Even the wool over our eyes is cotton-polyester...

I dole out what I feel is a fair amount of crow around here at Average America for being in the dark about what's going on around, and often to them. As much as the AIG bonuses are a distraction from the real problems at hand, they are at least giving the American public some kind of reasonable direction in which to focus their anxiety and displeasure with the current situation.

But the fact that the AIG bonuses got the sheer volume of press coverage that they did, at the expense of information on more important issues suggests that America wants a scapegoat more than it wants a complex solution.

But in this video from Bill Moyers Journal, Willaim K. Black, former senior regulator during the S&L crisis in the 80's, suggests that the public might have quite a bit of help remaining in the dark. From the transcript:

Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.

And later on in the interview, he makes one of the smartest analogies I've heard anybody make in a while:

The Pecora investigation. The Great Depression, we said, "Hey, we have to learn the facts. What caused this disaster, so that we can take steps, like pass the Glass-Steagall law, that will prevent future disasters?" Where's our investigation?

What would happen if after a plane crashes, we said, "Oh, we don't want to look in the past. We want to be forward looking. Many people might have been, you know, we don't want to pass blame. No. We have a nonpartisan, skilled inquiry. We spend lots of money on, get really bright people. And we find out, to the best of our ability, what caused every single major plane crash in America. And because of that, aviation has an extraordinarily good safety record. We ought to follow the same policies in the financial sphere. We have to find out what caused the disasters, or we will keep reliving them. And here, we've got a double tragedy. It isn't just that we are failing to learn from the mistakes of the past. We're failing to learn from the successes of the past.

There's more great quotes from the interview, so many that I'll just stop here and tell you to go watch the video.

A tip of the hat to Washington's Blog for the link.