David Simon via Bill Moyers

I can’t get past just how juvenile the thought is that if you just let the markets be the markets, they’ll solve everything.  And if profit is your only metric, man, what are you building?  David Simon

This is the first part of an interview with David Simon.   He is a “journalist and creator of the TV series The Wire and Treme…”   Mr. Simon talks about America as a “Horror Show”.   (video below the fold)

What caught my attention is that this is the first time I have heard someone in the public sphere use the word “selfish” instead of the more benign word “greed”.

You know when we started out space program, which was, you know, an unqualified success in the end, the rockets kept blowing up on the launching pad. Somehow we figured out a way to keep launching rockets and do it right. And that’s a very different America from the tonality of this one, which is selfish, which is I have my health care still and I don’t want to pay for anybody else to get back in the boat.

Some excerpts:

The Supreme Court has walked away from any sort of responsibility to maintain democracy at that level. That’s the aspect of government that’s broken.

And it doesn’t matter whether it’s Obama or Clinton or Bush or anybody at this point. If this is the way we’re going to do business, we’re not going to do business. You know, they’ve paid for it to be inert. And it is inert. And ultimately that aspect of capitalism hasn’t been dealt with in any way.

We’ve changed and we’ve become contemptuous of the idea that we are all in this together. This is about sharing and about, you know, when you say sharing there’s a percentage of the population (and it’s the moneyed percent of our population), that hears socialism or communism or any of the other -isms they want to put on it. But ultimately we are all part of the same society. And it’s either going to be a mediocre society that, you know, abuses people or it’s not.

If how much money you have is the defining characteristic of citizenship or of value or of relevance, of human relevance, and if that’s all that we’re going to measure (and apparently, since 1980 this all we’re going to measure), you’re going to get a society to live in that is structured on that metric. And it’s going to be a brutal one.