JoePa was “Too Big to Fail”

There’s the lesson I take from the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, a scandal that will be roiling for weeks and months and years into the future.  I take that title from words in Jonathan Zimmerman’s column in the Philadelphia Daily News.  Sure, Zimmerman is talking of our obsession with sports in general, with Penn State as his specific example, but his trope is telling.  We have to wonder, as a result, what this scandal says about the state of America, of course, but we also must wonder what actions we must take to heal.   Yes, surely we must look to healing, because it is not just those boy victims who were harmed by Coach Sandusky at Penn State, or by the inaction of Coach Joe Paterno (who rightly deserves no pity)  and the entire administration at Penn State.  But we should look at this ugly scandal, and the roles of the men involved, as more than just an incident occurring in Happy Valley, but as an exemplar of our time, just as the failures of banks and auto companies and such are exemplars of our time. 

I love the writing of Ronnie Polaneczki, and have even, with my wife, taken her to a football game, and while I know she is right on the money to focus blame on the first eyewitness to the child sex scandal at Penn State, it is not enough.  Ronnie, it is not enough, and it is not even enough to blame big time sports.  There is blame here to cover much of our society.  I suppose the large lesson we need to absorb is that there is no such thing as “too big to fail,” but that “too big will always fail,” or that we need to make sure “too big isn’t too immoral.” 

Goldman Sachs peddled mortgage backed securities while betting against them.  One of the lessons we got out of that, and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merril Lynch, AIG, etc, was “Too Big to Fail.”  We ended up supporting those institutions that did in fact fail their customers, their investors, and also the American people.  We didn’t let “Too big” fail, but we haven’t adequately provided the solution to keeping “too big” from failing in the future, either.

The Philadelphia Daily News asks why the people responsible at Penn State did nothing, conspiring together instead in silence about the horrific abuse of boys.  How naive.  The powers that be at Penn State, starting from Joe Paterno, but including the Athletic Director, the President of the University, and on and on, played a similar double game as did the powers that be at Goldman Sachs.  They pitched their product to the masses, to tens of thousands of alumni and current students, to citizens of the state of Pennsylvania, and to the world, the notion that Joe Paterno ran a clean and honorable program.  It has now become viscerally evident that those powers knew of the rottenness that infected their football power, but decided to let it go on the faith that they were “too big to fail.” 

Hey, there may be more revelations in this more-than-sordid tale.  What of the mysterious death of the late District Attorney of Centre County, Ray Gricar?  Will the firing of Spanier and Paterno allow us to ignore the strange death of  the prosecutor who let Sandusky slide in 1998?   Yes, there’s much more to this story, but I’m a liberal.  I seek redemption.  I seek healing.  I’m just not sure how that happens, but I know it doesn’t happen by propping up the status quo. 

In the case of the banks in this country and their failures in 2008 and 2009, and the resultant failures in the auto industry,  our national response was to prop them up again.  We propped up AIG and Bank of America and GM and Chrysler, etc.  But we only propped them up.  Perhaps that was a good deed, but not in and of itself.  Were they too big to fail?  Of course.  We could not let them drive us all into depression, and there the Republicans are completely wrong in saying the marketplace should have been left to winnow out the failures.  The marketplace, after all, knows no morals.  As a people, we must have morals.  The Obama Administration has tried to institute such market morality with regulation that has been fought by Republicans on every single front.  Alas.  Perhaps it is time to note that Joe Paterno is a Republican. 

Joe Paterno was a personal friend of Gerald Ford and George HW Bush, giving a speech endorsing Bush at the 1988 Republican Convention.  Paterno’s son Scott Paterno ran for Congress as a Republican, though several friends of mine know him as a piss poor lawyer when he was an associate in Philadelphia.  But it isn’t Joe’s identity as a conservative and as a Republican that taints his actions in this scandal.  That taint is all his own.  He’d internalized the notion, I suspect, that Penn State Football and JoePa were just too big to fail.  One thing he could count on, though, is that no Republican would stand in his way.  Heck, Rick Santorum, a current Republican candidate for President, gave an award to Paterno’s former Defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, calling him an “Angel.”  (Angel of abusing boys, Rick?)  Not a coincidence.  The Republican instinct seems to be to look the other way, whether the topic is Goldman Sachs or boys being raped.   And while Republicans (Mitt Romney did so in the debate last night, as did all his fellow Republicans) stand strong against bailouts, at risk to our society, they also stand strong against corrective action, even in the sphere of morality. 

Oh yes, Republicans stand against regulation of banks and auto companies and any other business that through careless striving for profit ends up horribly damaging our country.  They fought regulation of the banking sector, and I’m betting they will fight reform in college athletics as well.  They think “too big to fail” means “let’s let them fail,” while moral people will react by calling for businesses, and college athletics, to stand by moral codes that are enforcable. 

But let’s get to healing.  Part of the healing in regards to the banking crisis of 2008 was the misdirected and whiney Tea Party notion that anything can fail, and that we should never guard against failure with regulations built from morality.  That was ignorant short-sighted denial just as surely as is the rioting of students on Penn State’s campus Wednesday night.  Then there is the Occupation Wall Street attempt at healing, one that recognizes the economic sins of the banking industry as well as the sins of trying to prop up those banks without moral accountability.  No bankers went to jail after the 2008 crisis, and neither will JoePa go to jail.  There’s the shame. 

But is it the solution to send people to jail?  Send Joe Paterno to jail, even though he has technically not breached any law?  I think not.  He was fired, and that’s a good start.  Penn State should also be occupied.  The Board of Regents at Penn State should then wipe all mention of Joe Paterno and his legacy from the face of the campus, and start over, pledging with strict controls not to allow “too big to fail” to mar their essential mission, that of educating students. 

Let’s not take the Republican route in healing here.  Let’s not “let them fail” with no remedy and recourse, no healing.  Let’s find some moral background for our country, for our economics, for our businesses, and for our sports.  Alas, I’m a cynic and know that ain’t about to happen.  Still, I call for an Occupy Penn State, with occupiers with the moral foundation the football program has lacked, criminally, under Joe Paterno.