For those who don't harbor burning ambitions or insatiable acquisitive streaks, money is the root of all evil. Money, these people will tell you, can't buy happiness.
While most Americans would probably agree with this sentiment—if only as a holdover from religious training that encouraged charity and thrift as signs of virtue—we still pursue money with a blinkered focus that borders on obsession. And those who actually do score big financially often complain that they don't have time to "enjoy" the money they manage to amass.
For a tiny segment of Americans, money is the be-all and end-all. Money to these people means power and influence, access to exclusive clubs, secret conferences, exotic retreats, sexy companions, and, of course, politicians. For this small chunk of Americans, money begets more money, money talks and everything else walks, including laws, ethics and common decency. It's that simple.
Regardless of whether this is simply endemic to the human condition, Americans like to think "the people" hold power here; "the people" is inclusive, not exclusive.
Still, the people don't always raise their collective and inclusive voice. That voice, in fact, seems to fade in times of prosperity, only to rise again when the bubbles and money scams inevitably burst and the government, or someone, has to clean up the messes. Such a democracy is crisis-driven and, frankly, dysfunctional.
Whether the powers that be care to admit or face it, we are in one of those times of crisis now. And while the people's voice is rising, the confusion over what to say is, too.
Perhaps, then, the best way to get a handle on the sheer enormity of the current mess we're in is provided by Kevin Phillips in Bad Money, a new book in which he chronicles "reckless finance, failed politics, and the global crisis of American capitalism."
One of the most stunning of the many stunning things Phillips conveys in this short but powerful book is a simple statistic: "Financial services" makes up 21 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, while manufacturing makes up just 12 percent.
In other words, America's "wealth" is now built on sleight-of-hand con artistry that does not produce anything tangible. The actual making of products—those things we use and consume in our daily life—has been shipped to other countries, even as our national debt and trade deficit approaches numbers that only the likes of Stephen Hawking can comprehend. Phillips notes, "'Risky' doesn't begin to describe this new focus in the American economy."
Under the inept stewardship of the current regime, the U.S. dollar has fallen so far that foreign banks are now trying to unload it. They want their coffers filled with stronger currency than our greenbacks.
How did we get in such a fix? Phillips breaks down America's "reckless finance" in a manner that even a monetary dunce like me can understand. He indicts hedge funds and marginally criminal activities like day trading, as well as asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. Ultimately, Phillips pins much of the decline on the "botched petroleum-driven invasion of Iraq."
The perpetrators of this mess are a small if overly powerful minority. And, given that money also talks loudly in our courtrooms, they will likely go unpunished, except monetarily—that is, whatever it costs them to pay their lawyers.
But the bottom line here is that, while a minority of people perpetrated this mess, the vast majority of us were conned and went along for the ride without raising our collective voice.
Thus, because we largely remained silent when all of this was going down, we bear some responsibility for this crisis, too.
