Democracy Run Amok

While the Middle East continues to struggle to topple dictatorships and establish the roots of democracy (TNR Article), at home we continue to push further and further away from it. Since the 70s, there has been ample evidence that Republicans are not that fond of democracy -- from Watergate to Iran-Contra to the Florida 2000 debacle to the diverse efforts by the Bush Administration to establish a Presidency above national and international accountability or law. Citizens v. United States of America (an ironic title if there ever has been one) further undermined democracy and the voice of the people, by allowing the much more heavily subsidized voices of corporation to have an even larger (unlimited) role in elections. Now we learn that the Republicans who spent an unprecedented amount of money to take back the House are not only working to overturn Obama's healthcare reform (which is still unpopular), but also the watered down Wall Street reforms that he passed with popular support: Politico. However, since Wall Street Reform remains popular with a public still suffering under its excesses borne of the deregulation of the past 30 plus years, Republicans decided their efforts to reform the Dodd-Frank should be a little less publicized -- or, wait, not publicized at all. The GOP, claiming that new regulations on derivatives, credit rating agencies and private equity firms are undermining economic growth by "raising the cost of doing business in America but also send jobs overseas." Besides the fact that these are relatively absurd claims, is the fact that those reforms, as meager as they are, are a direct response to the root of the financial crisis that emanated from derivatives gone wild, credit agencies that profoundly overrated what were essentially worse than junk bonds and private equity firms that callously continued to sell CDOs, while openly acknowledging they were garbage. Again, the voices of the people are silenced and corporate interests brought to the fore of policy. And yet again we see a Washington DC that seems completely oblivious to the sources of our continuing financial crisis and ways to solve them.