Who's Responsible?

A friend has invited me to think more critically about corporations. Let's face it. Corporations sometimes do bad things. But they're not inherently evil. They are amoral, human organizations capable of doing both bad and good. They are reflections of the people who run and staff them.

This may be splitting hairs when facing an economic crisis brought on, at least in part, by corporations which did some really stupid things. Who is responsible if not corporations like Citigroup and Bear Stearns?

Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times, put things into perspective for me when, in a recent column entitled "All Fall Down," he wrote:

"This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics. So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home...bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties as if they were AAA bonds...buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield."

"Citigroup was involved in, and made money from, almost every link in that chain. And the bank's executives, including, sad to see, the former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were clueless about the reckless financial instruments...or were so ensnared by the cronyism between the bank's risk managers and risk takers (and so bought off by their bonuses) that they had no interest in stopping it."

Doesn't it make you want to scream?

I'm reminded of a well known song, Father and Son, by Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens. The song is a conversation between a father and son. The father cautions his son not to react too severely when he finds that things in the world are amiss. The lyrics include these words of the father:

"I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy,
To be calm when you've found something going on.
But take your time, think a lot,
Think of everything you've got.
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not."

But the son's righteous indignation persists. He feels compelled to leave and strike out on his own to a fate of which we can only guess. Perhaps years later the son becomes the father, cautioning his son to stay calm.

So, who is responsible for fixing the economy? Well,in many ways it's each of us. For the economy is really a compilation of financial and lifestyle decisions we all make. Perhaps each of us must determine which of the two people in the song we will most resemble--the father or the son?



Yusuf Islam performs Father and Son in a 2007 BBC telecast.

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