The reason has long seemed fairly obvious to me: The government is run by and for corporations. Once, politics may have mattered. Now it seems like a magician’s trick, a diversion from what really matters. Which is economics. So when, for example, I hear Fox News described as “conservative” and MSNBC as “liberal,” I think the speaker is naïve — from where I sit, American media’s not political, it’s corporate. Like pretty much everything else.

 

The most astonishing thing about what I think of as corporate feudalism is that no one steps up to acknowledge it. And so almost all of the national  conversation about our troubles misses the point. With the exception of Bill Moyers, you will never hear on a major American network or read in a major American print publication anything that suggests our problems are structural.

 

The real story — for me, the only story — is money. And I don’t mean, terrible as it is, the income inequality that has a handful of people making trillions. The problem’s much bigger: the way the rich and their business interests control our government. Candidates spent about $4 billion getting elected in the 2010 midterms, and not much of that came from your $25 checks. And now that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations — like private citizens — can contribute to political candidates, corporate gifts to politicians will make 2010 look like a junior high school student council election.

 

And it will be this way until we have public financing of elections.

 

Until then, the game’s over. Corporate money won. You and I are ruled by politicians who are owned by people, companies and interests that don’t even have to identify themselves by name.

 

Nowhere is that more obvious than on Wall Street, where no one above the level of a local banker is in any danger of being prosecuted for what looks like the biggest financial fraud in the history of the planet. This is not a secret. The story has dribbled out in the business section over the last few years. And my wife and I — like you, perhaps — have read it. Worried for our country? Feeling gloomy? Impotent? Us too.

 

And yet, because Charles Ferguson only makes terrific documentaries, we roused ourselves from “Law & Order” reruns last week to see his new film, “Inside Job.”

 

Now we’re even more distressed. But it’s open-eyed distress, the kind you feel when you watch Jon Stewart and think, "Wow, this situation really sucks," and at the same time you’re glad to learn that you’re not the only one who thinks so.

 

Charles Ferguson began his career as a policy wonk and government adviser, then veered into the digital world with a website development tool called FrontPage, which he sold to Microsoft in 1996 for $133 million. A decade later, when he saw that no one was doing a film about the American occupation of Iraq, he plunged in. “No End in Sight” turned out to be such a stunning portrait of ineptitude, corruption and blind allegiance to ideology that it was nominated for an Academy Award. [To buy the DVD from Amazon, click here. For the on-demand video rental, click here.] 

 

The trailer for that film is online. So are the reviews. Given that, it is astounding that Wall Streeters, government officials and academics who were unlikely to come off well agreed to be interviewed on camera for “Inside Job.” Here’s the list of the arrogant gents who thought, I guess, that Ferguson would be as toothless as the rest of the media: Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia University Business School and formerly chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers; Martin Feldstein, who headed Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers and is now a Professor at Harvard; and Frederic Mishkin, who moved on from the Federal Reserve board to Columbia. Idiots, all. And seriously corrupt people, no matter how exalted their titles. (What about Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner? They, at least, were smart enough to blow Ferguson off.)

 

How good is this movie? Watch the trailer:

 

 

I encourage you to see “Inside Job” as soon as you can. Or you can get pretty much the same point-of-view — the real estate bubble as a giant Ponzi scheme — in a new book by Matt Taibbi, who combines the virtuosity of Hunter Thompson with dogged reporting skills. (It was Taibbi who compared Goldman Sachs to “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”) Now he’s produced “Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America.” [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.] 

 

And now I think, rather than put some veneer on his work, I should just step back and quote Taibbi at length:

 

…Almost everyone who touched that mountain turned out to be a crook of some kind. The mortgage brokers systematically falsified information on loan applications in order to secure bigger loans and hawked explosive option-ARM mortgages to people who either didn’t understand them or, worse, did understand them and simply never intended to pay. The loan originators cranked out massive volumes of loans with plainly doctored applications, not giving a shit about whether or not the borrowers could pay, in a desperate search for short-term rebates and fees. The securitizers used harebrained math to turn crap mortgages into AAA-rated investments; the ratings agencies slgned off on that harebrained math and handed out those AAA ratings in order to keep the fees coming in and the bonuses for their executives high. But even the ratings agencies were blindsided by scammers who advertised and sold, openly, help in rigging FICO scores to make broke and busted borrowers look like good credit risks. The corrupt ratings agencies were undone by ratings corrupters!

 

Meanwhile, investment banks tried to stick pensioners and insurance companies with their toxic investments…. And at the tail end of all this frantic lying, cheating, and scamming on all sides, during which time no good jobs were created and nothing except a few now-empty houses (good for nothing except depressing future home prices) got built, the final result is that we all ended up picking up the tab, subsidizing all this crime and dishonesty and pessimism as a matter of national policy.

We paid for this instead of a generation of health insurance, or an alternative energy grid, or a brand-new system of roads and highways. With the $13-plus trillion we are estimated to ultimately spend on the bailouts, we could not only have bought and paid off every single subprime mortgage in the country (that would only have cost $1.4 trillion), we could have paid off every remaining mortgage of any kind in this country — and still have had enough money left over to buy a new house for every American who does not already have one.

 

But we didn’t do that, and we didn’t spend the money on anything else useful, either. Why? For a very good reason. Because we’re no good any more at building bridges and highways or coming up with brilliant innovations in energy or medicine. We’re shit now at finishing massive public works projects or launching brilliant fairy-tale public policy ventures like the moon landing.

What are we good at? Robbing what’s left. When it comes to that, we Americans have no peer.

 

The bright spot in all this? Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, who appears often in “Inside Job.”

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Christine Lagarde
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I have a wicked crush on her. Useless and inappropriate, but after you immerse yourself in this appalling story, you take your consolation where you can find it.