"And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place,"
Greenwald's response:
The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis "own" the U.S. Congress -- according to one of that institution's most powerful members -- demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.
The ownership of the federal government by banks and other large corporations is effectuated in literally countless ways, none more effective than the endless and increasingly sleazy overlap between government and corporate officials.
Greenwald goes on to list several examples of high-level musical chairs between legislative and lobbying sector jobs, and eventually gets to the sleaziest and most egregious offender, Goldman Sachs:
Nobody even tries to hide this any longer. The only way they could make it more blatant is if they hung a huge Goldman Sachs logo on the Capitol dome and then branded it onto the foreheads of leading members of Congress and executive branch officials.
And he finishes with the real reason why, even over a week after Durbin's statement, the big networks and big papers have ignored a huge statement by one of the country's highest ranking legislators:
One might think it would be a big news story for the second most-powerful member of the U.S. Senate to baldly state that the Congress is "owned" by the bankers who spawned the financial crisis and continue to dictate the government's actions. But it won't be. The leading members of the media work for the very corporations that benefit most from this process. Establishment journalists are integral and well-rewarded members of the same system and thus cannot and will not see it as inherently corrupt (instead, as Newsweek's Evan Thomas said, their role, as "members of the ruling class," is to "prop up the existing order," "protect traditional institutions" and "safeguard the status quo").
That Congress is fully owned and controlled by a tiny sliver of narrow, oligarchical, deeply corrupted interests is simultaneously so obvious yet so demonized (only Unserious Shrill Fringe radicals, such as the IMF's former chief economist, use that sort of language) that even Durbin's explicit admission will be largely ignored. Even that extreme of a confession (Durbin elaborated on it with Ed Schultz last night) hardly causes a ripple.
3 comments:
Not to mention that newspapers are holding out hope to get some relief.
I had (have) the same beef with campaign finance reform. Leaving aside the constitutionality of the law, is it any surprise that people want to influence those who seek to micro-manage and regulate nearly every corner of their lives? Here's a thought - want less money in politics? Try regulating less. Presto!
So your response is to simply say the best kind of government is one that refuses to govern? No thanks. If you want less regulation, you ought to test the waters in Afghanistan - by all accounts its a libertarian utopia over there.
I don't care what Afghanistan is, as long as they carry only soy milkshakes and goat's cheese burgers at McDonalds, I have no interest in them. That, my friends, is an issue that needs regulation, and a platform I can get behind.
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