![]() ![]() ![]() We’re looking at déjà vu all over again (to quote Yogi Berra) - the failure on this reconciliation bill to really get things right, to really deliver what people want. But, I mean, look at what’s going on in the United States right now. I’ll take a brief whack at first, and then David can follow and expand. It’s about explaining how we arrived at this moment right now. So, this is not just a historical look back. I would say that the meltdown we’re talking about is something that is still going on today. That is a meltdown simmering underneath basically everything in politics since the financial collapse. But what this series actually looks at is a meltdown of people’s faith in the government to do anything other than enrich the rich and empower the powerful. ![]() The term “meltdown” as it relates to the financial crisis has been used to describe the crisis itself. When we use the term “meltdown,” that’s what we’re actually talking about. The only thing I would add to that: I just want to underscore that there has been a lot of reporting on what happened before the financial crash and what happened in the financial crash, but there has not been as much attention paid to the political ramifications and the ramifications for democracy that the financial crisis really created - and the Democratic response, or lack thereof to it, created. With that thesis in mind, I thought, “Well, let’s take this on.” So, we put together a team, this wonderful group from Transmitter Media, and we were off and running. And the thesis was so simple and pure: The idea that the failure to properly take care of the problems after the financial crash is really what gave us Donald Trump. So, when David mentioned this to me, I thought, “Wow, that’s great because this is the one thing that nobody’s done.” People have done a lot about the run-up to the financial crisis, but not very much at all about what happened the day after. Some of the nonfiction docs that we were doing were narrative based but also dug deep on themes that were very human. But he had an idea about this podcast, and we were just getting into the podcast territory and really liked the form because it seemed very much a canvas. We’d come close to doing various things, and David had been involved on and off with some things that we had done. Jacobin’s Luke Savage sat down with investigative journalist David Sirota and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney to discuss their podcast, the meltdown of 2008–9, and the various ways history seems to be repeating itself amid the ongoing reconciliation fight.ĭavid and I have known each other for some years and have always wanted to do a project together. The recently premiered podcast series Meltdown mounts a compelling case that the crisis and the institutional response to it from Democrats still haunt politics today and are in many ways the proverbial skeleton key to understanding the current moment. Bringing about millions of foreclosures and a trail of human misery in its wake, the crisis touched virtually anything and everything that came after it, but, alongside the “war on terror,” has fast been relegated to the back burner of the United States’ cultural memory. For an event so utterly cataclysmic, the meltdown of 2008–9 is rarely remembered as the formative political and cultural moment it so clearly was, if indeed it is remembered at all. ![]()
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