VisionFarm

The Financial Times published today a commentary on an article to appear in the May The Atlantic pointing out that, just as in many emerging economies that have tanked in recent years, a financial elite is running the US. While this has been obvious for years, I’ve never seen it written about in the major media (although, admittedly, neither the FT nor The Atlantic has broad readership in the US, so perhaps I’m excited for something that has yet to happen).

The one passing line that I’d like to comment on is this one:

In the US, influence comes as much from a system of beliefs as from lobbying….

The single biggest impediment I see in any change effort is an unwillingness to examine and understand one’s own perspective. If you view the problem through the same lens that created it, you fail to see other contributing factors and generate only predictable options for response. (Facilitating this type of perspective shift is a key outcome of working with VisionFarm.)

The real tragedy of the US response to the financial crisis is that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is an acolyte of those who architected the current system. Geithner is, and please pardon me for being so blunt, a tool. He is the fair-haired boy intent on impressing his perceived seniors, the eminence grises who established the current rules in the 80s and 90s, when he should be challenging them. He’s simply not grounded enough in his own creative self to challenge his beliefs, and the beliefs of those who preceded him, to generate the reforms we need. The system of beliefs will remain unchallenged and thereby protect the system of financial regulation from the real change it needs. 

Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them - Albert Einstein

[Postscript regarding the politics of Geithner's appointment that I will publish now because I failed to do so at the time: President Obama missed an opportunity to signal his seriousness about upleveling ethics in Washington when he failed to tell Geithner to withdraw his nomination - instead, his failure to hold Tim Geithner accountable in any public way for his tax problems communicated to the too cool for school crowd that he would tolerate misbehaving so long as their potential contributions were deemed necessary to his administration. This single failing drastically undermined his authority and, with his penchant to think that everyone is as motivated to do good as he is, will increase subtle resistance to his agenda from within his own administration until such time as he makes several high-profile examples of people for not meeting his ethical expecations.]