America the Oligarchy, continued

I haven’t quite finished Robert Reich’s new book, The System –– Who Rigged It and How We Fix It. The evidence for his case is overwhelming: The system is rigged for the rich and powerful, and this cuts across party lines. The man who epitomizes the situation, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, is a Democrat who talks a good liberal game, which hasn’t kept him from being a prime operative in promoting the interests of the rich at the expense of the beleaguered middle class and the oppressed poor. Summing up the problem, Reich quotes Louis Brandeis: “We can have a democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Today, I’ll finish the book and tomorrow say something about the hard problem: how to fix it.