who brings to his examination of our current economic crisis his experience as a Washington Post correspondent in Argentina during its hyperinflation in the 1980s. From his office in the financial district he could observe as people came to observe the tickers:
When things got really bad, crowds would gather and watch their wealth evaporate minute by minute as the numbers went south.
He has experienced something of the same effect with our stock market in recent days, and as he writes in is column today, entitled Talk About the Meltdown,
Up 100 points, down 200, rallying, retreating, meandering, "looking for a bottom," falling off a cliff. Another day, another triple-digit decline.
And then he asks of both presidential candidates the first two of a series of questions:
Is the United States destined to look and feel increasingly like a "developing country"? Is this the way it's going to be?
Perhaps thinking of the US as a "developing"or "third world" country is a bit shocking. And yet precisely such imagery has occurred to more than a few in recent years, as we have seen increasing wealth in fewer hands, the development of ever more gated communities, and with the rise of Blackwater the development of what are in effect private police forces and armies.
Robinson acknowledges that the structure of our economy is very different than was that of Argentina, that our mortgage meltdown is NOT the equivalent of their runaway inflation. And yet he warns us that we are not alone, pointing out that well-developed Iceland is facing the equivalent of national bankruptcy - and in case you had not noticed, their stock market was closed for the last two days of the work week.
Robinson seeks the point of view of the candidates, beyond the usual boilerplate, about the implications of our current crisis. He does so by presenting more questions:
Is this a temporary setback or a fundamental shift? When the volatile markets settle down, as they eventually will, is the United States going to be a poorer nation than it was? Will the next generation of Americans lead lives of less affluence and comfort, rather than more?
I want to know whether this is some kind of final reckoning for living so far beyond our means. Is the bartender finally presenting us the the bill?
Some of these are questions I am hearing from acquaintances: from fellow staff and faculty at school; this evening at a memorial service for a dear friend on what would have been is 56th birthday, and was two days after his death from a melanoma that spread through his eye to his internal organs; among active Democrats when watching the debate on Tuesday night; in casual conversations with acquaintances I encounter at the supermarket or the local Starbucks.
And Robinson is right - neither candidate is really addressing these issues. Oh, to be sure, both are offering programs that address the most severe of the symptoms. The same could be said of the interventions sought by bankers through the administration, and of those authorized by the Congress - they attempt to ameliorate the most severe of the symptoms, but do little to assuage the underlying concern and fear at which Robinson's questions point so clearly.
Some of the questions Robinson offers are far more pointed, and are placed in the larger context of our financial relationships with other countries, the looming restrictions of the next president to financially fulfil many of his promises, and of the ongoing abuses we still see from the executives of companies on whose behalf the US has intervened to save them from failure. Consider these questions:
By Inauguration Day, how many "bad" mortgage-related investments will the U.S. government own? How much more money will the Treasury have poured into the insurance giant AIG?
And perhaps appropriately given what we know about the executives of AIG,
Will the tone-deaf executives rent the Taj Mahal for their next party?
Perhaps it is the nature of our political campaigns that people are unwilling to speak hard truths. After all, part of McCain's problems in Michigan was his blunt message to the workers of that state that the good jobs they had known from the auto industry were not coming back. Thus Robinson's remarks in his final two brief paragraphs - which include yet more questions, stated and implied - are even more unsettling. Consider:
I'm worried that this economic crisis may be more than just an episode. I'm worried that what's at stake is not just a few years of lost economic growth but our traditional notion of the American dream.
Sen. Obama? Sen. McCain? Reassure me. Don't give me empty words about American exceptionalism. Tell me in plain language what our new place is in the world and how we're going to give our children the good life that we've enjoyed.
I don't have biological children, but I teach 186 adolescents. And they are worried about their economic future. They hear their parents wonder what they will be able to provide them. Some have already heard of the severe diminution of their college funds. Others hear their parents talk as do some of my acquaintances, worrying whether they will be able to retire as they watch their IRAs and 401Ks disappear before their eyes, as the Argentinians with which Robinson begins his column watched their wealth disappear.
Some are afraid to look - this evening an acquaintance told me she has refused to open the quarterly statements that have come in from various retirement accounts and several people who overheard her chimed in that they were the same. They know they have lost, they are afraid to know how much.
Robinson is right to be worried about the traditional notion of the American dream being lost. Where I perhaps part with him is in my belief that the loss is not something that just happened: for far too many it has been happening since deregulation began under Carter; that accelerated during the years of the Reagan economic and regulatory approach that accelerated our sliding into a third world pattern of a few with ever-increasing wealth and many more being squeezed as their income did not keep up with their needs and wants (more about the latter anon). And the administrations of Bush 41 and Clinton did little to restore the structure that had changed during Reagan, and during Bush 43 we have reaped the folly of those changes.
As we have also reaped the folly of our own actions, our willingness to consume beyond our income, both as a nation and as individuals. Our stubborn belief in our exceptionalism has meant that as a nation and as members of a society we have been reluctant to address what for many was an obvious crisis, one which had not only the financial implications we are now experiencing, but also the environmental aspects about which Al Gore and others have been proclaiming, and the moral dimensions which we are too reluctant to directly confront. It is perhaps no coincidence that during the period our economy changed into a structure resembling that of some third world countries that our rate of incarceration skyrocket to one of the highest in the world, and almost certainly the highest among the Western industrialized nations.
There is also the additional moral decay demonstrated by our unwillingness to pay contemporaneously for the benefits we receive and the wars that we fight, and to seek to pass the costs for both onto future generations: I can assure you the adolescents I teach understand those costs.
It did not have to be this way. At least by the end of the Clinton administration we were no longer rapidly increasing the size of the debt we pass on to the future. But even then we were not addressing the continuing situation of those economically trapped at the lowest rungs. Even in what now seem like halcyon days we paid too little attention to those the least among us, and thus according to the standard espoused by Jesus in Matthew 25 condemned ourselves, in this case by our inaction and inattention.
Crises can provide opportunity. They can force us to ask the hard questions, once for which their are no easy answers, or at least none that are both honest and politically palatable. It is precisely those questions we need to hear, that we need to pose to those who would seek to lead us.
Eugene Robinson has done that. He has asked SOME of those questions. For that we should be grateful. And we should not stop. We should add the additional questions with which we already wrestle, and those that occur as we read his words, or perhaps even as a result of reading mine.
Peace.