Will Hutton of The Guardian writes about the diverging directions of the American and European economies, and he attributes it to our broken campaign finance system:
Both at federal and state level ever higher campaign donations are correlated with ever fewer actions against monopoly, price fixing and bad corporate behaviour.
The results should be familiar to all Americans:
Mobile phone bills in the US are on average $100 a month, twice that of France and Germany, with the same story in broadband. Profits per passenger airline mile in the US are twice those in Europe. US healthcare is impossibly expensive, with drug companies fixing prices twice as high or even higher than those in Europe; health spending is 18% of GDP.
Unfettered capitalism will do that. We need more fetters.