Honest Answers about the Financial Collapse

Imagine a clock that marks time not only in minutes and hours, but centuries and millennia. What would that tell you?

That it’s important to think beyond the immediate, for one thing.

The financial crisis, like the energy crisis and the climate crisis, arose because of short-term, get-rich now, pay later thinking. Apart from a general sense of greed that surrounds our culture, we have not developed the foresight, thoughtfulness and concern necessary to preserve and protect those who come after us. Last week, Barack Obama had to warn us that solving the problems we face might take longer than “one term,” as if fixing the many broken parts of our economy, not to mention the planet, isn’t going to take decades (once we actually start).

To illustrate the relationship between time and responsibility, a group of interesting folks are planning to build a “clock of the long now” in Nevada - it will tick once a year, and cuckoo every 1,000 years. The non-profit “Long Now Foundation” wants to “provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking.” As they explain, “we are trying to stretch out what people consider as now.”

In a book about the project, Stewart Brand proposes a 10,000 year library that would contain a “Responsibility Record” — to “make decision-makers accountable to posterity as well as to their present constituents.” But it’s hard to imagine our elected officials and corporate executives thinking beyond the next election or stockholder meeting. I can tell you from first hand observation that most members of the House of Representatives weren’t thinking beyond the end of the week when the bailout legislation was first sent to Capitol Hill in September.

What does a future produced by short-term thinking look like? Read the fascinating new novel Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. On a world much like Earth, all scientific knowledge is protected and advanced by people who live in secular monasteries. They are separated from the rest of the distracted and oblivious population by walls whose gates may open only once every year - or once every thousand years - to seed the inhabitants of the planet with the knowledge they had long ago forgotten.

Once the euphoria subsides tomorrow, whoever is elected will have the deeply difficult task of rescuing our economy from a looming depression. Let’s see where we are nearly sixty days after the meltdown:

1. The $700 billion bailout has yet to lead to the kind of mortgage or credit card rate reductions needed to reboot the consumer economy.

2. Despite the bailout and at least a trillion dollars in taxpayer loans to corporations made by the federal government, banks are hoarding or merging rather than lending.

3. Lobbyists for the financial titans that got us into this mess – banks, hedge funds, private equity, etc – are hard at work protecting their interests in Washington, D.C. As usual, the interests of the average person have yet to be represented or even articulated by elected officials.

4. All economic indicators suggest further deterioration in the economy.

If Obama wins tonight, he will still face a Congress that has long been indentured to the financial industry. Even a landslide does not guarantee that members of the House and Senate will follow his plan to rescue our economy – a plan which has yet to be developed.

If McCain ekes it out, he will face the added complication of a Congress dominated by the other party, likely with greater numbers than at present.

My take: getting elected President was the easy part.