Even as the political process grinds forward on health care reform and financial regulation, the capitulations made along the way by Congress and the administration have puzzled countless supporters of these reforms. The larger story behind these frustrations is that the political process is broken.
Amy Goodman at Democracy Now talked this week with Robert Johnson, a global expert on finance and international monetary reform, to find out why his testimony was silenced when he spoke before Congress advocating more regulation of derivatives. His simple explanation is that business very completely owns our representatives through the campaign finance system. This structural dysfunction, says Johnson, is what prevents much of the reform from getting passed.
Here’s the clip of yesterday’s broadcast. The interview starts at minute 11:25 and goes to 30:00. There’s also a transcript available at the website.
Harper’s magazine also observed the silencing of Johnson, and commented correctly that it shows how broken the system is. See An Object Lesson in Governmental Failure: Derivatives reform
It’s frustrating to see how gridlocked the system has become, also quite scary given the radical new thinking increasingly required by today’s world – this is thinking that doesn’t seem possible given our representatives’ extreme condition of servitude. Business owns democracy, and despite any belief one might have in the wholesome ministrations of the free-market dynamic, this ownership will not make democracy stronger or more efficient.
The article Amy Goodman refers to by Nouriel Roubini is worth reading to get a taste of how the U.S. government has been reinflating the very bubble that recently collapsed. That collapse finds most of us still buried in rubble – but not the traders, who are already breathing intoxicating air once again. See if you can walk away from this title: Mother of all Carry Trades Faces an Inevitable Bust.
And about those derivatives by the way. If you need a perspective on the danger posed by an amount the size of global GDP trading around the world unsecured by anything but taxpayers, read someone else’s comment I saved as a note-to-self here in a post back in May called Remember the Derivatives.
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