Anyone willing to look can see that ethical criteria for honest, clean, and trustworthy financial practices have spiraled downward to oblivion in the U.S. The Goldman Sachs scandals are opening new depths of cognitive dissonance measured against ethical standards; the same with the banking industry, disgraced by robo-signing and sheer greed.
The question is whether people of both faith and secular humanist traditions have the will to unearth and reconstruct a moral vision of justice and shared decision-making. The moral vision is there in Christian, Islamic and Jewish roots as well as in egalitarian writings of the Enlightenment. The grand scale corruption of today’s common practice is both an intellectual and political problem. The rationalizations that enshrine wealth as moral success beg for deconstruction; as does the so-called democratic practice of self-interested factionalism. U. S. political practice keeps defeating itself by separating process from goals, turning the process itself into the supposed desired end; easy to do if you make millions doing it.
As example, Goldman is making headlines almost every day. Last Saturday (3/14) the NY Times reported that federal prosecutors “have recordings of a Goldman Sachs executive leaking confidential information” about technology stocks to financial mogul, Raj Rajaratnam, now serving a twelve year sentence in federal prison for financial fraud. Two other Goldman executives are reported under investigation for their roles in a vast insider trading network.
Of course it’s not surprising that a strong defense is being mounted on behalf of Goldman Sachs, exposed in last week’s blog for its “shameless” double-dealing in the proposed giant El Paso/Kinder Morgan merger. (Where Goldman persuaded El Paso to sell itself for far less than it was worth.) Loyalty to profits count. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg made a special visit last week to offer condolences to Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein as he endured this new avalanche of criticism. It had grown even larger because of the spectacular resignation last Monday (3/12) by one of Goldman’s own executives, Greg Smith. In a Times Op Ed Smith itemized Goldman’s toxic and destructive culture: clients are called Muppets, he said. A “vampire squid culture” urges employees to “rip-off clients,” and “ rip out eyeballs.”
Mayor Bloomberg called the criticism worse than “ridiculous.” But the fact is that Goldman is “a key contributor” to the Mayor’s wealth. NY Times Reporter Michael Grynbaum observed that Goldman “leases thousands of Bloomberg terminals, sending tens of millions of dollars a year to the mayor’s private company [Bloomberg News].”
These seem like misdemeanors compared to the Wall Street Journal’s report of continuing corruption in the banking industry where a decimal point can destroy the lives of thousands of moderate income or unemployed families. Last Thursday the Journal reported on new research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland discovering that banks are ”systematically overvaluing foreclosure homes.” This makes it too difficult for under water homeowners to negotiate a loan modification, enabling banks to evict people sooner. Nice! “The higher the lender thinks that the value of a home is, the less likely they are to offer a modification” that would enable families to remain in their homes.
Meanwhile the struggle to improve financial regulation is being fiercely resisted with big money lobbying from the same Wall Street industry. It has dug in its heels to water down the final stages of rule-setting for the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
This Sunday, in the Christian world, cognitive dissonance will be the order of the day as thousands of churches hear the Lenten lectionary reading from Jeremiah—“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” And from the Psalmist, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.”
When and if the people connect the dots, we’ll know that when we act. Everything now hangs on whether we can grasp that the dreams, the language, the rhetoric no longer describe either our broken world or where we need to go. Will we articulate new visions for ancient values?
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