Our nations debt crisis... what do YOU think? Put down the channel changer for five minutes and read this.

What do you think? Can we as every day middle class citizens affect change? I would like you to think about the answer to that question before you read this blog post –

Scott and I watched the documentary “Inside Job” last night because it won the Oscar this year in the documentary category. Although the topic of the movie looked a bit brain-numbing, I was very interested to see it because I wanted an answer of why our nation is in the debt crisis it’s in… and wanted to know the cause.

When I got my MBA at Westminster a few years ago, we read an amazing book called “Conspiracy of Fools” about the Enron scandal. You may also be familiar with the documentary “The Smartest Guys In The Room” which is based on the book. We discussed white collar crime and all agreed that it’s essential to be an ethical leader in today’s society, because – let’s be honest – integrity is a rare thing these days.

You’d have thought that our nation would have learned our lesson with Enron or WorldCom or any other company that embezzled money or hid money in securities or posted their “future income” as a way of inflating their revenue numbers to inflate stock prices… but what we have to realize, is our government (republican and democrat) is in on the scandal as well… which is why things aren’t changing and why it’s impossible for any one citizen to affect change.

After watching “Inside Job” last night… my stomach sank. And it’s truly ironic that the day after I watched that movie I hear on NPR that the “S&P threatens to cut U.S. credit ratings on our deficit”.

What you need to know about our country if you don’t want to watch “Inside Job” (But I HIGHLY recommend that you do):

1)
After “The Great Depression” and the “Wall Street Crash in 1929” the government put certain restrictions and regulations on what the Financial Institutions in our nation could do. The industry became highly regulated because if it wasn’t regulated, the government had no idea if what the financial institutions were doing was legal or ethical or in the best interest of everyone in our country. These regulations were a good thing because we didn’t have any “ponzi schemes” for a long time after that and our economy grew back to a healthy state… then President Reagan de-regulated the financial sector during his presidency … why? Well probably because someone in the financial sector said they would pay him a ton of money to support his future political campaigns or probably just pay him off outright.

2)
There are financial executives who pay off politicians and economic professors at prestigious universities (and who knows who else) so that they can strategize highly unethical ways to FAIL companies and doop others (through fake PR and the public's trust in government authorities) to believe they have a legitimate business model. These companies and schemes are the very reason we are in the economic situation we are in… they give to the rich and take from the poor and cause the stock market to fail. They make the rich richer and the poor poorer. How these people live with themselves… I don’t know.

The fact that these executives pay off government employees (mainly the president) to hide the fact that our economy is in such utter failure is beyond me. And because they do this, we everyday citizens will spend more money to contribute to their fake companies.

An example of this is the mortgage crisis… these financial executives made it SO easy for all of us to get a loan (a home loan, a boat loan, a car loan, etc.)… even if we couldn’t afford it. These loan companies sold the loans to major financial institutions that didn’t care if the loan was paid off or not… they had already made the initial investment. They didn’t care if middle class people could actually pay off their loans. They didn’t care if middle class people lost their homes because the financial industry put them in a situation they couldn’t control… they just wanted to money.

The fact that this is LEGAL is baffling to me. These people don’t go to jail either… The government can’t prosecute people they were “working with” right? A lot of the economic advisers for Obama’s presidency were on the board of or executives of companies that contributed to the financial crisis in 2008 (this type of behavior has been going on since deregulation of the financial industry in Reagan’s presidency). It’s basically like we are rewarding unethical behavior that rewards the rich and hurts the poor. It’s like we don’t worry about “conflict of interest” anymore.

Speaking of “conflict of interest” the financial institutions also pay off companies like “Standard & Poors” who give them triple A ratings (which means they are stable) even if they are not. If we can’t trust these companies to give us ACCURATE ratings, how can we make good investments as a society?? If we can’t trust our government or professors at our schools? Can we trust anyone?

3)
Economic professors of our nation’s top schools write articles for financial institutions and the government that lie about the actual state of our nation’s financials (and other nations like Iceland). They will publish articles that have literal LIES in them so that the financial services industry looks better. They publish these articles so that people keep spending money and don’t worry about how insolvent our nation’s funds are. Wouldn’t you think that economic professors that teach our students about economics and publish articles that lie after being paid off by financial institutions is a bit of a CONFLICT OF INTEREST? Not to mention, journalism is supposed to be fair and balanced (it is supposed to represent both sides of the issue)… these reports not only didn’t represent both sides of the issue – they outright lied about what was going on.

Many of the education institutions as well as the financial institutions wouldn’t even comment on this film because they knew they were doing the wrong thing.

What happened to being a nation founded by God? What happened to a nation that had values and morals? It seems as of late that we are founded on greed. Is that what America stands for? If so, that makes me sad and I know we can do better. Why do financial board members and executives (and professors and government employees) get away with this? And standard every day citizens have to obey the law and pay the consequences. It all seems backwards to me.

So – when I asked you at the beginning of this blog post if you felt that you as an every day middle class citizen could affect change… you probably had hope… How do you feel now? How can we even begin to think about affecting change on this topic when most people would rather play a video game or watch reality TV instead of watching this documentary and caring about our country?