Can You Spell "Corruption?"
by
Urgelt
10/13/2007, 1:15 PM #
The Clintons have long sold themselves as "business-friendly" What, exactly, does that mean?
It means fiscal responsibility, certainly. Bill Clinton delivered that as no President had in more than a half-Century before him, and the markets surged. By contrast, the extreme deficit spending of the last 6 years under Bush has added over 4 trillion dollars to the national debt. Pumping up the debt has meant pumping new liquidity into markets to service it, and that has made the financial markets erratic and vulnerable as too many dollars chase too few solid investment opportunities. Clintonian fiscal restraint would be welcome news to CEOs.
But the other side of the Clintonian coin is a laissez-faire approach to regulation, which appeals to CEOs but is anathema to core Democratic values.
It's all in who gets appointed to be the regulators. Under Bill Clinton, as under the Republicans, the regulators were mostly not independent experts. They were drawn from the ranks of the industries they regulate - in many cases they still take money from those industries while serving.
There is only one word that fits this practice: corruption.
No wonder CEOs are friendly to the Clintons. Who else will butter both sides of their bread for them? Fiscal restraint and corporation-friendly regulators. It's a win-win for corporate America.
Weak or nonexistent regulation is anathema to the Democratic base. Unregulated markets lead, not to more competition, but to more consolidation - monopolization, in other words. Media concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Price-fixing in medicine. Windfall profits in oil. Banks freed to engage in conflicts of interest and risky behavior. Patents spiraling out of control, to the point where you're guilty of a patent violation if Monsanto's genetically-engineered seeds blow onto your farm in the breeze. FDA approval for inadequately tested drugs and, worse, thousands of chemical food additives, many of which are blatant carcinogens. Contracting out public sector functions to companies who charge more to provide the service than it cost in-house. Offshoring of jobs. Taxation polices friendly to business and unfriendly to the little guy. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
It's not a mixed economy that Clinton will deliver; it's another sad step on the road to fascism, which Mussolini famously described as the "the merger of corporate and government power." Corruption disenfranchises the electorate; its end result is totalitarianism. Under Bush we've taken several giant steps forward towards this end state. Clinton's "business-friendly" policies will only make it worse.
And who is selling us this bill of Clintonian goods? Corporate media. Engineered polls become self-fulfilling prophecies; the electorate stampedes to support the "winner" before the first primary vote is cast. Shame on us.
