6/29/2010
For a decade now, we’ve been watching the unraveling of nearly every institution in which we the people used to place our faith. One by one they’ve toppled in our esteem, leaving many of us to conclude that most of the institutions that run our world are utterly hollow if not rotten to the core. With this loss of faith in the bastions of society has come a commensurate feeling that the government, which was supposed to protect us from bad institutions, did not always do so, at least in part because government itself is subject to those same institutions.
To recap, first there was Enron and the accountancy scandal, the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church, the discovery that the American military practices torture, the scandals in the mortgage and housing markets, and then the lending market generally, ending with the collapse of the entire global economy two years ago. To top it off, Barack Obama, for all that he isn’t George Bush, is not what many people hoped he’d be, and so there is that disappointment. Now, still in the same decade we began, BP is dealing with the reality that they are slowly destroying the Gulf of Mexico. Read More
