What happened to just saying no?

WASHINGTON — Over the years, when I have spoken to students about journalism, questions of personal morality have inevitably arisen, and I have always answered by saying, “Don’t tell me what you WILL do; tell me what you WON’T do!”

I was trying to tell them that, in every decent and honorable human being, there has to be a moral and ethical plateau that the person simply will not breach. My father, a small-businessman on the South Side of Chicago, was put upon in the 1930s and ’40s by both mafiosos and corrupt city inspectors, and he surely had such a plateau. He expressed his “feelings” by physically throwing the rapscallions out!

As we all sit back in shock these days, stunned by the seemingly never-ending sagas of corruption from Wall Street to Palm Beach to Fleet Street and beyond, I keep searching for the “men who said no” — the men and women who stood up and said, “No further, no more!” And here, I think, I have found the key to what has happened.

As I have carefully read over all of the intricately reported stories, from first Enron to WorldCom to Global Crossing, and today AIG and Lehman Brothers and the incredibly inventive Bernie Madoff, one profoundly troubling aspect of the whole sordid mess has finally hit me: This is not a scandal that you can pin on one or even a few who are guilty. No, this is the collapse of an entire economic system, and the guilty are scattershot across the system like violent cancers in a sick body.

Listen first to The Wall Street Journal’s analysis: “With the Cold War over and investments flowing across the globe, people believed they were in a long-running Pax Americana of worldwide prosperity and rising productivity. During the 1990s, investors added $1 trillion to mutual funds. The Dow Jones industrial average surged above 11,000 in 1999, up tenfold from 1982.”

Complex periods

But our America, you see, has never been good at the more complex — and initially beguiling — periods after great victories. After the Civil War, Reconstruction doomed the South to ruthless exploitation for years; after World War I, we disarmed, allowed the Depression to occur and faced World War II criminally unprepared.

After the Cold War, it was the same-old, same-old, deja vu all over again, as, instead of rationally reinstitutionalizing the world, our “best and brightest” flocked to Wall Street. They went not to build the country, but to make huge amounts of money and run with the new crowd of ridiculously, wholly unproductively American rich!

The result, as stated brilliantly by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn in The New York Times, was that, “Americans enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics.”

Saying “no” was most definitely NOT in fashion for the CEOs and those lunatic leaders of the big Wall Street firms. “If any one of them had set himself up as a whistleblower — had stood up and said, ‘This business is irresponsible and we are not going to participate in it’ — he would probably have been fired,” these writers say.

And meanwhile, the so-called regulators and rating agencies were being paid by the issuers of the bonds they supposedly rated and, “Seldom if ever did Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s say, ‘If you put one more risky asset on your balance sheet, you will face a serious downgrade.’”

But it can be all exposed — it was in a previous age. In another outstanding article in the Times, Ron Chernow, author of “The House of Morgan,” carries us blessedly backward in time to the early 1930s, when the Senate, under the direction of a probing investigator little known today, Ferdinand Pecora, “unearthed a secret financial history of the 1920s, demystifying the assorted frauds, scams and abuses that culminated in the 1929 crash.”

‘Banksters’

By the end of it all, the great and hitherto untouchable bankers of America, men like J.P. Morgan Jr., were being referred to as “banksters” and the atmosphere of the times was summed up by a newspaper photo of Morgan with a circus midget planted on his lap.

In the end, it’s easy to prosecute an Enron CEO or a Madoff for saying “yes” to corruption. It’s very hard to prosecute a person for not saying “no.”

Universal Press Syndicate