Web Letters: Wall Street Meltdown 101

Thank goodness for the Old World.

While conservative US pundits were wringing their hands over the financial meltdown, which was caused by an American regulatory failure in the first place, Europeans were coming up with a better bailout plan than Secretary Paulson's. For once, given the gravity of the crisis, we listened and followed the despised "Old Europe," and while we are not out of the woods, significant improvements have been made. Can you imagine? The Brits and even the French lecturing us on how to run our financial system, and being right? And the right answer was... direct government intervention? To an old-fashioned American conservative, this must feel like Armageddon.

All this while China sends astronauts into orbit, something that we'd find very difficult to do with our aging shuttles if not for Russian rockets, and India plans a moon probe... For decades, we have dismissed Europe as weak, quaint, passé and Asia as uncreative and backward, while thumping our chests and telling everybody to just follow us, because we had all the answers. Remember how we used to lecture the Japanese during their financial crisis in the '90s to just let their banks, burdened by bad loans, fail? The market would surely fix itself, we argued. Now, we have discovered that we are not willing to suffer the consequences of "the market fixing itself" if this means millions of lost jobs and widespread homelessness 1930-style. Suddenly, all these foreigners who supposedly could not blow their noses without our help look a lot smarter than they did before. "European" is not a bad word anymore. Who knows, maybe we'll even finally adopt the metric system, rather than sticking to English units that the English themselves have ditched.

What do Europe and Asia have in common, compared to the United States? They have been around for thousands of years. Europe, India, China, Japan, Korea, Russia have been through empires, wars, plagues, invasions, revolutions, destruction and rebuilding. In other words, they have stood the test of time, and were able to survive and adapt in times of crisis. Compared to them, we are a mere adolescent on a historical scale, full of youthful enthusiasm, but relatively untested. And in this crisis, these old cultures seem to be more flexible than our supposedly superior one. What's going on?

For one thing, the post-World War II order is over. After World War II, the United States was the only industrialized country that had not been reduced to rubble. Not surprisingly, it enjoyed a tremendous economic advantage over other countries for a few decades. We made good products, our ingenuity and technical competence were exemplary, and we led the industrialized world. No more. While other countries rebuilt and adapted to costly energy, we rested on our laurels, convinced that everybody would always look up to us and buy our Chevys. The last great American product was the personal computer. Now, even IBM no longer makes PCs. It sold that operation to China's Lenovo. Our products are no longer the best-made in the world, and our competent engineers have been replaced by hordes of salesmen and MBAs. Now even these latter-day heroes have lost their aura of invincibility.

Globalization, a process we started to create business for our companies, has a created a worldwide competition that we are not winning. And while we used to lecture everybody on the virtues of our financial system, the latest financial debacle left us with egg on our faces and a severely damaged credibility. Thank goodness for a dour Scot named Gordon Brown who may have saved capitalism, including American capitalism, from its own excesses.

It's time we went through the process every kid goes through when adolescence ends and adulthood begins: realizing that you don't have all the answers and that your elders are not stupid after all. Perhaps there is something to learn from those who have been around longer than us.

If we want a leadership role in the future world order, we are going to have to earn it. Here are a few suggestions:

1) Let's shut our big mouths and stop telling ourselves how great we are and shouting down anybody who suggests we aren't perfect. We do have a lot of strengths, but there is plenty of room for improvement. And no, it's not unpatriotic to say that America isn't perfect. It's unpatriotic (and irresponsible) to pretend that it is when evidence suggests otherwise.

2) Let's get off our overweight behinds and get to work on something more concrete than generating phony securities. New technologies, especially new energy technologies would not be a bad idea.

3) Let's abandon the illusion that we have nothing to learn from anybody. The first sign of wisdom is to admit one's own limitations.

Lucio Miele

Chicago, IL

Everyone still seems to be ignoring the large alligator in the middle of the living room. We have deindustrialzed the country. Upper-case rule be damned. Ten percent of us own 80 percent of the wealth. Forty-seven million have no healthcare. Millions are homeless. Thirty-five million go to bed hungry, many of these elderly and children. People burn their furniture to stay warm. We have just borrowed billions from China to bail out Wall Street and continue to fund a war of arrogance and hubris. And one of the major architects of this mess, Phil Gramm, calls us whiners. Let's also not forget William "Bubba" Clinton, who drove the last nail in the coffin. Here is a new economic catch phrase: "Drain a lake to fill a swamp, you end up with two swamps." Even Paul Krugman has become a tepid "free trader." Unregulated greed does not work. It is not self-regulating. Greed always overshadows conscience. How about a new bumper sticker, "Sell it here build it here"? We need to return to an ethic of rewarding value-adding labor like producing vacuums and cars etc. here.

JAMES PINETTE

Caribou, ME