Home foreclosure, in fact, became a burgeoning industry unto itself, as ad hoc courts worked hand in hand with big banks to eject people from their homes. Financial institutions would be kept afloat with wads of federal government cash, while ordinary citizens caught in predatory mortgage schemes would be left to drown. Bringing some 2.5 million home foreclosures between 20, the crisis liquidated working- and middle-class bank accounts, destroyed lives, and spread a plague of misery and despair throughout the US body politic. In a sense, it’s quite remarkable that events both so recent and so cataclysmic need to be unburied at all. Because the failure of government then gave us the world we live in now. We need to unbury this moment, to reexamine it. Our government stopped working for its citizens during a moment of profound crisis. But the political disaster that came after. Not the bank failures or the stock market crash in 2008. the meltdown of 2009 is this generation’s pivotal moment. “This is why,” he explains at the end of the series’ first episode: That meltdown, it turns out, isn’t just the economic crisis itself but also the institutional response to it - a response Sirota asserts is deeply interwoven with both the Democratic collapse of 2016 and the continued rise of the extreme right. In refreshing contrast, the series’ case is both compellingly coherent and unabashedly populist in tone and inspiration - taking up the election of Donald Trump and the ongoing crisis of American democracy as its animating questions and forcefully arguing for the centrality of its eponymous meltdown to political events today. Narrated by Sirota, Meltdown’s raison d’être is more or less the inverse of the chin-stroking equivocation practiced by many of its subjects. These themes run strongly throughout Meltdown, a new podcast series from investigative journalist David Sirota and documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney about the 2008–9 financial crisis and its aftermath that debuted this week. But it has also proven mightily convenient for leading Democratic figures themselves, who had appropriately devised the perfect chin-stroking rationale for their own refusal to attack the crisis at its roots or put the interests of average people ahead of Goldman Sachs’s bottom line. “The buck still stops nowhere,” as attorney general Eric Holder put it in 2014: “Responsibility remains so diffuse, top executives so insulated, that any misconduct be considered more a symptom of the institution’s culture than the result of the willful actions of any single individual.” This explanation certainly pleased the country’s leading bankers. When it comes to the financial crisis of 2008–9, the story told by senior officials in the Barack Obama administration was quite literally that the corporate greed and malfeasance at the root of the collapse couldn’t be prosecuted because no one was actually responsible. In some cases, the error is benign in others, it’s simply convenient. In parsing these nuances, however, attempts to avoid reductionism can also become so narratively diffuse that they ignore the obvious and miss the forest for the trees. Complex events, after all, rarely if ever have a single cause, and in the case of a major national event like an economic collapse or an election, a wide range of factors and causes is invariably at play. The question of causation in politics is almost always fraught.
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