THERE may not be a person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit. In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.
The window for change is rapidly closing.
I don't have time to flesh out this diary but everyone needs to read the column....
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Note from Diarist:
My apologies for the hit and run nature of this, but my intention was solely to alert some late night insomniacs to the presence of a monster home run before they saw it on the Pundit FP in the a.m. Did not expect to wake up on the rec list after hitting the sack.... at my age, when nookie is calling you have to drop everything else.
The most telling aspect of Frank Rich's column, IMHO is that finally, an established warhorse seems to be going after Wall Street and that could be huge news in itself, particularly considering this recent dialog between Bill Moyers, David Corn, and Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, transcript here:
BILL MOYERS: Where is the countervailing power in Washington? If the press is falling down. If the executive branch is compromised, as you said earlier, by Obama's approach to conventional wisdom. If the bankers are in charge of Congress, and you described there. You also make the very strong case in your article that the Fed is involved in this, as well. The bankers really know how to work the Fed. Where is the countervailing power?
DAVID CORN: There isn't any countervailing power.
BILL MOYERS: You mean I have cancer and there's nothing I can do about it? I'm serious.
DAVID CORN: Well, there could be.
BILL MOYERS: This discourages a lot of people when you give this depressing analysis.
DAVID CORN: I understand that. And I wish I could be more hopeful. And we had a President who ran on a hope platform. You have just described all the major actors in Washington. And, you know, they are, to some degree, responsive to what happens outside of Washington. But if there's no pressure coming into Washington on this stuff, particularly given, as we've talked about, its tremendously profound complication. Then things just sort of, the status quo wins out.
BILL MOYERS: I mean, in Washington, if you are a critic, if you're a journalist in Washington, who reports the kind of-- on Washington the way you do, you get marginalized right?
KEVIN DRUM: Yes. Yes. I think you do. You're not part of Wall Street. You don't really understand what's going on. That's how they feel about it. I think that the Obama Administration — all the people in there — I think they have become convinced, like a lot of people, that if they don't do what Wall Street says, terrible things are going to happen. I mean, if they try to reign in Wall Street, all of our financial business will move to the Bahamas. And we'll lose trillions of dollars. And they believe that. And that's what the banks are--
BILL MOYERS: But as you say so astutely in this article, that happened for 20 years. Washington-- 30 years. Washington did what Wall Street wanted. And we had a debacle anyway.
KEVIN DRUM: Right.
BILL MOYERS: Have we learned nothing?