by Warren Longwell

Created on: March 22, 2010   Last Updated: March 31, 2010

From the very beginning, the financial meltdown was… and still is… a human ethics problem more than a situational problem, and that’s why I believe the American economy will continue to decline. Forget the happy talk. A housing report this month (March, 2010) says that the new home sales are the lowest, and the home foreclosure rate is the highest since the government started keeping records on this. Meanwhile, the true unemployment rate stubbornly refuses to budge off double digits. These are just the symptoms, but the root causes of the financial meltdown are far more depressing because the ethics vacuum, and the CEOs who exploited that situation are mostly still in place. In a very real sense, nothing has changed.

The seeds of the financial meltdown go back more than twenty years, and a lot of smart people saw it coming. Unfortunately, the people with the power to set things right were too busy collecting bonus checks… men like Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers, Jeff Skilling and Ken Ley of Enron, Roger Smith and Rick Wagoner of General Motors, and Hank Mckinnell of Pfizer. The list could go on and on, for there was never a shortage of men like these who could take a highly successful company and drive it into the ground just for personal wealth and lazy unimaginative expediency. Worst of all, there weren’t any grownups around to supervise.

 America still tolerates and nourishes a veritable galaxy of CEOs like this because the vast majority of Americans don’t realize how drastically the ethical landscape has changed. In this country, our quaint and naïve love affair with Capitalism is based in no small way on our nostalgic admiration for industrialists like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone and Walter Chrysler, primarily entrepreneurs, and then subsequently tycoons who headed successful business operations that produced and sold products that they, themselves, had invented or developed. That respected American entrepreneurial tradition continues to this day with successful businessmen like Bill Gates and Steven Jobs and Warren Buffet. Admiration for all of these men is justifiable.

But a major part of our current problem is that most Capitalism-loving Americans can’t tell you the difference between a Bill Gates and a Dick Fuld, and it would be difficult to overstate the significance of that. The difference is that corporate honchos like Fuld and the vast majority of other corporate CEOS are

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