Bill Moyers reminds us how dysfunctional American politics have become
by David Atkins
Bill Moyers is still going strong, and still a national treasure. My local NPR station just re-aired this amazing hour-long segment on the how the big banks are rewriting our economic rules. It doesn’t say much that close readers of this blog, of Michael Lewis and Matt Taibbi haven’t already stated before, but it does so in a way that makes it painfully, clearly evident that this country still has gaping hole of criminality and wretched excess in our economic system. Wall Street greed nearly wrecked our entire future, and still nothing much has been done about it, basically due to corruption of the electoral system. The two main guests of the program are former Senator Byron Dorgan, and former Citigroup Chairman John Reed. They don’t mince words.
The fact that naked credit default swaps are still legal, that the too-big-to-fail banks are even bigger than before, and that one of our two political parties is about to nominate a vulture capitalist who argues that the regulations on Wall Street are too strict, is a sign of just how deeply rotten to the core the political system in this country has become.
But instead of this issue, we spend our time debating whether global warming is actually real, how much Social Security should be cut to please Standard and Poors, and how much birth control women should allowed to take.
Completely, totally dysfunctional.
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