Restoring Peoples' Trust, After So Many Catastrophic Failures (Joe Rothstein's Commentary)

September 11, 2009

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNEWS.COM

Commemoration of the 9/11 attack is always a jolt to America's nervous system.

Beyond the solemnity and homage to the victims, it's a stark reminder of how the leaders of the richest, most powerful, most technically advanced nation in the world failed us. Our intelligence apparatus failed to detect the plot and derail it. Our homeland security system failed to engage and defeat it while it was occurring. And, despite two on-going wars and enormous costs, our leaders have failed to bring to justice those who organized the deadliest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.

The entire 9/11 episode has been a U.S. leadership failure of historic proportions.

And that's not the only leadership collapse we've lived through since the turn of the millennium.

Our financial and banking leaders, with complicity of lawyers, accountants, stock and bond brokers, rating agencies and sleeping "watch dogs" in government, have given us Enron, WorldCom, and now the near collapse of capitalism itself. The fall-out has been catastrophic for tens of millions of people. And it will be for many years to come.

Leaders of the Catholic Church tolerated widespread pedophilia in their sanctuaries, and compounded that criminality with elaborate efforts to hide the crimes, protect the perpetrators and punish the victims.

Baseball, once seen as American as apple pie, has been uncovered as a caldren of drug use, with some of the most idolized players as willing participants and club owners as silent accomplices.

Our business leaders have closed up plants and shops all over the U.S. and sent those jobs to other countries, profiting grandly on the misery they left behind.

The nation's roads, bridges, railroads, mass transit, schools and water and sewer systems have all been allowed to deteriorate. So has our health system. And our educational system. Entire states, notably California, are seemingly ungovernable.

Of all the crises now on the front pages of our newspapers (many of which are also going bankrupt), none is more compelling than the crisis of leadership---leadership at so many levels of public and private activity.

We've been living through a leadership failure seldom experienced in our nation's history---matched only by failure to head off the Civil War and failure to anticipate and initially react to the Great Depression. Government, business, religious, financial and social leaders have all let us down.

What's the answer? It lies in recognizing the truth about past sins and dealing the new realities honestly---and where need be---with courage. A lot courage.

At a bankers conference in Germany the other day Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, admitted that his firm and his industry made a lot of money selling socially useless financial products and that a lot of money paid to people in the industry was “inappropriate.”

That's a start. Now Kenneth Feinberg, President Obama's “pay czar” needs to reject the outrageous bonuses scheduled to be paid to the handful of bankers and AIG people who are in line for them. His answer to their protests should be “Sue me.” And the President needs to forcefully and unambiguously back him up.

Congress would go a long way toward repairing trust in itself by throwing a harness around Wall Street and setting up the financial protection agency President Obama has asked for.

Withdrawing support for a corrupt regime in Afghanistan would also be a signal that with President Obama and the current Congress we will get “Change We Can Believe In.”

And, one more thing. Congress needs to up the ante on recovery by pushing megabucks out the door, soon, to stop the bleeding of jobs. It's undoubtedly true that everything the administration's done so far has stopped the financial meltdown from being worse. But for the millions out of work, the millions losing their homes, the businesses collapsing because of lost sales “it could have been worse” is not a good enough answer.

"Let's make it better" is the right answer, and the one most people are waiting for.

Getting another stimulus bill approved, halting the Vietnamization of Afghanistan, quashing the bonuses and reining in Wall Street are all tough assignments. Every one of them will take a mighty effort and a lot of courage.

But the country needs these things to happen. These things have to happen for their own sake, and to add to the restoration of trust that the U.S. is being lead again, firmly, and in the right direction.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted as joe@einnews.com)