This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers talked with economist Dean Baker and columnist Bob Herbert about the economy and the political conditions that have contributed to its troubles. Bob Herbert said: “The class war is over, and we lost... Over the past 30 years or so, Americans’ wages have remained relatively flat. But women went into the workplace, wives and mothers started working. People started putting things on their credit cards. There was a stock market bubble there for a while. We had a housing bubble. People refinanced and stuff. Now, they’re coming up against a wall. They’re not finding a way now to get some extra money to power the consumer economy.” Dean Baker suggested that public officials deliberately failed to protect ordinary Americans: “All the people who should have been looking out the last six, seven, eight years are all going ‘oh, well, who could have known? Who could have known?’ And they’ll put Alan Greenspan here on a pedestal, because he’s [saying that] he had no idea this was going on. You had to try not to know this was going on. Certainly, someone like Alan Greenspan, our reserve board chair, had all the data I have times a thousand. He absolutely knew what was going on. And he was doing his best to look the other way because you had a lot of big interests who were making a lot of money.” Faced with these dire diagnoses, Bill Moyers asked: “No matter who wins this election, the next administration will in ...
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This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers talked with economist Dean Baker and columnist Bob Herbert about the economy and the political conditions that have contributed to its troubles. Bob Herbert said: “The class war is over, and we lost... Over the past 30 years or so, Americans’ wages have remained relatively flat. But women went into the workplace, wives and mothers started working. People started putting things on their credit cards. There was a stock market bubble there for a while. We had a housing bubble. People refinanced and stuff. Now, they’re coming up against a wall. They’re not finding a way now to get some extra money to power the consumer economy.” Dean Baker suggested that public officials deliberately failed to protect ordinary Americans: “All the people who should have been looking out the last six, seven, eight years are all going ‘oh, well, who could have known? Who could have known?’ And they’ll put Alan Greenspan here on a pedestal, because he’s [saying that] he had no idea this was going on. You had to try not to know this was going on. Certainly, someone like Alan Greenspan, our reserve board chair, had all the data I have times a thousand. He absolutely knew what was going on. And he was doing his best to look the other way because you had a lot of big interests who were making a lot of money.” Faced with these dire diagnoses, Bill Moyers asked: “No matter who wins this election, the next administration will in ...