Bill Moyers: Wall Street And Financial Reform

Highlighted and recommended by Jesse : Bill Moyers Journal, Part 2 is here.

Here's the transcript of the video: here

• The ancient Romans had a proverb: "Money is like sea water. The more you drink, the thirstier you become." That adage finds particular meaning today on Wall Street, which began this New Year riding a tidal wave of bonuses in a surging ocean of greed.
  
  Thanks to taxpayers like you who generously bailed banking from the financial shipwreck it created for itself and for us, by the end of 2009 the industry's compensation pool reached nearly $200 billion. And despite windfall profits, the banks will claim almost $80 billion in tax deductions. And nearly $20 billion of those deductions will go to just three institutions — Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs.
  
  Ah, yes — Goldman Sachs, that paragon of profit and probity — which bet big on the housing bubble and when it popped — presto! — converted itself from an investment firm into a bank so it could get your bailout money. Now consider this: in 2008, Goldman Sachs paid an effective tax rate of just one percent. I'm not making that up — one percent! — while their CEO Lloyd Blankfein pulled down over $40 million. That's God's work, if you can get it. And, believe me, Wall Street bankers know how to get it.
  
  What's their secret? How do the bankers pick our pockets so thoroughly with barely a pang of guilt or punishment? You will find some answers in this current edition of "Mother Jones" magazine, one of the best sources of investigative journalism around today. Most of this issue is devoted to what the editors call "Wall Street's accountability deficit."
  
  In it, the Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz writes of the "moral bankruptcy" by which bankers knowingly trashed our economy and tore up the social contract.
  
  http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01082010/transcript1.html
  
• DAVID CORN: I mean, my favorite one that I wrote about, and I don't know him personally. He could be a great guy. Never even met him. I tried to interview him, but he wouldn't consent. Mark Patterson. He's the chief of staff for Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Department Secretary. He was a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. What did he do as a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs? He lobbied against a bill in the Senate to restrain it was a very modest bill, to restrain CEO compensation.
  
  Basically, gave shareholders the right to say, "We think you're paying them too much." It wasn't even mandatory. It wouldn't even cut back pay. He you know, Goldman Sachs would have none of that. He lobbied against that bill. Who authored that bill? Barack Obama, when he was a Senator. So, the guy who fought Barack Obama on CEO pay, an issue that Barack Obama says he cares about. And I believe he does. Is now running the Treasury Department for Tim Geithner. I mean, this really doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
  
  Yeah. Makes no sense to me either. In fact, the only mind that can make sense of such dichotomy in purpose and intent is a schizophrenic mind.

A snippet of the show on youtube: