Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

Bucco, I know you dislike and distrust President Obama. That is your right. But the problem we have with a deteriorating government goes a lot deeper than one man.

The whole emergence of wildly risky financial decisions and products made by the nation's banks dates back to the repeal of Glass-Steagall done by a Republican Congress, but not vetoed by Democratic President Bill Clinton. Then the Democrats got control of Congress and added to the open greed of Wall Street and the big banks now permissible with the repeal of the simple but strong prohibitions on risk-taking provided by Glass-Steagall by enacting even further loosening of bank regulations. People like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd presided over even more loosening of the financial regulatory environment--an almost criminal loosening. But this time all was found agreeable by Republican President George Bush and his key financial appointees.

Barack Obama took office when the resulting financial crisis was at it's peak. Many like yourself argue with the steps he and his new administration took--the auto bailout, the stimulus, etc. In my opinion those steps weren't well done, far from it. But I'll also say that the new President had few choices in addressing a frozen-in-place banking system and an economy spiraling out of control.

Since then not a whole helluva lot of truly positive things have been accomplished, first by a Democratically-controlled Congress and since 2010 a "split" Congress, neither of which benefitted with any particular leadership from the White House. Oh, a growing ideological bitterness contributed to the almost complete absence of Congressional governance, but that also seems to support the argument that is the basis for my original post.

Our government is broken. Neither political party seems capable of leading the country out of the morass we face on so many fronts--fiscal, economic, foreign affairs, social issues, energy, the environment. The Democrats didn't make any improvements when they had control. Any contributions by the now Republican-controlled House are hard to find. And the circular firing squad that seems to describe the GOP nominating process doesn't provide much confidence that any real leadership will emerge from that process. If things continue as they are, it's unlikely that the Republican candidate can actually displace President Obama. And there's a growing chance that the Democrats will actually regain control of both the House and Senate. As a backdrop, fully 20% of the members of the House and Senate are quitting, giving up on the possibility that any real governance is possible, giving up and getting on with their lives.

Bucco, our government is broken. Broken badly. None of those either in elected office or running for election seem to provide any confidence that there will be a change. All Dodd-Frank and ObamaCare do is to provide proof that the governance of this country is bought and paid for by special interests, special interests with very narrow, personal, greedy and short-term objectives. And short of simply throwing everyone out of office and tying to start over, there 's no apparent solution.

And frankly, even that may not work.