2 March 2007

I just got home from work to catch the last segment on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer in which he talks about the recent insider trading scandal.  He guests a professor from Columbia University and a reporter for The New York Times to get their commentary.  Interestingly, the Professor unwittingly contradicts himself within the same breath of explanation.  Roughly, he explains part of the reason for the resurgent scandal – a level unparalleled since the 80s Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky S&L scandal – is that Wall Street is currently of the generation too young to remember and/or learn from the 80s, so they are more ambitious, greedy and prone to pull off such a scheme.  He then states in his next breath that the corruption of this scandal runs so deep, well into the high level of executives in the SEC – a corruption “…akin to the head of the CIA leaking information to Osama Bin Laden”.  So in one sentence he explains it away upon the more youthful Wall Street generation and in another sentence he discloses the extreme level of the corruption – at the older generation of high level executives who supposedly know better.  So is it youth or is it power?

Neither.

First of all, to read today’s headlines and especially to read about this most recent scandal and be surprised at a resurgence of corruption and conspiracy is really to be quite oblivious.  The very term resurgence suggests that an event occurred, ended, and now is reoccurring.  When ever did corruption, conspiracy, and scandal ever stop? 

The resurgence here is not in corruption.  The resurgence is in our naiveté that further exposes our perpetual self-delusion to the deceit clearly lying before us as the “white elephant” in America. 

When will we ever wake up?  When will we ever take the initiative to call and identify the elephant for what it is?

This is the hyphenation paradox of the American conscience – hyphenated in a seemingly perpetual self-delusion blanketed by “wise-alecky” assertions of feigned wisdom exposing a deeper and more widespread ignorance.

Clarion call, anyone?