Financial Crisis: Fault of The Wealthy?

by Clyo Beck

Is our financial crisis the fault of the wealthy?

This is the first of four posts addressing this question.

Most people believe the wealthy are to blame or, rather, the greed of the wealthy and the wannabee wealthy.

After all, greed caused both banks and ”flippers” to over extend themselves. Greed caused people, like the couple infamously satirized by SNL, to bundle billions in questionable mortgages and offload them on banks like Wachovia. Greed inspired lobbyists to get Congress to roll back legislation that had required downpayments and more stringent lending parameters. And the greed of stockholders who will dump any stock that doesn’t keep showing growth caused banks to cut corners for greater profits and higher share prices.

Yet, from a spiritual point of view, we know that scapegoating any person or group is a mistake. We’re all in this together and we created it together.

Bah, you may say. Why would we create an economic meltdown?

Consciously we wouldn’t. Yet when we are not being congruent with the higher aims of our souls, something has to break, and it won’t be the soul. In this case there has been powerful incongruency between what we say we are about as Americans and how we walk our talk. I suggest these words as clues to our current situation:

lack/inequity
guilt/shame
spiritual hunger
self-punishment

First, let’s consider the twin issues of lack and inequity.

There are more poor in the world than most people can imagine. At this writing nearly two billion people are experiencing some degree of starvation. Around fifty million Americans live in poverty. There are American children who go to bed hungry and who will suffer lifelong neurological impairment as a result. We have, however, repeatedly elected politicians who state their intention to kill all social welfare programs that serve our most vulnerable citizens. We also laud our capitalist system and the globalized system of trade and food production pushed by our nation across the world which promotes hunger and starvation.

Our willingness to allow others to live in poverty has steadily been poisoning our own consciousness with guilt and shame. This has resulted in another economic piece of “lack” in this puzzle: that working-class and middle-class jobs don’t pay what they once did, families have been falling behind instead of getting ahead and, as a result, these Americans looked to their real estate to make up the difference.

Hence we witnessed an epidemic of home equity loans that served to fund the illusion of being able to buy everything that we are told we must want as part of The American Dream.

Yet the American Dream is not and has never been just about buying things. The American Dream has been about fulfilling one’s potential. It’s been about having an idea or a dream and being free to pursue it and make it come true. It’s been about visualizing an outcome and seeing it manifest.

That dream, however, has never existed for millions of Americans, and has turned into a house of cards for millions more who will never have even a glimpse of what they might have become or done. Instead they will spend their lives struggling just to survive. So, from what I can see, the fact that we overreached economically is not the primary causation for the current financial meltdown. The meltdown is, instead, a consequence of attitudes which include a chronic indifference to the wasted potential of our people.