Mark Wilson
If the debt-ceiling debacle did one good thing, it confirmed for all of us, in no uncertain terms, that our government is broken. We’ve spent many, many years yukking it up with jokes about corrupt politicians, but a stark reality should be settling over the country like a San Francisco fog at dinnertime. The debt-ceiling crisis is only the latest in a series of vignettes that illustrate not only the corruption inherent in our ailing republic, but also our representatives’ unbridled apathy toward that corruption.
Consider: after the savings and loan scandals of the 1980s, high-profile bankers went to prison. After Enron, corporate executives went to prison and Arthur Andersen ceased to exist. To date, no executives of the investment companies responsible for the 2008 financial crisis have been prosecuted. The executives at Goldman Sachs and other investment firms were on the phone with the Federal Reserve and members of Congress, holding a gun to the nation’s economy and insisting that anything less than lax regulations and enforcement would result in financial meltdown (“Look what you made me do!”).