What If We're Beyond Mere Policy Tweaks?
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The nation’s ills cannot be fixed by thousands of pages of regulation or more policy tweaks. Only a profound cultural transformation can address our problems.
Back in December, Nick Schulz helped put the size of the 2,074-page healthcare bill into some historical context by comparing its length to some previous bills that rank among the most consequential in U.S. history, like the 82-page Social Security Act of 1935 and the 74-page Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Now that Congress has passed the “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act,” it might be a good time to compare the 2,319-page financial reform bill (245 pages longer than the healthcare bill) to the previous bills listed below (and see graph) that are considered among the most consequential legislative acts for banking and finance.
1. Federal Reserve Act (1913) – 31 pages.
2. Glass-Steagall Act (1933) – 37 pages.
A profound realization hit me last night: America is just going through the motions now–of reform, of healthcare, of everything. America’s leadership–both its elected and appointed officials, and its “shadow” Financial Power Elite leadership (the corporatocracy of crony Capitalist cartels and rentier/speculative parasites) are just going through the motions of financial reform. And the American public is resigned to just going through the motions of accepting the travesty of a mockery of a sham that is called “reform,” too, even as they understand in their bones that nothing has been fixed and the next financial crisis has already been cooked into their future.
One of our few reliable voice of reason in the world of finance, Simon Johnson, has already laid bare how the the next financial crisis and inevitable bailout of the banking parasites will unfold. His article in The New Republic Way Too Big To Fail reveals how the “too big to fail” banks have shredded the wet paper bag of “reform” Congress went through the motions of conjuring up: they are quickly expanding globally, beyond the reach of any mere nation-state’s grasp.
Let’s be honest, shall we? There never was any fire for real reform of the financial sector. It was all rote, a foul, stupid play-act, a passionless pantomime of “caring” and fake-”progressiveness” displayed for propaganda purposes.
Real reform occurs when the political class of toadies, sycophants, leeches and cowards is forced by a near-universal public outrage to pass simple, powerful legislation and the budgetary resources to enforce that legislation. For example, the landmark environmental laws of the 1970s. Rivers in America used to catch fire before this Federal legislation; now they don’t. There was a true passion and desire in the nation to clean up the industrial pollution that was destroying the nation’s commons.
There was no real fire for financial reform in the politico class. All they had to do was wait out the public’s outrage over TARP and then get down to the business of collecting contributions from financial players and their armies of toady-lobbyists.
So Washington went through the motions of “reform” and the regulatory agencies went through the motions of “enforcing” existing regulations. But nobody was indicted, no RICO suits filed on behalf of the defrauded, no billion-dollar penalties slapped on those who carted off tens of billions in embezzled, ill-gotten gains, and no perps forced into bankruptcy.
In other words, nothing got done except another layer of useless, overpaid bureaucracy was added to the bloated, overstuffed Federal payroll.
The exact same dynamic is visible in the “healthcare” (a.k.a. sickcare) “reform.” 2,000 pages of mind-numbing slicing and dicing of the vast flood of national treasure that flows to the sickcare cartels, and nary a single word on the actual health of the American public, which continues to deteriorate on multiple fronts.
The “reform” is to add multiple layers of bureaucracy and additional costs on a bloated, out-of-control system in which 50% of the money is already wasted on fraud, needless procedures/meds and paper shuffling.
It was all about going through the motions of reforming a system everyone knows is beyond dysfunctional.
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