The Great American Stickup by Robert Scheer makes the compelling argument that the Great Recession of 2008 was caused by deregulation of markets through all Administrations since Ronald Regan, and that Bill Clinton was among the worst. He goes on to say that Obama hasn't stuck to his mostly correct analysis of Wall Street's evils because many of the people who perpetrated the mess are his economic advice now, and that the root causes have not been addressed and indeed the fix is in to protect the interests of the institutions most responsible, and that it is not prinarily a partisan issue,
The big loser was 99% of the population, the lower and middle class, with the top 1% by income holding 10% of the networth and able to buy political favor.
In fact it appears that "the blame goes around" and people who ran many of the banks that were "too big to fail" are in both major partys and that they have worked both sides against a middle that favors Wall Street banks going largely unaccountable for the malfeisance that lead to the crash.
Most of the book is devoted to revealing how pervasive the corruption is, how government agencies that are supposed to independantly monitor financial dealings of Wall Street are led by the very people whose business dealing the agencies are meant to regulate, and how it doesn't matter which party is in power, the same individuals with the same ties to the big New York investment Banks influience policy, draft laws and get them passed despite massive conflicts of interest.
The book ends without solutions on a down note, it is a retelling of the details of the fix and a dire warning.
The story goes back as far as Ronald Regan's efforts to cut taxes to the rich and privatize everything. It takes pains to point out Alan Greenspan's philosophical base in the writing of Ayn Rand and how the Market Fundementalism, the belief that markets self-regulate and don't need outside oversight, was soundly refuted by the Crash of 2008. It doesn't mention Greenspan's recantation before Congress in 2009, basically admitting his errors. Where Regan didn't succeed in getting the financial sector fully deregulated, Bill Clinton did and many of the players have resurfanced in Obama's administration. Certiantly a debate about the Glass-Stegal law, that kept investment banking separate from commercial banks, goes back to its passage in 1933, a response to the same kind of malfeasance in the 1920's. It was replaced in 1999 with the regulations that led to the bubble.
I picked up P.J. O'Rork's Don't Vote..." and skipped to the part at the end where he makes predictions. The book is almost entrely a satire of politicis, but the grist of his belief is that anyone but government, and politicians can do almost anything better. I guess that means Wall-Street Investment Bankers. The problem with this pat and partisan view is that people forget that the government gets vilified because corruption is more easily exposed by public hearings and the disclosures they produce. If the reality is that there is a revolving door where the same elites move seamlessly between business, academe, and government, that their conflict of interests do not get disclosed UNLESS they have public scrutany. In business, such double dealings are not only kept secret, they are encouraged.
So if centrist politics won't fix this, what alternatives do we have? The Tea Partys?
We have been down this road before, and notwithstanding Robert Reich's dire scenario for the 2020 election in which a reactionary party wins the Presidency from discredited Democrat and Republican candidates, the Tea Partys don't have more ideas than anger and are easily disposed of in any long-term political process. The reaction against politics reveals an intellectual vacuum in the American scene in which no one has come forward with a vision of what the mistakes were and how to fix them. America's love-hate relationship with Big Business may have poisoned the well, much to the delight of international investors who may feast on the demise of American wealth.
My housemate who describes himself as an "anarco-libertarian" has been predicting "The Collapse" for as long as I've known him since 2003, has been having nightmares recently that reveal to him that the "real" end is neigh.
Nothing could be worse than a repeat of 1931-1939, which is why the American tendancy to think that our experience is unique and ignore history is so wrong. The worst that can happen is America loses all its wealth, which it may well deserve, and even that isn't the end of the world.