FRANK RICH on with Tavis Smiley tonight on your local PBS

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I'd call that MUST SEE TV.

[Bozita]

1. And THIS piece in New York Magazine by Frank Rich is why it's MUST SEE TV

Obama’s Original Sin
The president’s failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second.
By Frank Rich
Published Jul 3, 2011


After 9/11, Rudy Giuliani went on Saturday Night Live to give New Yorkers permission to laugh again. But Mayor Bloomberg never did tell us when we could resume conspicuous consumption after the crash of 2008. And so, as we stumble through the second year of the official “recovery,” it’s been an improvisational return to high-end carousing in Manhattan.

A case in point was the late-May celebration of the centennial rededication of the New York Public Library. Surely no civic institution could be a more unimpeachable beard for a blowout. The dress code—no black tie—was egalitarian. The Abyssinian Baptist Church Gospel Choir, the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, and that cute chorus from P.S. 22 in Staten Island—Glee diversity on steroids—were in the house along with some 900 invited guests, marquee names included (Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen). Bloomberg delivered a pre-dinner benediction from an altarlike perch on the main reading room’s balcony. “Free and open access to information may be the single most important component of any democratic society,” he said.

But it was impossible to banish toxic trace memories of the financial meltdown. Some two weeks earlier, the mayor had restricted the “free and open access” he now extolled. His fiscal 2012 budget called for slashing $40 million from the library system, a cut that would have mandated four-day weeks and the shutdown of a dozen branches.

There was also the awkward matter of the gala’s “corporate chair,” Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America. In the pageantry preceding Bloomberg’s remarks, the slightly flushed Moynihan, looking like a nervous ring bearer in a stately wedding ceremony, was among those singled out by the announcer while marching down the reading room’s long center aisle in a processional of library trustees. No doubt he earned this honor by ponying up to give more New Yorkers more books. But free and open access to the unexpurgated books of his own bank—and of its gutted acquisitions, Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial—would be a far more valuable gift to our democratic society. Just a week before the library fête, the Huffington Post reported that B of A was stonewalling the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s investigation into fresh charges of defrauding taxpayers. Down in Naples, Florida, one Bank of America victim, Warren Nyerges, a 45-year-old retired cop, was getting ready to take the law into his own hands. Through a bureaucratic blunder—or worse—the bank had hounded his family for over a month, trying to foreclose on his house even though it was entirely debt-free. Unable to recover the legal expenses inflicted by this harassment, Nyerges staged a ruckus by hiring a lawyer who “foreclosed” on the bank’s local branch instead.

more, lots more ... and well worth the trip:
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/obama-economy/presidents-failure/