IMHO, all of them. But that wouldn’t be very practical.
For all practical purposes, there is only one political party in the United States and it has no interest in representing the people.
Our democracy has all but been stolen from us. Our elected representatives work for the interests of corporations that fund their campaigns and not for the citizens that elected them to office.
We cannot have a democracy by the people and for the people with a mainstream press that spews infotainment in lieu of investigative reporting, a Washington lobbying structure that is weighted thoroughly on the side of the corporatocracy, and election campaign financing that converts perfectly good candidates into whores of the oligarchy.
Add to this an inefficient educational system that no longer teaches critical thinking, guaranteeing somnolent constituencies unequipped to derive fact from fallacy.
Change those things and we may get our democracy back.
As to the present economic crisis:
It was quite evident to many people five years ago by the way banks and the daisy chain of the ancillary service industry were trading, insuring, and inflating bad paper, that there was a collapse coming. The Fed was finding newer and more creative ways to increase the money supply by loosening credit in an environment that was already bankrupt.
Banking regulations put in place 70 years ago to prevent the conditions that led directly to the depression of the 1930s had been removed, e.g., repeal of Glass-Stegall, the removal of capitalization rules, etc. Congressional oversight committees had been neutered. The SEC were essentially inactive except for a few high profile actions like the Martha Stewart case that had no connection to the systemic corruption that was taking place directly under their noses.
The common household investor, through IRAs, heavy dumps into mutual funds, and through enormous corporate employee retirement plans, had transferred 80% of the capital on Wall Street into the hands of a few managers presenting the possibility for manipulation. The individual investor had given his nest egg over to institutional trading while burying himself into household debt. We were conducting two wars that were draining our treasury while we were barely able to pay the interest on our national debt, much less ever paying down the principal, making future payments dependent upon future taxation and the desperate sale of US Treasury bonds to foreign governments with opposing ideologies such as China.
Obfuscation abounded. The media was one big smiley face through it all and the average mensch continued to be taken—in droves to the slaughter. The government had stopped reporting critical data on the money supply which skewed their reports. Respected institutions like Moody’s had changed their rating criteria for reporting the quality of stocks to make the bad look better and suck in more suckers, but the indicators were there and economists such as Paul Krugman were not only ignored, they were vilified in the media.
So, it was no surprise that things really began to fall apart in the summer of ‘08. It was also no surprise when the Federal Reserve came begging to congress for a bailout to the tune of 7 trillion dollars the following September. It was a surprise, however, when the Bush administration—supposedly good Republican fiscal conservatives all—didn’t veto the Bailout Bill because it was such a bad idea. Even more surprising was that the architects of this debacle were not immediately replaced, but given the task—and free access to America’s treasury—of being the architects of the solution. But, if you look at who stands to profit from the fallout and re-set, it becomes glaringly apparent why they let it go through.
So the stage was set for disaster. Whoever took the presidency after this last set of crazies was going to inherit an economic debacle not seen since 1929.
Obama has moved top former Wall Street lobbyists and Wall Street investment Bank executives from the institutions that perpetrated the present economic fiasco, including the former Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of NYC into key policy and executive federal government positions. The new Treasury Secretary is the former head of Goldman Sachs, as was his predecessor. A few weeks ago, Obama decided to let Ben Bernanke continue as head of the Federal Reserve.
The bailouts continue as they did under Bush, the wars continue as they did under Bush, the no-bid contracts that have been draining the war chest continue as they did under Bush. Renditions, although there are motions to have them stopped, have not been stopped. Obama has penned support for the unwarranted surveillance of American citizens under FISA and supports the continuation of the Patriot Act—just like Bush.
