March 28, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


SELECTIVE GOVERNMENT HELP

Republicans have been big on the notion of "personal responsibility." You don't need bankruptcy laws, for instance, because people should use "personal responsibility" and not get into debt. Never mind that there are all kinds of different circumstances people encounter. But "personal responsibility" doesn't apply to big corporations. The bailout of Bear Stearns just illustrates the point. The failure to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina also illustrates the point. This article by Allison Kilkenny is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The Bush administration and its staff of flying monkeys are either unwilling or incapable of providing American citizens with basic services. Their main failures regard regulation, one of the foundational purposes of having a government in the first place. When the government goons DO decide to perform some kind of regulation, it's usually done to strictly benefit wealthy corporations. Free trade advocates claim this is regulation run amuck, but the bailout is merely a continuation of the selling out of America to the corporation. The act simply masquerades as government regulation, but the truth is that cronyism has infested Washington and Wall Street, alike, resulting in the government's desire to protect the wealth instead of the people.

WE SHOULDN'T BE HOSTAGE TO BIG MONEY

An old maxim advises not to put all your eggs in one basket. Yet that is what we've been doing by transferring so much wealth and power to just a few people at the top of the economic pyramid. We're supposed to trust these people because they're the best and brightest in the worlds of manufacturing, technology, banking, communications, and transportation. We were told that for these wonderful folks to innovate they needed less government regulation. The results have been dismal. Who wants to fly now on airlines that don't maintain their planes? Who feels truly comfortable with the food supply when food is consistently contaminated by e. coli and other pathogens? Who likes the higher phone bills and confusion we get with deregulated phone service? How about energy deregulation? Remember Enron? Now we see what's happening with banking deregulation. We shouldn't be held hostage to what Theodore Roosevelt called "the malefactors of great wealth." This article by James Ridgeway is at www.commondreams.org:

Deregulation has been the mantra on both sides of the aisle since the late 1960s. Long gone are Democrats like Michigan’s Phil Hart who, as chair of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, held hearings on the concentration of economic power in the United States, and proposed expanded government regulation of everything from the oil and auto industries to pharmaceuticals to professional sports. Hart believed that because wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of such a small number of corporations, the market economy had become no more than a facade. In this context, what would bring about lower prices and greater productivity and innovation was more government intervention and regulation, not less.

Hart got a Senate building named after him, but his warnings about the threat of unbridled corporate power and consolidation went unheeded. Instead, the rush to deregulation began, first in the transportation sector. Efforts begun under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford came to fruition under Jimmy Carter, who hired deregulation guru Alfred E. Kahn to head the Civil Aeronautics Board, the widely loathed agency responsible for regulating the airline industry. Senator Ted Kennedy and his then aide, future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, embraced deregulation as a consumer issue, and with their support, Kahn quickly worked his way out of a job: The 1978 Airline Deregulation Act dissolved the CAB and removed most regulation of commercial airlines. Carter also signed into law bills deregulating the railroads and the trucking industry.