Guest article by my friend Allison Addicott:

In The Beginning

Remember films such as Robin Hood or others that depict tax collectors for the landed gentry repeatedly riding into small villages demanding more money? In such films, often the final manifestation of unabashed moral corruption on the part of the landed oligarchy was the torching of dozens of little homes as flocks of extras flee, wailing into the night.

A while back, in mid-September 2008, many in the media observed the slow collapse of the financial networks in terms of “shoe-dropping.” “When will the other shoe drop?” At that point, being overly reactionary to the circumstances rising up around our ankles seemed to be ill-conceived. Now, with so many institutions in the midst of being propped up, set to receive another round of money, the tax payer still does not know, really, what happened to the first round. Other folks who have traditionally received government funds, like non-profits, can testify that government money usually comes with reporting so complicated that it requires a staff just to manage and track the data the receipt of funds requires.

In this story, the American taxpayer is asked to observe a kind of moral largesse, a selfless humility these past few months. The taxpayer says nothing as his or her hard-earned money is handed out like giant pink puffs of cotton candy to an industry with a 24/7 sweet tooth. Most Americans want to do what is best, to work together, and want to help this new administration, under the direction of President Barack Obama, succeed. The taxpayer has by and large managed this feat even while trying to dog-paddle in the thrashing seas of bad news about the stormy economy. Is this picture changing, though? The high-drama tea bagging by conservatives aside, will centrist and democratic taxpayers continue this stiff-upper lipped silence? Or, are Americans, beginning to find their voice about morality, ethics, and the world of finance?

Morality, High Finance, And The Role Of The Taxpayer

Indeed, as columnist Paul Krugman penned in his April 23, 2009 New York Times column “Reclaiming America’s Soul”, ethics and the voice of the average American seem to be merging into a higher pitched harmony then ever before. Just as Krugman points out the call and the need to find the perpetrators and arbiters of torture in the Bush Administration, so this other shadowy, Bush-era abomination of corporate greed and usury must be displayed to the light. Americans now pay out taxes to support firms that became bloated on corporate greed — that dangled sub-prime mortgages and low-apr credit card-carrots at the average American. As taxpayers we have always been held to a standard of ethics and responsibility in our role as citizens. Somehow, though, we transferred that allegiance of subordination to the world of finance – and we continue to allow financial firms to claim moral authority over our credit “choices.”

They claim moral authority simply in the act of stating that they are “too big to fail”…too big for whom? And will someone please define fail? If by fail one means a moral and ethical failure then fail they have – already. For example, firms receiving stimulus and TARP funds still by and large make no accounting for their prior ludicrous usury, but still nary a hint from the divas of finance about where the support funds are going or have gone. Meanwhile, a little guy like Bernie Madoff seems to have been offered up as an easy and symbolic fall-guy — burned in effigy – with the smoke enabling the true criminals to remain calmly obscure and anonymous. Where accountability reigns supreme for us as taxpayers, the Morality-Free Zone Wall Street moves, speaks and acts in an emboldened but hidden language – behind a scrim most taxpayers still cannot read. These firms have failed every test of morality conceivable. Further, the Grand Canyon-size yawn of silence from CEOs echoes into the national discourse – not a twitter of contrition.

The really egregious paradox is that the rhetoric of morality itself – and claiming a national role as systemic high-minded arbiters of morality and personal responsibility has been the very means by which banks have kept Americans puffing on the credit hookahs. Americans could logically claim that buying more and more on credit to improve one’s “credit score” was a wise financial move in the financial world that has come to exist in the past 20 years. In the late 80’s I was shocked to learn from my younger brother, who took a post-college job with a credit firm, that if a person did not have credit cards he or she would actually have “bad” credit. The “Credit Rating” (the financial/secular measure of personhood) is dictated by these very banks, again. We blindly accept the credit rating armband distributed by an authoritarian financial sector that is in fact morally bankrupt. It has become a force that judges but could never survive judgment by the same criteria. We never question that moral game – and it is the worst most pernicious con game Americans – even after the apparent Obama-Enlightenment, continue to observe in a kind of Pavlovian response developed over the past decade.

Homeless Hens Or Visionary Citizens?

But, what if we did not buy that con game any longer? We need to let the scales drop from our eyes once again. Shake the sand out of our brains and ask ourselves exactly what kind of authority over our lives we are giving to institutions that have no moral high-ground at all except that which we now give them as money wrapped in duty and pity….even as these firms continue to be secretive. Am I wrong here? Are we going to continue to be chickens that pay admission to the wolves for entry into the henhouse – only to be raided and obliterated in a few hours?

Financial institutions and other lenders refuse to hold themselves to any level of moral veracity or to align with a sensibility that supports their customers. Just as bad-boy tax collectors for the landed gentry in “B” movies, Wall Street came to call for our tax dollar with one hand while dropping the atom bomb of homelessness on the very people it defrauded and conned. This con game perpetrated in perpetuity by the manor lords on the peasants really does have morality and moral authority at its heart. Americans bought into the use of credit, financial institutions and banks began to see the mass profits that could be generated by continuing to create new and more usurious methods of pulling money out of the wallets of consumers.

Now, financial markets are not my bread and butter. But, I spent a nano-second in law school. And when folks who were supposed to be the good guys were telling the media that there was nothing they could do – CEO contracts “required” they receive bonuses – and those contracts would have to be honored even for firms with prop-up funds. I have to confess, it made me a bit queasy. Call me a neophyte, but one of the first things you learn in the law is that a contract can always be broken. What kind of fools do they think we really are? Frankly, I think they rely on us being our own worst enemies. And, why not?? Being our own worst, uninformed enemies is what enabled the entire first term of Bush’s presidency. But, I rant, and I digress. Perhaps we Americans – under our various hats as taxpayers, as consumers, and as citizens are beginning to envision again that we do have a lot of power. And we by nature are people of ethics and morality as we speak up to the wrongs of torture and the amoral or immoral reign of Wall Street. Will we as Americans claim our financial future as our own by demanding the current administration and the financial institutions do more than just survive? As Americans and as folks of all faiths we should be demanding a say in how our money will be handled in the future.

(c) 2009 Allison Addicott

Allison Addicott writes and does public speaking with the goal of improving communication between people and between cultures. (She blogs at Quill And Wit.) She holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, a Master of Divinity from Pacific School of Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and earned the Paul Wesley Yinger Award for Preaching in 2003. She did PhD work in Theology and Philosophy of Religion at Drew University in New Jersey, and at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She is currently on ordination track in the United Church of Christ, a progressive denomination that seeks social justice and interfaith dialogue. @allisonwrites

Next up by Allison: Ethical Failure and the Codependence of Greed: Consumers and Bankers as Greedy Bedfellows