Watching America Vote

Image via WikipediaFor a quick snapshot at what the rest of the world is thinking about our upcoming presidential election, you'll find a fascinating array of articles on msnbc.com's "World Blog" that reflect the hopes, fears, frustrations, selfish wishes, and altruistic dreams for a better world that make me pause to reflect. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26716509 The headlines themselves are telling, surprising, even eye-popping: "Germans Hoping to Get Past 'Bush-fatigue'," "Vietnamese Back McCain," "Neither Candidate Will Be Good for Pakistan," "For China, US Election is Entertaining" (entertaining??!), "Iraqis Say Vote Smells of 'Honey-Promises'" (one of those weird translations, no doubt), "Egyptians Looking for 'Good Side' of America."

We can be certain this will be, as it is among Americans themselves, the most closely-watched of elections. I've been in Washington, DC this week on meetings and it is as fascinating to hear the array of views inside and outside the beltway, as it is to see the America's reflection both inside and outside the country. We've seen very little substantive discussion among Obama and McCain of a broader concept of "the national interest." We get snippets here and there: their views of our national interest in the global financial crisis, Israel, Iraq, Iran, energy policy, mostly talking points and poorly articulated boilerplate designed to enable them to skate over the tough questions. I wonder if, as we as Americans become more embattled economically, socially, politically, a greater sense of the national interest will emerge that can provide us some kind of beacon in troubled times.

But the outcome of the elections in two weeks is only part of what the world is watching. Today's papers note that in Florida, almost a third of the electorate will have voted early in this new kind of in-person absentee voting. And yet there are same problems with our faulty physical voting structure. I hope these problems won't blow up into a new national electoral crisis a la Bush/Gore. My friend in DC -- a high level technology policy expert -- had a clipping of a letter to the editor to a national magazine taped to the back of her kitchen cabinet expressing her view of what happened: two or three highly technologically savvy people monitored the computerized election returns in Ohio. When it became clear Bush would not win a key county, one of these techno-burglars quickly, anonymously, and remotely hacked into the computerized voting system and switched the vote to favor Bush. Of course, my friend the writer went on to point out, this could never be proved, but concluded with optimism that our newly computerized voting systems would be changed to restore our faith in democracy.

I wonder. The problem, of course, is not the computerization, but the lack of a means to double-check results. Basically, the lack of a paper trail. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6530. Just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled with Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner on Friday, October 17, granting her a stay to a temporary restraining order from a federal appeals court that ordered her to provide a system for implementing voter fraud prevention methods. It's a striking case of the Republicans manipulating the issue for their gain, with the Ohio Republican Party filing the initial suit challenging the state's compliance with the Help America Vote Act, alleging that the state has no system to deal with mismatched voter records.

I suppose we might get through Obama v. McCain without the system blowing up in our faces and into the arms of the Supremes again. But as we watch, and the world watches how American votes, and how America votes, I can only hope that our newly re-engaged electorate will care passionately enough about both results to move forward to a fuller expression of what really works for America.

Leadership and Critical Thinking in the Global Financial Crisis.

Many will already have seen or read Bill Moyers's October 10 interview with George Soros on his "Journal" program/blog. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10102008/watch.html What's striking about Soros is how he observes the groupthink grounded in basic human nature that has driven this crisis to the brink. "[O]ur ability to govern ourselves doesn't keep pace with our ability to exercise power over nature, control over nature."

This is especially striking when looking at the role of the SEC in permitting the five major investment banks to self-regulate. As Soros put it so well in his interview, the major flaw in Wall Street thinking as developed since the demise of Glass-Steagall is the belief that by distributing the risk, you reduce the risk. The real question is: at what point does blindness to reality set in?

What happened at the SEC in 2004 is succinctly put together by the New York Times's Stephen Labaton in his multi-media presentation on the subject. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/09/28/business/20080928-SEC-multimedia/index.html http://www.blogrunner.com/snapshot/D/0/9/stephen_labaton/

It's a powerful example of how quickly the belief in the all-powerful, self-correcting, invisible hand of the market always making things right became arrogance combined with pure greed. Who was worse? The SEC, for essentially rubberstamping a fundamental change in how risk is accounted for, or the firms and their lobbyists for squeezing out the last major run up this super bubble of a market these past 25 years? These human blindspots are curious. I'm struck by how stupid and mute we've become today, numbed by the "good" times to the point of some weird lethargy that's both blind hope and apathy. Which brings us to the psychology of leadership of the governments we now look to for "bailout" and "rescue".

How caught up are the world's finance ministers in clinging to their belief in the Market as the ultimate expression of Mammon? The Brits have, again, shown a capacity for both critical thinking and leadership that gives cause for hope. I wonder if, as Labaton suggests, it isn't strange that we have Henry Paulson leading the way in this crisis, and if we can't possibly crack the mold of our group think about what's possible and what's right to move out of this mess.

Greed, Greed, and more Greed

I can't help but consider the root causes of our current economic state of affairs, and it comes down to unbridled greed. The necessity felt by all in business to do better, to do more, to make more money - quarter after quarter, year after year. The insatiable NEED for profits has created a house of cards that we've seen flattened in very short order.

In looking through my collection of news sources this morning, I was struck by the comment in one piece that banks and investments banks, collapsed together by the now discredited abandonment of Glass-Steagall, were driven to find new sources of profit at the time of the collapses of the dot.coms in 2000 and 2001. We'd heard of derivatives long before this, of course, but the "sophistication" of these instruments -- such a malapropism -- has now gone way beyond what even my most "sophisticated" friends on Wall Street could easily describe in lay terms.

I can't but wonder now what this human drive for ever-higher standards of living by our wealthiest citizens will create out of the chaos of a global financial meltdown. Much is being said now about a return to a slow growth economy -- a weird nostalgia for the values that came out of the depression that for a short time made America the wealthiest and most powerful nation known in history. See Jim Cramer's September 29 piece in New York magazine and his comparisons with today's situation with that in the movie, It's a Wonderful Life. (http://nymag.com/news/businessfinance/50520/) Are we craving for a break from the pressures of quarterly earnings reports, workaholism, and total lack of balance between a healthy standard of living and the basic demands of capitalism, even as we are in utter terror about a global financial meltdown the likes of which no one has ever seen?