The Avenues to Express Greed had Grown - 19 July 2002

I am relieved to say (and I hope you'll be relieved to hear) that I don't intend to talk at length about Topic A -- the suddenly discovered epidemic of corporate fraud.

Since the dread word Enron emerged, in January, like a submarine surfacing to inspect the damage it had done - we I believe, have heard nothing from the Wizard of Us All - Mr Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the only national institution which can set the primary interest rate for all bankers.

You may or may not recall that during the Roaring Nineties, Mr Greenspan would appear regularly before a committee of the Senate or the House - usually the banking committee and announce that the economy was in fine shape but because there was so much plunging speculation and an orgy of stock purchases, he would cut the prime interest rate by, say, half a point.

He spoke to us always in the dense jargon of his trade which only experts in his line could translate into English. Mr Greenspan knew full well that if he started talking plain vivid English the market would stagger from a mere glimpse of something everybody could understand.

Only once, when the bubble was swelling to bursting point did he express a regret that the market was showing signs of "irrational exuberance." The market sneezed and other countries caught cold.

He never talked English again. Until last Tuesday, when he summed up what's happening by musing "an infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community¿it is not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously."

He did not define these avenues as crooked paths that must be made straight. He was, after the President, yet another diagnostician naming the disease but not telling us how to cure it.

I suppose his appearance before the banking committee was intended, like the President's speech to businessmen a week ago, was intended to reassure us. If so, both of them failed. The market went on down and down - 166 points after Mr Greenspan's talk.

But - if reassurance is to raise its happy head and encourage people (half the population) to start investing in the market again - that reassurance will come from Congress.

Day after day, in the past two or three weeks - the members of both Houses have listened to the administration's lamentations, but what they heard louder has been ordinary people asking what happened to their pensions. When and how are corporation chiefs to be stopped walking off with twenty millions while the employees lose their savings.

Consequently, every day since the President's business speech, both houses have gone into session again and passed tougher and tougher bills going from stiff jail sentences to a law prohibiting the firing of whistle blowers. Let's not forget that the Enron scandal burst on us because of one young woman on the board or the staff who smelled something rotten in the auditing of Enron's books and the suspiciously ripe misstatement of their earnings.

Enough! Alright. Let me go now to a simple story, two simple stories, about two schoolchildren whose complaints to their fathers changed the daily life of this whole country - one profoundly, the second hilariously.

In a prairie town, Topeka, Kansas, one day in 1951 - the father of an eight year old - what was then respectfully called a Negro - became more and more concerned about his daughter Linda, who soon would have to go unaccompanied to school - a two mile journey which entailed crossing a railroad track. There was a school very nearby their home, but it was a white school.

Mr Brown decided to take an unprecedented step. He got a lawyer and sued the Board of Education of his town, Topeka, maintaining the incredible doctrine that forbidding Linda to go to the white school was a violation of her rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, to the Constitution which decrees the "equal protection of the laws."

For sixty years before Mr Brown's audacious move, the doctrine prevailing - about the separation of the races was laid down in a famous case, which the Supreme Court decided should provide - in the public (that is the Public) schools "separate but equal" facilities.

It took three years for Mr Brown's suit to go through the intermediate courts and land up at the United States Supreme Court - which on a May day in 1954 - issued the stunning unanimous judgment (nine to none) that the 1896 ruling was wrong. That in practice the facilities were always separate but rarely equal and that therefore the Fourteenth amendment would now be invoked to illegalize the separation of the races "with all deliberate speed", the court said, public schools were now to be integrated.

Well as you must know the new ruling came to apply to all public facilities and from then on there were to be no more separate sections in theatres, restaurants, stadiums, schools, universities, separate drinking fountains, swimming baths - in any public facility.

The second story is of today and simpler still. A father (who is an atheist) decided that his son ought not - every morning at school have to stand with the rest of the class and recite the Oath - The Oath of Allegiance to the Flag that is - which was composed by a Boston journalist in 1892, a turbulent time in a United States about to acquire an empire of its own.

It was an affirmation of patriotism, and this is how it went: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States, and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with justice and freedom for all." And that's the way it was recited by two, three generations of American schoolchildren.

But in 1954, a two word phrase was added by Congress. Now in 1954 the United States looking across the Pacific saw Communism thoroughly established in China and North Korea and feared for Indochina, Burma and India.

Looking across the Atlantic, it saw Moscow in virtual control of Eastern Europe and threatening Western Europe, which accordingly mounted a defensive alliance.

It was a time ripe for fear and suspicion, and a Senator from Wisconsin, one Joseph McCarthy, chose a melodramatic route to fame.

He exploited the popular hatred and fear of what he kept calling "godless Communism" by saying that the government was riddled with Communist cells. He said he had names - fifty odd in the State Department alone.

He never identified one - but for a time he rode a whirlwind through Washington.

The only thing he achieved was to see the Congress pass a resolution adding two words to the Oath of Allegiance - "one nation, under God, indivisible, with justice and freedom for all."

And that's the clause the atheistical parent doesn't want his son to have to utter. He got a lawyer too. And behold, suddenly a week or two ago - a federal court ruled that he was right - that the phrase violates the First Amendment to the Constitution which says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion".

What the founding fathers meant by establishment - there shall be no official, no state, sect, no Congregationalist, Catholic, no Church of America.

The same sentence says Congress shall not "prohibit the free exercise of religion" but in our time liberals and agnostics and non-religious people (and some of the courts) seem to have used the non-establishment clause to discourage or even forbid any mention of religion, of God anywhere in public life - in spite of the second phrase of the sentence -"Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion."

Anyway, this federal court says the father is right and implies that under God should be stricken from the Oath. This will now undoubtedly go onwards and upwards to the Supreme Court.

If it agrees, what a technical revolution the government will face. There should be little trouble persuading presidents-elect to drop the phrase "so help me God" when they take the oath of office: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. "

George Washington, at his first inaugural improvised "so help me God" and every President since has echoed him. It should be easy to stop that.

And I suppose there'd be no great brouhaha over abolishing the daily prayer (which is to a general God) which precedes each session of the Senate and the House.

But the Herculean labour will come with the obvious obligation to destroy and redesign and reprint the entire currency of the United States. How did this come about?

In November 1861 - a bad month for the Northern armies during the Civil War, a New England parson wrote to the Secretary of the Treasury declaring that "our national shame has come from disowning God....". He begged the treasurer to print on all federal coins the phrase "In God we trust." It was done.

Years later it was dropped - but the idea was revived again in the wake of the McCarthy storm - in 1955, Congress enacted that "In God we trust" should be printed on every coin and every piece and negotiable paper money. And there it is, in all the change in my pocket.

There seems to be no constitutional reason why "in God we trust" should stay, if "one nation, under God," has to go.

A saving solution has been suggested by none other than the droll one-liner - Robin Williams. He says the whole uproar could be side-stepped if the oath were adjusted to say "one nation indivisible - under Canada."

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