of power those who didn't look like them. A true test of the disempowerment of working classes has been the past almost eight years. We have failure on every front.

High standards of behavior, which the Geyer mantra assumes belong to the very rich, are what we have had wiped out to our great loss in the current occupied White House. She is correct that criminal conduct has hurt even the criminals.