Daniel O'Rourke: Greed Is Killing Us
Greed Is Killing Us
Daniel O’Rourke
6/24/10
Gordon Gekko is a fictional character in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street. In that film Michael Douglas won an Oscar for the role, in which Gekko notoriously proclaimed the Wall Street mantra, “Greed is good.” The Gekko character is loosely based on the market manipulator Ivan Boesky and the (in)famous corporate raider Carl Icahn.
Wall Street may have thought that greed is good, but it isn’t. In the old catechism greed is one of the seven Cardinal Sins. It ranks right up there with anger, lust, pride and a few other nasty human traits. Religions, history and spirituality tell us that greed is immoral, that greed is evil. The old, out-of-fashion Biblical word is sin - a deadly sin, and as current events are showing it is causing much death and destruction.
The Oxford English Dictionary (not the Baltimore Catechism) defines greed as an “intense and selfish desire for food, wealth, or power.” Another dictionary calls it “an overwhelming desire to have more of something such as money than is actually needed.” That selfish, overwhelming desire is precisely what has caused the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico - and many of the debilitating crises that now engulf our nation and world.
Victor Davis Hanson, a historian at the Hoover Institution, wrote an article a few years ago entitled “America’s Nervous Breakdown - Should It Continue, a World Breakdown May Follow.” Well, it has continued; now the world too is having its breakdown - and greed has caused it.
It was greed for more and more profits that motivated British Petroleum to cut corners and compromise safety in the recent horrendous disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Greed was at the bottom of Wall Street’s decisions on derivatives: to trade them, to bundle them, to sell them internationally and thereby jeopardize the American and European economies. Greed motivated both Bernie Madoff and those who lusted for unrealistic financial returns in his damnable Ponzi scheme.
Greed is also a common cause for the growing number of embezzlements in local governments and parish churches. Moreover, the motivation for much embezzlement is to pay off gambling debts. Indeed, addiction to gambling itself is another species of greed: an intense desire for easy and excessive wealth. And society supports this illusion. Many states encourage lotteries to bolster floundering budgets, and casinos pile up across the nation like chips on a roulette table.
But another aspect of greed in our society is much more troubling. In this case greed is not only huge; it is colossal. The Military Industrial Complex, of which President Dwight Eisenhower warned us in his farewell address to the nation, feeds this greed. It is the association between the government, the military and industry. The relationship includes research, construction of weapons and equipment, and funding for military training and bases. Enormous sums of taxpayer money are involved - especially in the manufacturing of highly technical weapon systems. Billions of dollars tie government to the military and to industry. Eisenhower was President; he had been a General in the military and knew this game and the corrupt playing field all too well.
The Military Industrial Complex prompts the Pentagon to lobby for, and Congress to fund weapon systems that are hideously expensive, frequently overpriced, and often as in the case of the F-22 Stealth Bomber, obsolete and no longer needed. An overwhelming desire for billions in profit keeps this vicious cycle rolling along.
In some ways greed sometimes motivates war itself. War demands more, bigger and more expensive weapons. Manufacturing these weapons nets billions for industry. These pressures are subtle, but they are real.
The tentacles of greed, however, also reach deep into non-military structures of the nation. Consider Ethanol and agribusiness subsidies, pressures on corporations and money managers to show larger returns to stockholders, high energy prices (think Enron and its accountant Arthur Andersen). Greed is all around us. It has helped shape our society and Frankenstein-like it is destroying us.
What Henry Ward Beecher, the prominent preacher, social reformer and abolitionist, wrote after the Civil War is still relevant not only for individuals but for nations. Despite the masculine and exclusive language of his age, we should ponder his words. “No man” [or nation] “can tell whether he is rich or poor by turning to his ledger. It is the heart that makes a man” [or nation] “rich. He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.”
Greed might have shaped us, but it has turned on us and is killing us. As a nation we need a broader, less selfish vision. We need far-sighted policies motivated not by greed but by concern in order to protect the common good.
Retired from the Administration at State University of New York at Fredonia, Daniel O’Rourke lives in Cassadaga, NY. His newspaper column appears on in the Observer, Dunkirk, NY on the second and fourth Thursday each month. A grandfather, Dan is a married Catholic priest. He has published a book of his previous columns "The Spirit at Your Back.” To read about the book or send comments on this column visit his website http://www.danielcorourke.com/