Fiddling While Rome is Burning

Yesterday, the House of Representatives defeated a bill to rescue our failing economy. Within six hours of the failed vote, the stock market declined 777 points. The American economy lost $1.1 trillion dollars in one day. Stock markets in Asia, Europe, and Canada have also declined. It is a global financial crisis, and it affects everyone. While Rome is burning, the American people and Congress are fiddling around.

Blame and accusations continue to fly between President Bush, a fractured Republican Party, the Democratic leadership, and both presidential candidates. American taxpayers are outraged! How this could happen? Why did no one see it coming? Why did no one do anything to prevent it? What are we going to do now? Who is to blame?

George Bush and his administration assume no responsibility or admit to any fault. They plead for urgent action for their 3-page plan. The lame duck president's credibility is at an all time low. Bush has cried wolf too many times. Skeptical members of his own party scramble to distance themselves from his failed administration. The financial situation becomes a political football during the last weeks of a presidential election.

Everyone uses the term Wall Street "bailout," a word that implies throwing money down a New York City rathole. Angry and economically stressed, taxpayers are vehemently opposed to assuming $700 billion in new debt. Why should they be expected to rush to the rescue of banking executives who have reaped million dollar bonuses and golden parachutes? Congressmen's offices are flooded with taxpayers' letters and calls to "let them suffer; let the bailout fail!" No one in government has communicated with the American people in terms they can understand. I'd like to offer a metaphor of the current financial crisis that we can identify with.

Imagine that you just finished struggling to pay off a 5-year car loan on your brand new car. You are on your way to your stressful job one morning, doing the speed limit, driving defensively, when a guy in an expensive, sportscar flies up right behind you, practically sits on your bumper. Next thing you know, the guy gives you the one-fingered salute, races around you on the right, and zig-zags through the traffic ahead of you. Suddenly, the traffic up ahead stops. The traffic behind you doesn't. Cars alongside you swerve. Bam, bam, bam! You're involved in a multi-vehicle pileup. Cars are crushed, crumpled, in pieces, destroyed. Passengers are badly injured; some are trapped. You are dazed, bruised, and bleeding. Soon, sirens begin to wail.

Are you going to stand around and figure out who is at fault? Are you going to cry and complain about the damage to your car? Are you going to whine about being late for work, what this accident will do to your driving record, or how your car insurance will increase? This is not the time to blame the idiot driver who caused the pileup. This is not the time to feel sorry for yourself and your car, and ask why it had to happen to you. It is time to get help and get the critically injured to the emergency room. And you'd better do it quickly!

That's what is going on with our economy. Huge banks that serve smaller banks all across the country are in a very severe credit crunch. Banks do not have money to loan. Big and small businesses all across the country cannot get loans to pay their employees, buy inventory, pay bills and overhead. Soon, they'll go out of business. Regular working folks won't get car loans, mortgages, bridge loans, college loans, or loans to pay their healthcare bills. The cost of everything will continue to rise. As the stock market tumbles, Americans everywhere will watch the value of their savings, pension, 401k, kids' college fund, and retirement fund go down, down, down. People everywhere will lose their jobs. Housing values will continue to plummet. There will be more foreclosures, personal bankrupcies, and homeless. Neighborhoods, towns, counties, cities will have no revenue for schools and other services.

This crisis is not about Wall Street executives losing their jobs. It's about you losing yours. It's not about punishing executives and politicians who were greedy or corrupt. It's about preventing a bad situation from getting much, much worse. It's not about blaming leadership for allowing this to happen or failing to see it coming, it's about stopping the hemorraging before the American economy bleeds out.