Driving the kids home from kung fu, I heard this on the car radio.
The financial industry poured $500 million into lobbying lawmakers on the new financial reform bill. And it was money well spent.
Mike Konczal is being ironic, of course. After counting the ways financial lobbyists have weakened reform legislation, Konczal concludes, “This legislation doesn’t do the very thing it was supposed to: prevent another financial meltdown that takes us down with it.”
Sarcasm aside, I can think of so many ways that kind of money could have been better spent. Aren’t there whole state governments that are in the red? Or school systems that need books and modern upgrades and teachers and libraries? Or families and veterans made homeless by the economy and the war?
Yeah, yeah. Same old shit. I probably blogged a similar sentiment last year when Hollywood spent a gazillion dollars to make a quasi-liberal/quasi-racist environmentalist statement. In 3D!
But when I read or hear about things like this I wonder, “And socialism is a flawed system, cuz…?”