To fix our ills, we must admit our role in creating them

By Brian Greenspun (contact)

Sunday, March 29, 2009 | 2 a.m.

It is OK to be mad these days, even angry, but we should be clear about two things.

First, we need to understand why we are not happy, and second, of course, we need to channel that anger in the pit of our stomachs toward the real culprits. The answer to the second challenge will for sure be unrewarding because the person responsible for our current displeasure is us — “we the people” in constitutional parlance.

To understand what I am talking about, we have to visit a few examples of the first matter — why we are unhappy.

I suppose we can start just about anywhere, but let’s make this easy. How about the economy?

Raise your hand if you are better off today than you were eight years ago. Remember that question? Ronald Reagan asked it when he was running for president and, of course, the people answered “no” in resounding numbers and swept the Gipper into the White House with the peoples’ hopes and prayers hanging in the balance.

I am not assessing blame — although that is easy to do — but, rather, making the simple statement that we have heard many times — votes matter. At almost every level of government during the past eight years, the level of competence of those we entrusted to run our country has been seriously and appropriately questioned. The questioning has been based on fact — call it 20-20 hindsight — and not on conjecture.

An excess of corporate greed, a failure to enforce the rules, and an exaltation of the capitalistic marketplace without an understanding that humans make mistakes on purpose, or not, were hallmarks of the past administration’s attitude toward government. That’s what we got with the elections of 2000 and 2004. So if you are looking for someone to blame for all our troubles, look in the mirror.

Closer to home, we are living at ground zero of the home mortgage meltdown. This has brought with it all kinds of financial ugliness, including what we hope and believe is a temporary collapse in the tourist business model — the one that requires people to have jobs and a pretty good attitude about tomorrow before they will spend on the leisure activities our tourist economy offers them. In the midst of all this heartache, job loss and general malaise, we have a state government that is deaf, dumb and blind to the needs of its citizens.

We need high quality education — lower and higher — if we are to attract people and companies looking to move here to make a better life for all Nevadans. We are at the bottom of all 50 states in that regard and our governor and his nutty “no tax” supporters think that is just fine. For the vast majority of Nevadans who don’t agree, look to the culprits. Again, look in the mirror: You elected him.

Three weeks ago I was in Miami at a speech given by the Nobel Prize-winning president of our neighbor and good friend to the south, Costa Rica. President Arias, in as polite and diplomatic a manner possible, explained that friendship is a two-way street and that the United States needs to remember that there wouldn’t be drug wars in Mexico and along our border if there weren’t two things coming from the United States.

First, an insatiable and irresponsible appetite for illegal drugs, which fuels the cartels and lines their pockets with billions of dollars every year. Second, boatloads of the most advanced weapons are available, are sent from our country to the cartels’ armies and are used to overpower governmental authorities who seem helpless to stop the violence.

It was a hard truth to hear and I am sure not an easy one to speak about by President Arias. Just this past week, however, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted our country’s complicity in the drug wars. That would have never happened under President George W. Bush. That it happened and, therefore, opened the dialogue up to a possible solution, is a credit to both Secretary Clinton and President Obama.

Again, votes matter. While this country stalemated on the illegal immigration issue — which I suggest has been driven by raw politics rather than responsible policy — the drug cartels were allowed to run rampant and run over neighboring governments that were “frozen out” by an administration unable or unwilling to multitask immigration and drug–related issues.

Want to get mad at someone over that mess? Look in the mirror.

A final example is AIG. You are mad as heck about that. So am I.

My anger, though, has very little to do with $165 million in “bonuses” to AIG executives that amount to a rounding error when compared to the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars being used to bail us and the rest of the world out of the deep water we are drowning in.

I am also mad because, like millions of other Americans, I have done nothing wrong. And yet the 1,200 employees in our business family are being asked to bear the brunt of the mistakes, excesses and incompetency that marked the decision-making process of the last administration.

Are there mistakes being made today by President Barack Obama and his colleagues? Maybe. But none of us will know that for a long time, and if we allow ourselves to argue our actions into inactions, we will all certainly fail, complaining and blaming others all the way down. Isn’t it better to go down “swinging?”

Not one person I have talked to will argue with me that giving “retention” payments to AIG employees who were responsible for helping to get us out of the mess they helped get us into was a bad idea. It was a bitter pill but a necessary one because to lose those folks in the middle of this mess could have been financially disastrous.

And, yet, it has been so easy for people — who justifiably are mad at just about everything — to blame the wrong people. For example, Sen. Chris Dodd is a good and decent man. But, even though he heads the Senate Banking Committee, he is not a financial or fiscal expert, as are Alan Greenspan, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke. He is entitled — I would say commanded — to take the advice and counsel of those who are experts.

Other than acting like a deer in the headlights — that happens to all politicians who get a microphone stuck in their faces and bombarded with questions, knowing that whichever way they answer they will be chewed up and spit out by the talking heads of cable television — what Chris did wrong was not remembering who did what and who said what, so he did the heretofore safe thing. He pointed the finger elsewhere.

Would he have been better off to say he added the amendment that saved the AIG bonuses? Sure. But that really isn’t relevant when trying to understand why the “bonuses” were paid in the first place. And why he complied with the experts’ request.

When people know and understand the facts, most of them shake their heads in both agreement with the reasonableness of the actions and in disgust that the actions were necessary in the first place.

And that is what we are facing today. Nobody likes where we are. Everybody is scared and most of us want to understandably blame the real culprits for what is undeservedly happening to us.

But that doesn’t give us the excuse to cast blame where it doesn’t belong. Votes matter. We cast them. The mistakes are ours.

The real question remains: What are we going to do to make sure we don’t make the same mistake again?

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.