Rachel Maddow Takes Conservatives to Task Over Deregulation

Posted by Daniel De Groot, Open Left at 7:50 AM on March 20, 2009.

18 March:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN, ® ARIZONA:  I don't think, frankly, someone who wants to increase the burden of government regulation and higher taxes has any real understanding of economics.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW:  Take it from him.  Heaven forbid, there would be rules to rein in what happens on Wall Street, right?  I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

The conservative argument against regulation was always that deregulation would create a lot of wealth.  Deregulating Wall Street would allow for all of this great wealth creation that we have experienced as a country.  The problem, as we have found out, is that "A," it allows for all sort of immense criminality, say, Bernie Madoff, say; "B," it puts the country hugely at risk, say, AIG, Citigroup the whole country; and, "C," economically, it really only benefits the people at the top.

While all of those executives walk away with these giant bonuses year after year after year, take a look at what normal families walked away with during the Wall Street fueled deregulation so-called boom.  This is median household income.  In the 1970s, it rose 4.5 percent.  In the 1980s, it rose 6.5 percent.  In the 1990s, it rose 8.3 percent.  In the 2000s-down 0.6 percent.

Deregulation benefits the people at the top.  They get really, really, really rich doing stuff that might otherwise be illegal if there were regulations in place to stop them.  We get all the national risk associated with what they were doing, and they get all the cash.  No one else actually benefits from it except for them.  It doesn't trickle down.  No one pays ultimately except the rest of us.

I still find it a surreal experience to hear a real live prime time television host who reads like any one of dozens of all our favourite liberal bloggers.   I know this is kind of a silly fan-boy post, but I don't want to let this window slide by.  

It it a rare event in US media history that there is a prominent liberal voice, able to calmly lay out the ideological case not just for specific liberal policies, but for broad meta-policy approaches.  This isn't just a case for some specific regulation like Glass/Steagal or food manufacturing inspection, but for the broad rubric of regulation generally.

For those on the right that have actually believed the media was liberal, Maddow shows what an actual liberal media would look like.  It's not just the content of her show, but the unhurried style, the politeness, substantive questions and the pauses between guests to add context with relevant facts and statistics.  If liberals ran the media, it wouldn't look like the clusterfuck out there today.  

I hope it lasts, but as Donahue (and Maher) learned, having good ratings is no insurance against being cancelled.  So in the event it doesn't, and the liberal moment fades, let's at least appreciate it.  

(moment quoted is part of this clip)

Tagged as: mccain, msnbc, rachel maddow, deregulation