Our Last Stand: A Look at Modern Politics

Watching the beginning of the latest Republican Reality Chow Down, the second Florida debate, I was struck by the unreality of this endeavor. It has become a circus of clowns instead of a serious venue. More like Real Housewives vs. Jeopardy vs. Football than the activity of serious men who have any ability to lead this nation.

Meanwhile my husband, shouting with the TV crowd, was enjoying the spectacle to come. I felt physically ill and left the room. Thought I might read but flipped on the small TV in the bedroom instead. Running through the channels I chanced upon an ancient image of Ronald Reagan and David Stockman. There was Bill Moyers interviewing David, a much older version of the young turk who had famously spoken truth to power in the 80s and had his ass kicked for the privilege. He was Reagan’s young and brilliant budget director. Now he was explaining how Crony Capitalists of Wall Street had brought the western world to its knees and gotten away with the scam.

Glued to his story about armies of lobbyists, mountains of cash and the congressional attentions those can persuasively command, I suddenly knew that our democracy was lost. We, the regular folks, can’t compete with our unfunded voices, not at thirty dollars a throw we might send to our favorite candidates. And certainly we ourselves can’t afford to run for office. One thing Romney got right was if you need a job you shouldn’t be running. We are all too busy; working 40, 50, 60 hours a week, caring for our families, paying the mortgage, bring the cat to the vet, or grandma to the doctor, or our kids to sports practice. We thought the simple act of voting was enough to maintain our great system. Well, it’s not. And hasn’t been for quite some time.

Stockman, himself a spokesman for real Main Street capitalism, weighed in against the banks who, in 2008, bought the bailouts from Bush and Paulson (nee Goldman Sachs). Then inveighed against GE Capital, later bailed out by Obama and Geithner (more Goldman Sachs). Oh, and Obama made Jeffery Immelt (nee GE) his Jobs czar. And these outrages are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Really, even the One we sent to Washington for his serious brilliance and street cred, even he has been co-opted by the Cronys who crapped capitalism. Real capitalists are conservatives because they know that to fail is to go out of business, not get saved by taxpayers. The financial system has made itself too big to fail by threatening to fail and take us all down with it. This is what has happened and the public has paid the price. Certainly no Cronys will pay. Nope, they just keep holding on to power by giving out millions to fund a political system they have come to own.

Worst of all is that it will certainly happen again because the system is broken. Dodd Frank, the 1500 page regulation Act, did nothing to fix it. The single most important bill that came out of the Great Depression was Glass-Steagall, the 32 page Act which limited the banks to either lending or investing but not both under one roof because this lead to the abuses which rocked the system back then. When that was overturned in 1999, with both Democrat and Republican assistance, we signed on to our eventual financial melt down. The new bill is 1500 pages long and implies myriad loopholes, to which battalions of lobbyists currently are applying pick axes.

So, yes, it will happen again says Stockman and also Gretchen Morgenson, the financial writer whose interview followed. A serious journalist whose byline I read regularly in the business pages of the New York Times, Morgenson warned that the lack of rules regulating the banking and financial industry means that the power of a small number of players will control the lives of everyone of us and not to our benefit. They have gamed the system. We, the American People, have lost, because as regular folk:

We Can’t Get There From Here. Period.

We can’t buy the votes, influence the regulators or have a real say in what actually matters to our jobs, our money, our mortgages or our futures. We’re just working stiffs until we’re stiff and the Cronys know that so they give us entertainment that looks like reality shows in place of reality. The Romans famously gave their people Bread and Circuses. We all know how that turned out.

Deb Mesibov, West Nyack