Father Peter's Forum

Do you remember the commercial of Chase Bank which ran over and over again in 2007: “I want it all. I want it now.”

Few of us, in that year, realized how dangerous this was. Our economic leaders surely did not tell us. Our politicians surely did not want us. And our preachers surely did not pay much attention to it.

Every year, our homes increased in value. And every year, we wanted more goods and services and came to expect more goods and services. Our salaries continued to rise. Our economy continued to flourish. We were all encouraged to spend, spend, spend with credit easily available.

It was a very seductive time. Most people vaguely knew they were spending too much but, like an adolescent who has three traffic tickets unpaid with failure to appear in court and a warrant out for his arrest, they felt that if they just did not pay attention to it, it just might go away.

Our leaders really did fail us in this regard, fail us very badly, political leaders, economic leaders and spiritual leaders. And when the collapse came in 2008 and 2009, it came with a vengeance, as we shall see very shortly. The world has changed and it has changed for all of us. We are no longer free to borrow, borrow, borrow. Credit is tight. We are no longer free to rack up huge bills in credit cards. We are no longer free to spend, spend, spend. Many are out of work, up to 10% of the work force. The world will not be the same as it was just a few years ago.

We are now being told, and rightly so, about something we forgot long ago, namely, that thrift is important, that our leaders and us, too, were engaging in what we now see in hindsight as some selfishness and greed which are wrong and that what we need is to restrain ourselves and rediscover thrift and moderation.

It was St. Paul who said: I learned to live in abundance and I have learned to live with scarcity. If the world has changed, what do we do? We cannot change the world. We cannot change the economy. But we can change ourselves. Yes, there are ways we can change ourselves with the grace of God.

Looking back, it is easy to see that we forgot to restrain ourselves, we forgot moderation and we forgot self-discipline. “I want it all…I want it now.” We thought that would be just fine. We were blindsided. We wanted to be free to spend as we liked. We wanted to be free from some of the moral restraints of the past (thrift, hard work, self-sacrifice, discipline).

But we were not the only ones who forgot. Our political and economic leaders shamelessly abandoned traditional moral restraints of fiscal responsibility. A little lying, a little cheating, a little stealing would not be so bad. We will see in a later chapter that there is a basic rule of anthropology: Leaders gain and maintain power, not only by money but by making sure their view dominates and prevails. We were lower on the economic ladder and, when our leaders kept assuring us that everything was just fine, their views prevailed. We believed them. We shall see how they themselves now admit, in their best moments, making the grossest of errors.

Let us try to put this in perspective. Do you remember when we were adolescents, what we wanted more than anything else is to be free from restraints? How many times did we say to ourselves: no one is going to tell me what to do? In our adolescent fantasy world at the time we believed we could perhaps lie a little, cheat a little, steal a little and get away with it. Cheating in school was common place. Cheating in sports was common place. Lying to our girlfriends or boyfriends was common place and petty stealing was universally visible, as any shopkeeper would tell us. It came as a shocking realization that sometimes we got caught lying. But we did not repent. Many of us just lied more to cover it up. It came also as a shocking realization that if we cheated in school we did not always get caught, but some day it might catch up with us and it did for many. And we remember those who continued to steal, sooner or later, almost always got caught.

And yet, as adolescents, many continued to lie, cheat and steal. And many adolescents, and those older, continued to prolong their immaturity by embracing freedom from sexual restraints. Following the mass media, there are those who engage in sex without feeling, and not just adolescents, boys ripping off girls, girls ripping off boys, pornography and all other manner of perversity. The result is often depression, loneliness and alienation. Here at Boys Town, we see this with the children who come to us. They are not happy having to embrace freedom without moral restraints.

It is very curious for this author to reflect on how this mantra of freedom from restraints, so prevalent in adolescence, moved into the political and economic realm of adulthood in financial matters. Here it simply means that the profit motive was allowed to be less restrained by any sense of justice or fairness, by government regulations, or by our consciences.

Most adults know instinctively that if we do not put taboos on lying, cheating and stealing that they will grow and flourish. But somehow in the economic sector, our leaders began to let the market (freedom from restraint) prevail and the heck with everything else. What mattered was profit. It did not matter if you lied a bit or cheated a bit or even a lot. Harbingers were ENRON where there was a massive corporate network of enriching those at the top and lying to those below. There was the collapse of World Com, but everyone thought it was an aberration. And then there was the collapse of Arthur Anderson and people began to say perhaps this is not an aberration.

This became a very malignant form of capitalism. It was not a healthy form of free enterprise which is based on justice, fairness, a free exchange of goods, private property and a condemnation of greed and malice. Free enterprise is good in unleashing free human creativity in the economic sector, the positive role of business with justice and caring.

But what began to emerge, as we shall see in later chapters, was a huge global economy where economic leaders and government regulators did not put visible limits on the economic sector in terms of justice and fairness. They started to believe: “I want it all…I want it now.” They were like adolescents, wanting freedom from restraints. They began to believe it just as adolescents did. At the top of the economic ladder, at the bottom and sometimes in the middle, greed, lying, cheating and even self-deception were allowed to flourish without our hardly noticing it. We call it “making the fast buck.”

But less we be too hard on everyone, it is good to remember that basic principle of anthropology, namely: elites gain and maintain power, not only by money but by also making sure their view dominated and prevailed. The elites claimed, as they always have, superior intelligence, superior wisdom and the power to enforce silence to anyone who disagreed. It has always been difficult to tell truth to power. So few, if any, did.

If we did not have police pursuing robbers, there would be more robberies. If we did not have governmental restraints in financial areas, we would have more lying and cheating. And that is what happened. It all began with the insistence that we should have fewer banking regulations, more self regulation.

Who was one of the chief proponents of this? Alan Greenspan and many others like him. Greenspan for two decades (1987-2006) was Chairman of the Federal Reserve with great influence on Congress, the White House and others in promoting deregulation of financial markets. He would say that markets worked best when left alone (freedom from restraint). Many nodded their heads in agreement. That sounded great to a lot of people. No mention of justice, fairness or regulation by others. Greenspan argued that government intervention was a problem, not a solution. Many nodded their heads in agreement to this, too. He always advocated for less regulation and called it voluntary oversight. That is like telling the night manager at McDonald’s that when he closes and counts the cash drawer, no one else will recount it. It will all be on the honor system and no further checking. No business owner, in his right mind, would allow that. But that is the beginning of what we did in banking. “Let us use the honor system.” When the honor system is used in schools, it is the teachers who have the honor and the students who have the system. It is important to remember that, even in banking.

What were the ideas behind this lessening of regulation and voluntary oversight? In the 1950s, Alan Greenspan joined the inner circle of Ayn Rand who believed that self-absorption, not self-donation, was the answer, not the problem. He joined her inner circle in the 1950s. She praised anyone who pursues their own advantage regardless of others as long as it was not done by force or fraud. She said: “You have no responsibility to others except through self-restraint and self-interest.” She said: “Individual happiness is the ultimate good.” Alan Greenspan believed that in the 1950s and later put it into practice as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He said it this way: “There should be less government regulation, there should be self-regulation guided by the self-interested.” He said that self-interest (code word for selfishness) would stop people from being unjust, unfair and greedy. How foolish that was. He said that was the way to great freedom and great prosperity. He followed Ayn Rand’s book written in 1964 called The Virtue of Selfishness.

On 23 October 2008, Alan Greenspan appeared before the Government Oversight and Reform Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. The economy was in shambles. He admitted there was “a flaw” in his beliefs about self-interest and market forces. He said:

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of leading
institutions to protect shareholder equity, myself included, are
in a state of shocked disbelief.”

He suggested what went wrong was excess demand for home mortgages and failure to price them properly. He failed to mention selfishness, greed, fraud and the neglect of justice and fairness. In other words, he failed to mention public and private virtue. Justice is about giving everyone their due. Fairness means you have to think about more than your own advantage. You cannot say the heck with everyone else. You have to treat others the way you want to be treated. But that does not make a lot of sense when you believe the commercial of Chase Bank: “I want it all…I want it now.”

Too many people believed that. It was nothing more than greed. Subtle, yes, but greed nonetheless and no one was reminding us of that. It was nothing more than greed. Instead of saying I want it all, if we are honest and conscientious, we should be saying I would like to have my fair share and we need to make sure others have their fair share, too. Instead of saying I want it now, we should be saying: I need to save. I need to discipline myself. If I want more, I have to pay for it later and I have to be fair with others.

Too many people think of our economic system as a sophisticated money driven matrix “creating” wealth, driving progress in production and technology. But what if it only does that for a few people of the world while many, many, many others are in abject poverty in Third World countries? Is that fair? Is that good? No.

Here in our country it was this greedy self-interest that propelled our largest banks to successfully negotiate a bill in Congress in 1983 that would, to all extend and purpose, bypass the restrictions of how much interest credit card companies could charge. It was usually pegged at 17 or 18%. The law in 1983 was changed to say that if a bank or credit card company had a headquarters in a state where there were no restrictions, such as South Dakota, then the credit card company could allow the no restriction on interest rule throughout the United States as long as it came from South Dakota. This was in their own self-interest.

Many of us received two or three monthly solicitations for credit cards. How many did you get in the mail this past month? There is an alumnus who came to me with 19 credit cards and $38,000 in credit debt on them and there was no way he could pay. I helped, through Credit Advisors, to consolidate his debts, but then come to find out, he had received three more credit cards in the next two months. When I chided him for it, he said: “What could I do? They made these offers in the mail and I simply accepted them and they sent me a credit card.” Credit card debt has tripled with, up until now, little thought of paying it off.

One of our recent high school graduates who is going to college said he did not qualify for a Stafford loan but, on the other hand, he did receive a private student loan from a bank. I asked him if he intended to pay it back. He said: “Why would I have to pay it back? I think it is like a Pell grant.” By the way, so many kids say that a Pell grant at certain colleges is what they call “free money.” The money comes to you. You do not have to spend it on school and there is no need to repay it. All you have to do is be enrolled in school the day you receive it. This all seems to be very selfish, very unfair and very unjust.

You would not be surprised to hear me say that our most pressing moral threat in the United States is not sexual, but financial. It will destroy our lives.

Several years ago a variety of church leaders, with general concerns for the poor, argued that “redlining” is immoral and rightly so. They also argued that credit should be available to the poor. This was also a good idea. In their enthusiasm, they forgot to mention that it should not be given to people who cannot pay it back. They meant we should make credit available to the poor so they do not have to go to loan sharks. Going to loan sharks is a bad idea. Making credit available is a good idea as long as it does not trick the poor into taking out loans they cannot pay back! Politicians picked up on the good idea, but it mutated very quickly into a big mess in such a way that many of the poor cannot pay back their loans. Politicians and churchmen forgot that a noble goal will be worthless if not implemented properly.

I sat down at a table for lunch the other day with new employees. One, very energetic, middle-age person said she was so happy to be at Boys Town. I asked her why she left the mortgage company she had been working for and she said: “I left because I just got tired of falsifying loan applications by using someone else’s salary stubs.”

In the next chapter, let us look at how we went from a nation of savers, namely, a thrift culture to a nation of debt ridden slouches. That Chase ad pretty well sums it up. “I want it all…I want it now.” Another good example is the show on the A&E Channel called “Flip This House.”

A hard working young Boys Town alum told me the story the other day of going to buy a used car. He had only enough credit for a $7,000 loan and picked a car with an appropriate price tag. The salesman showed him a $12,000 car, which the boy liked a lot, but said he could only afford a $7,000 loan. The salesman said: “That’s doesn’t matter. We will use someone else’s salary records when we submit the loan application.” “I want it all…I want it now.”

William Donaldson was head of the FTC and when he said we needed more financial restraints and was told no, he quit. Good for him. This financial crisis is brought to us by some of the best and brightest in the country. And some of them are saying they did not know what they were doing. My response is: You instinctively knew that as financial elites you gain and maintain power, not only by money but by making sure your view dominated and prevailed. That is irresponsible on your part. You tried to live with no sense of responsibility, no moral restraints.

I tell our kids at Boys Town they cannot live a life without restraint, without a sense of justice, without a sense of fairness and that selfishness and greed are sinful. Our leaders knew that or should have known that, but they followed the crowd. The question they asked was: what’s everybody else doing? And when they did, the result was we are all suffering. Sometime ago, I was in New York and made remarks such as this and the chairman of a very large American company came up to me and said I was making people fearful by saying these things. I told him he had made people fearful and he should reflect on that reality. Needless to say, we did not have any further conversation.

“I want it all…I want it now…” That commercial reminds me of some of our boys and girls who come from very, very poor families and who complain to me: Why can we not buy brand name foods such as Del Monte? Why do we have to buy Shurfine? They do not know that the same company makes both. But they have been told that just because you are poor you should still buy the finest brand names. I mentioned this one day at dinner with some very, very wealthy people. And one of them said: “This just goes to show you, Father Peter, that the poor have very good taste and a demand for quality.” My response: “This just goes to show you that someone taught even the poor to want it all and to want it now.”

Getting up this morning, it dawned on me that you and I and all of us citizens…on the basis of the mother of all bailouts given by the government to banks, to AIG, to General Motors and so many others…are owners of all kinds of bad debt. In fact, we American citizens are the largest holders of bad debt, perhaps in the world.

In conclusion, we need to discipline ourselves and we need to shed ourselves of the conviction that we should be free from all restraints. We need to help our brothers and sisters. We need to practice self-discipline. We have to start with very small things in denying ourselves. We need to pray every night: Lord, make me a more disciplined person. Make me more unselfish.

Perhaps, like Alan Greenspan, many of us trusted those in important positions in government, banking and industry to be people of character and virtue and too many were not.