When Systems Fail

“When Systems Fail.”

If we’re honest, the U.S. is facing serious crises. It is a crisis in leadership and a crisis in government. Indeed, the crisis is spreading like a virus. For years now, conservatives have claimed that government should be led by businessmen.

This is especially been so in the case of the U.S. presidency. It has been over six months with a businessman at the helm of the ship of state, and what do we see? If we’re honest, we must admit it has been a disaster. Government, to the extent that there is one, is largely dysfunctional.

It runs hither and yon from one emergency to another, solving no problems and creating many. It insults and demeans allies as shown perhaps best by Germany’s Angela Merkel who announced that henceforth Europe could no longer rely on the Americans and would go its own way.

Insults: they sell newspapers, but it alienates friends. Government and business are two different things, and like oil and water, they don’t blend well. Millions of Americans believe that one’s wealth was a sign of one’s wisdom.

The late John Kenneth Galbraith, an acclaimed economist, challenged that common belief, nothing: “One of the things you must understand about 1929,” here he speaks of the Great Depression, “is the danger in attributing intelligence to the simple fact that people are associated with large sums of money or large financial institutions. We don’t ask whether they’re intelligent. We say they’re associated with all this money, so they must be intelligent. We attribute intelligence to association with financial operations, and only afterwards do we discover that error and that people involved can be extremely successful in gulling themselves, that they can, in effect, and I use the word advisedly, be marvelously stupid.” A lesson from economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

Look at where we’re at now.

From imprisoned nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.