If you haven't yet seen the movie, here's director Charles Furguson discussing it a few months ago on MSNBC. It looks brilliant. (Here's the shorter trailer.) He raises questions that I've been asking for a while and still remain unanswered. As much as we continue to discuss the Democrats versus Republicans theme, the difference between the two on the financial crisis is minimal. Both sides were active participants in creating the problem and both sides were equal participants in bailing out the bankers, which went well beyond the issue of bailing out the banks.
I held my nose and voted Democratic for my Senate candidate but chose not to support my Democratic Congresswoman who supports the Comcast position on Net Neutrality. At this point I'm very reluctant to support any more Democrats (and certainly not Republicans) who can't come out in strong support of the American public, beyond Wall Street. Something tells me that I'm not alone in this either.
More from Furguson on the Huffington Post:
My answer is this: far from being in an era of brutal partisan warfare, as conventional wisdom holds and as watching the nightly television news might suggest, the United States is now in the grip of a political duopoly in which both parties are thoroughly complicit. They play a game: they agree to fight viciously over certain things to retain the allegiance of their respective bases, while agreeing not to fight about anything that seriously endangers the privileges of America's new financial elites. Whether this duopoly will endure, and what to do about it, are perhaps the most important questions facing Americans. The current arrangement all but guarantees the continuing decline of the United States as a nation, and of the welfare of the bottom 90% of its citizens.
First, consider Obama Administration policy. The Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates down, which greatly enriches the financial services industry. The bipartisan budget commission, whose Democratic head is a former investment banker, recommended raising taxes on most Americans while reducing taxes on corporations. And while, to its rare credit, the Obama Administration has sought to repeal some of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, it has avoided any serious attempt to tax or control financial sector compensation, to recover any of the massive amounts taken by bankers during the bubble, to penalize or prosecute those who caused it, or to reverse the extraordinary rise in inequality that has transformed America over the last generation. The Republicans go even further in catering to the wealthy and the financial sector, but the differences are relatively minor.
The financial services industry and the most successful American multinational firms now obtain rapidly increasing fractions, often already the majority, of their investment, employees, and revenues from (a) other wealthy individuals and corporations and/or (b) outside the United States. Over the last two decades their political interests, contributions, and lobbying have gradually followed these larger trends. As a result, the political duopoly has overseen a massive disinvestment in the future of the United States and the American people, and a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 1%. Taxes on dividends, high incomes, capital gains, and estates have sharply declined, while tuition at public universities, hours worked per family, household debt, and government deficits have all increased.
