Stephen B. Young, The Daily Record Newswire
In Washington, D.C., on a recent Saturday, as we were standing on the now pedestrian-only part of Pennsylvania Avenue that runs in front of the White House, my grandson Tamir pointed to the house of the president and asked: “Is that the government?”
That question put me to a test: How do you explain intelligibly to a 15-year-old that our “government” is neither a building nor a person?
Later, when we were lined up on the sidewalk waiting to enter the National Archives and see signed copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, I tried to make the point to him that just as ideas expressed in words don’t need paper and ink to have an impact in our lives, so our “government” is much more than buildings, people, police, taxes, roads and bridges.
I pointed down Constitution Avenue from the National Archives to the row of great buildings on the right side of the avenue, saying “All those buildings and many more here in Washington are the government.”
He replied, “But isn’t it President Obama?”
I said: “Wait, let’s go see some more buildings and think about the question again.”
So, among other sites, we took a tour of the Capitol and saw the Supreme Court’s chamber for hearing arguments. We called on U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s office.
Tamir asked: “So what does the Senate do?”
Not an easy one to answer: It passes laws that have to agree with what the House of Representatives wants and what the president will accept and what the Supreme Court will also accept. I mentioned separation of powers and checks and balances. I talked about laws as decisions on taxes and spending — buying soldiers and weapons and paying for health care, roads, bridges, schools and teachers and police. All of this and much more is our “government.”
Since Tamir’s life revolves around playing football, I tried the analogy of teamwork, saying the government is teamwork. The government is a coach and a quarterback who come up with ideas and strategies, an offense, a defense, and all the players who must do their different jobs for the team to win through execution of the ideas and strategies. And it is the referees, who are the judges of the Supreme Court overseeing the action on the field.
I actually liked this analogy a lot: teamwork. The quality of our government is suffering now because we Americans have lost our skill at teamwork.
To have good government, we have to work together.
I did not share with Tamir the meeting I had had the previous Thursday with two staffers in U.S. Sen. Al Franken’s office, which came to mind as a case study in our “government.”
Three of the big culprits in the 2008 collapse of credit markets were the credit rating agencies of Moody’s, Standard & Poors and Fitch. In short, these agencies provided investors with negligent and misleading valuations of securities like CDOs and securitized mortgages. Markets turn on information, and bad information leads to sub-optimal market performance. To have more reliable markets, we need to provide them with information of excellent quality.
In the Dodd-Frank remedial legislation, the three major credit rating agencies got off very lightly. Too lightly. While their de facto cartel needed reformation, Congress only required a study by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). But Franken is demanding more, and rightly so.
Franken has pushed the SEC into holding hearings on the conflicts of interest in the business model used by the cartel. He is concerned, and rightly so, with a business model in which those who want high ratings on their securities pay for the ratings. Franken knows that, most often, he or she who pays the piper calls the tune.
I have been working with the Washington, D.C., office of the German Bertelsmann Foundation on a new approach to credit ratings for international financial markets so that our global capitalism can become more responsibly moral. I had visited Washington in part to meet with Peach Soltis and Matt Hayward on Sen. Franken’s staff to commit my organization, the Caux Round Table, to support of his efforts and to advocate certain reforms in the methods used in the ratings process to provide more accurate and reliable information as a public good.
I found myself, therefore, right in the middle of our “government,” and it was all about teamwork. Franken needs to work with and through the Securities and Exchange Commission. Being a senator, he doesn’t have the time to follow through on all the details that arise from his interests and his commitments and the requests that come his way. He needs a staff team.
The staff team, consisting of young generalists, needs in turn to reach out to knowledgeable and interested individuals and organizations in order to formulate recommendations for the senator and to mobilize support for his position. It is his staff more than Franken himself who must interact with staff specialists at the SEC. And the staff of the SEC must report up to commissioners, who each have their own networks of contacts and influencers.
On this rather narrow issue of reforming credit ratings, then, there is a long chain of interpersonal relationships and contacts that constitutes government. Our government can break down at any link in this chain, should some person or group lose heart or fall out of cooperation.
So if we want our government to be a good one, we must demand certain levels of concerned cooperation from all who make up our government. This need for teamwork is not new.
Later on, when Tamir and I were at Mount Vernon, we happened across a little wreath presentation ceremony at George Washington’s tomb. Some 25 tourists had gathered before the open door to his final resting place. The interpretive guide asked one of those attending to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance, two others to place a boxwood wreath by the sarcophagus and a third to read a letter written by Washington raising a concern for the future of his country.
The guide told us that Washington worried that the United States would fail from lack of teamwork and good governance, so he wrote down what is now called “George Washington’s Prayer for His Country.” It reads as follows:
“I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection; that he would incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government, to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow-citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for brethren who have served in the field; and finally that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy nation.”
Upon his resignation as commander of the Continental Army in 1783, Washington wrote this as part of a letter sent to the governors of the 13 now-independent states, united only through the meetings of an occasional Congress. His fear was that parochialism, selfishness and misdirected passions would prevent a nation from emerging. He wanted teamwork, not self-promotion, from his countrymen.
Would that such a spirit of loving justice and mercy and such a personal disposition toward charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, in our time now, prevail among all those in and around our politics.
Then it would be easier to tell Tamir where our “government” is.
