Bill Moyer's Journal
Before we begin, get a wagonload of this. You know the election year farm bill that's been so much in the news this week? The one that gives billions of dollars to very wealthy farmers and landowners passing themselves off as farmers? Well, it turns out that buried deep inside its nearly 700 pages is a hidden, additional $16 billion of taxpayer dough that is, as the WASHINGTON POST reported Wednesday, "lucrative beyond expectations."
True, the bill contains more money for the hungry, but this windfall proves two things: one, before you can help the poor in this country, you have to buy off the rich, and second, so many vested interests have a stake in our government's dysfunction, they don't want to fix it. Just another reason for the candidates - and all of us - to read a new book by one of America's top students of government - Paul Light.
He calls it "a government ill executed" - a phrase from founding father Alexander Hamilton, who warned his fellow architects of our Constitution that "a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government."
Just look at the past six months, says Paul Light. We've seen the federal government at its worst, thoroughly unable to guarantee the faithful execution of all the laws or look out for your interests as citizens.
Where were the watchdogs who should have barked when lenders and borrowers went crazy and sub-prime mortgages began to melt down?
Where were the inspectors before those risky mining practices in Utah led to the deaths of nine men? If you were sitting on one of those grounded airplanes this spring, it's because the FAA had been treating the airlines - not the public - as their customers. When this FAA inspector blew the whistle on his agency - for allowing Southwest Airlines to fly for months without mandatory safety checks, putting lives at stake - his own management threatened him.
To Listen to the Episode on Government Malfeasance and Heroic Whistleblowers
No comments:
Post a Comment