Book: Twilight of the Elites

Chris Hayes' 2012 book on the destruction of public faith in institutions that we used to trust unreservedly: government, Wall Street, baseball, the Catholic Church, science, the media...

Quote :

The vice president's office, to which [New York Times journalist Judith Miller] had unrivaled access, spoon-fed Miller exactly the information they wanted her to have, no matter how dodgy or poorly sourced. Then in a particularly masterful stroke, Cheney would go on TV to cite "the New York Times" to confirm exactly the information that he himself had planted there.

So far, nothing in the book has been anything more than blindingly obvious, but it's a nice confirmation of my bias.

It was written during the Obama Administration so his worst examples seem kind of quaint today.

Chris Hayes' book recounts the causes and effects of the global housing meltdown in 2008-9, and makes me wonder again whether it would've been better for everyone involved -- in the long run, not the short run -- if the fed had simply let the insolvent lenders and foolhardy banks collapse en masse.

We would've seen a 1929-like depression.

We would've seen Obama's presidency shackled with Bush's "irrational exuberance."

We would've seen millions of homeowners foreclosed upon, though possibly not more than already were (>10 million).

But more importantly, we would've broken the "too big to fail" mentality among banks and Wall Street brokers, and created a culture of fiscal self-policing instead of reinforcing the still-universal moral hazard, and we would have kept the government from becoming the lender of last resort among CEOs who buy and sell politicians like candy.

We also might have / should have seen some federal regulators do hard time for dereliction of duty.

But Obama could've responded like Roosevelt and instituted sweeping reforms and infrastructure projects, he could've squashed the Republican party for a generation, he could've broken up the big banks and lenders and put them under civilian control. It would've given him a blank check to remake the country under populist models.

Chris Hayes wrote:

Since World War II, we've seen two distinct eras of equality in which a whole host of deeply embedded, overwhelmingly powerful systems of inequality were dramatically weakened, and in some cases all but destroyed.  The first era of equality, from the end of the Second World War to the early 1970s, represented a period of historically unprecedented growth, mass affluence, and middle-class expansion that has not been duplicated since.  Income inequality markedly declined, even as the economy posted a nearly unmatched level of annual GDP growth.  Between 1947 and 1979 real family income grew for everyone but it grew the most for the poorest 20 percent of the population.

Compare that to the period from 1979 to 2009, when real family income declined for those in the lowest income quintile.  The top 10 percent captured all of the income gains, while incomes for the bottom 90 percent declined.

And what happened in 1979? The Reagan Revolution.