A funny thing is starting to happen. Not funny "Ha Ha", but funny as in "I didn't think anyone would ever begin to notice what's been going on." It's this: America is broken, being sucked dry by a financial overclass that's co-opted both political parties and is liquidating America as the rest of us wonder how long it will be before the lights go out.
Paul Krugman has been on this for years, as has Bob Herbert. Frank Rich weighs in once more too.
On the Rec List is/was a diary by MediaFreeze on the movie Inside Job which shows who and how. Matt Taibbi's book Griftopia lays out in detail how the government is now a subsidiary of the financial sector. (more)
Rich's column puts it pretty succinctly:
As John Cassidy underscored in a definitive article titled “Who Needs Wall Street?” in The New Yorker last week, the financial sector has paid little for bringing the world to near-collapse or for receiving the taxpayers’ bailout that was denied to most small-enough-to-fail Americans. The sector still rakes in more than a fourth of American business profits, up from a seventh 25 years ago. And what is its contribution to America in exchange for this quarter-century of ever-more over-the-top rewards? “During a period in which American companies have created iPhones, Home Depot and Lipitor,” Cassidy writes, the industry reaping the highest profits and compensation is one that “doesn’t design, build or sell a tangible thing.”
emphasis added
This really isn't a new problem. A comment by NBBooks in response to a comment I'd posted goes back a hundred years to show the financial sociopaths have always been with us.
The power of the money trusts were reigned in, but not destroyed, by the New Deal. The opposition to Roosevelt and the New Deal was immediate, fierce, just as crazy as the teabaggers today, and also financed by some of the richest people in the country - just like the teabaggers today. The banking and financial deregulation, that began under Thatcher and Reagan were the result of the unremitting wrong-wing attacks on the New Deal ever since the 1930s, and has led to the ascendancy of new money trusts. One of the most disastrous, and least recognized, legacies of Reagan is the cessation of major anti-trust actions by the federal government.
Read the whole comment by NBBooks - it's a powerful reminder that We've Been Here Before, as quotes from Louis Brandeis demonstrate. (How in Hell could an obvious anti-business anarcho-socialist-communist-libertarian like Brandeis get appointed to the Supreme Court? It certainly wouldn't be allowed today....which is a huge part of the problem.)
We're looking at continuing job stagnation, possible deflation, calls for slashing Social Security and every other government program that makes life better for ordinary people in the name of.....what? How can that failure of the American Dream co-exist with this?
American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms.
Both parties are functionally insane in the face of this absurdity. There's one determined to bring everything to a screeching halt if they don't get tax cuts for the richest people in America and cuts to all the things that make life bearable for ordinary people. Meanwhile the leader of the other party which has nominal responsibility to turn things around is... reaching out to the perpetrators for help!
Matt Taibbi sums up where we are, and just who our political leaders are emulating in the first chapter of Griftopia:
These leaders are like the drug lords who ruled America's ghettos in the crack age, men (and some women) interested in just two things: staying in power and hoovering up enough of what's left of the cash on their blocks to drive around in an Escalade or a 633i for however long they have left. Our leaders know we're turning into a giant ghetto and they are taking every last hubcap they can get their hands on before the rest of us wake up and realize what's happened.
SNIP
If American politics made any sense at all, we wouldn't have two giant political parties of roughly equal size perpetually fighting over the same 5-10 percent swatch of undecided voters, blues versus reds. Instead the parties should be broken down into haves and have-nots - a couple of obnoxious bankers on the Upper East Side running for office against 280 million pissed-off credit card and mortgage customers.
If only.... Of course the bankers wouldn't bother to run, when they can afford to hire people to do that kind of messy work for them.
Now this isn't to say the rest of the country has quite awakened yet to the fact that our political parties are about as relevant in the face of this vast wealth transfer as the battle between Coke and Pepsi is to living a full and rewarding life. Think about the big stories in the last few months - at least as far as the media is concerned - and what do we get? Ground Zero Mosque. Gate Rape at the Airports by the TSA. Dancing With The Stars Tea Party Edition. Mid Term election attack ads warning of the female Anti-Christ Nancy Pelosi leading illegal aliens in an attempt to make our kids gay. Hopeful/desperate news stories that Americans will Christmas shop the country back to prosperity....
The question isn't how much longer this can go on. The question is: when it will all finally collapse from its own internal contradictions, like all the other bubbles and Ponzi schemes out there - and what will we do when it does?