Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit

"Perhaps the sole upside to the 2008 crash was that it discredited the Establishment of both parties by exposing its decades-long collusion with a kleptocratic economic order. If the corporation that introduced the lightbulb was a sham ripping off its employees, shareholders, and consumers, not to mention America's taxpayers, you had to wonder who at the top was not. The moral abdication of would-be liberal reformers, who failed to police such powerful economic actors, only added to the national disgust with elites. It's that vacuum that created the opening for a master con man. Once in the White House, of course, Trump conducted the biggest spree of grand larceny ever carried out by the wealthiest sliver of the country in the name of 'tax reform.' Everyone knows he is doing it except those among his base who dismiss all unwanted news as 'fake news.' But it’s a measure of how much the country is broken that we just shrug with resignation when the wealthy Democratic Goldman Sachs alum Gary Cohn joins this administration to secure an obscene tax cut, then exits without apology to enjoy his further enrichment at the expense of the safety net for the country's most vulnerable citizens."

Frank Rich at New York writes that "[e]verything in the country is broken." (As part of a special issue on 2008.)