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This was a fabulous program, one of Bill Moyers's best. This is the way things are now! The first part was a documentary on the devastation done to Cleveland, after these deregulated, "re-setting" home loans so brokers could re-sell them and profit off of the fees, etc., and resultant foreclosure epidemic. One person quoted, I think the Cuyahoga County Treasurer, said (paraphrasing), "In the old Wild West, when the sheriff wasn't in town, people would rob the bank. Now, in this situation, the sheriff is not in town, the banks are robbing the people," (like that). Part of the report was on the huge increase of the homeless, and they went to a very crowded, with families, shelter, of new people put there by having their houses or apartments foreclosed-on, and getting no help. This whole disaster was completely created by financial/investment deregulation.
The second part was a talk with William Grieder, who I think is overrated, but who was good here, although the great Bill Moyers was better. There was some explanation of the background, how the New Deal era regulations against predatory profiteering had it right, were undone by the phony sloganeering of the Reagan devils and their anti-Government pro-corporate "free" market crap, supported by both Carter and Clinton, to the present day of total collapse. Alan Greenspan, that asshole prick, doing nothing to help "the little people" as Wall Street became so profiteering on the basis of nothing, that the values of stocks just soared even as the economy stalled, and became unrelated to actual conditions. They talked about how the recent financial-sector bailouts are so badly-targetted, so unfair, that they may actually just increase more crimes of this sort, (like the asshole Reagan allowing corporations to take losses off their taxes, and profit by their failures for the first time, and--voila!--huge numbers of planned destructions of taken-over corporations, and a worsening economy even then).
The parts of the discussion where they talked about usury, no longer a crime, deregulated off the books, and how that kicked the floor out from under the honest borrowers and completely unbalanced the economy, so that only the richest predators could ever win, just like the pre-New Deal Gilded Age, etc., was maybe the best part. The financial-industry lawyers and lobbyists who got all the stabilizing controls removed, so that they now, did not make moderate-to-good profits, but huge, un-Godly kills, at the expense of everyone else, all at once, was yet another completely invented crisis, and done by "Democrats" and Republicans both. They recommended that the partly-Governmental lenders ("Fannie Mae" and "Freddie Mac," etc.) now owned/run by commercial stockholders, be returned to totally Governmental operation and control, as they were under Roosevelt, when they worked.
The only parts I didn't like was where Grieder claimed watchdog regulators had been "castrated" (fucking offensive prick: like, women="bad," get it, bigots?; are they NEVER not bigoted against women, even here?), and the part where Grieder orders us all, like Lou Dobbs, to become "Independents," for some reason. No, actually, we need to become like great Democrats, like Dennis Kucinich, Marcy Kaptur, Sherrod Brown, Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, all of whom, interestingly, are from Ohio.
This subject matter, report, and discussion, were all really great; tape it if they play it again on PBS. I am also going to save the transcript from the link here on this thread. This is our country now. The only hope is that it will lead to a new era of Government regulation and help.
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