A “hits-the-nail-on-the-head” opinion piece. American news media long ago transformed serious journalism into melodrama. Abandoning their fourth estate responsibilities, they concentrated on beefing up the bottom line—more crassly known as profits. Successful melodrama has to have a main plot, protagonists, antagonists, and be sufficiently simplistic to involve the audience (American public in this case) emotionally in the drama. Depending on one's politics, protagonists and antagonists can be anybody now on stage auditioning for the lead. As for why we're in this mess, and what should be done to rectify it--why the Hell spoil a good plot with analysis and facts?

This is a very sarcastic opinion piece that ties together the successful push for deregulation of financial markets that has occurred over the last 20 years, rampant excesses in the mortgage market and the current bizarre economic mess -- then asks where the press was as this long term story was unfolding. Why, covering lipstick on pigs and the like. The author has a point, of course, but it seems to me that he holds the press to a much higher standard than that to which we, the reading public, hold ourselves.

He has a point. Most of the coverage I've seen has either taken the Gramm approach and blamed greedy consumers for over-borrowing. Or they've scolded the titans of Wall Street for equally damaging greed. Few have laid any blame on the push to deregulate the financial sector, or the lack of oversight by those agencies that still exist to do so. While there's certainly enough blame to go around, we can't control greed. We can regulate it. So that certainly seems like a more useful focus.

Scarcely-veiled sarcasm reveals that our current economic crisis can be traced to former Republican senator (and McCain advisor) Phil Gramm, who is the author of the Commodity Future Modernization Act (2000) and co-author of the Financial Modernization Act (Gramm, Leach, Bliley, 1999), two deregulation measures that led to the meltdown (and both signed by former President Bill Clinton). A short but superbly acerbic look at modern finance and the pitfalls the MSM has avoided exploring until far too late.