Simon Johnson & James Kwak on breaking up the U.S. oligarchy

I'm including only this semi-optimistic excerpted quote from 13 Bankers co-author, BaselineScenario.com co-creator, and MIT business professor Simon Johnson, in order to give some much needed historical perspective on the crisis we find ourselves in today.

Bill Moyers Journal

Interview with Simon Johnson and James Kwak

April 23, 2010 | PBS

[...]

Bill Moyers: But we can't compete with those lobbying dollars. We can't compete with this interlocking oligarchy that you say. That's a fact.

Simon Johnson: Bill, in 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt took on the industrial trusts, nobody knew what he was doing. Nobody thought he could win. The Senate was called the Millionaires Club for a reason. And it wasn't even any theory. The antitrust theory, everything we know and believe about monopoly, why monopoly is bad for society, didn't really exist, certainly not in the mainstream consensus, when Roosevelt decided to take on J.P. Morgan, okay?

Ten years later, the mainstream consensus has shifted completely. People understood from the debate and from the struggle, from the fact- from the way the trusts fought back and the way they spent their money, they began to understand this was profoundly dangerous, politically and socially. 1912, everyone agreed that breaking up Standard Oil was a good idea. Had to be done. They broke into 35 companies, most of them did well. The shareholders actually made money. It's a very American resolution, Bill. And it's very clear that we've had this confrontation before in American history: Andrew Jackson against the Second Bank of the United States in the 1830s, Jackson won, barely; Theodore Roosevelt, the beginning of the 20th Century; FDR in the 1930s.

The American democracy was not given to us on a platter. It is not ours for all time, irrespective of our efforts. Either people organize and they find political leadership to take this on, or we are going to be in big trouble, okay?