If you support a progressive agenda, then support a progressive candidate.
Sens. Obama and McCain are both engaging in posturing over the Bush administration's repeated bailouts of failing corporations. As NPR reported, Obama has raised over $10 million in legalized campaign bribes from Wall Street while St. John has netted over $7 million. So excuse me if I don't buy into their faux populism.
St. John has called for a commission to study the problems. There is already a commission that's supposed to deal with some of these problems. It's called the Securities and Exchange Commission.
This is exactly what happens when corporations are given the protection of being backed by public (taxpayer) money without any restrictions whatsoever to protect the public interest. If you want the protection, accept regulation. If you don't want regulation, assume all the risk yourself. Pick your poison. These most gargantuan of corporate welfare handouts give the market the worst of both worlds: risk without responsibility.
I guess the 'free market' is free for the corporations, certainly not for the taxpayers.
But the meltdown in the insurance and financial sectors is not entirely the fault of Republicans. The deregulation that produced this risk without responsibility was the fruit of that most sainted of Washington concepts, one that is teflon to any and all criticism: (drum roll please) BIPARTISANSHIP.
In 1999, a bill was passed that completely gutted regulations on financial institutions. It was passed by a Republican Congress (with plenty of support in the Donkey Party) and signed by a Democratic president. Just read this CNN report from the time and count how many times you read some form of the word 'bipartisan.'
Many Americans think bipartisanship is automatically a panacea to any ill. In too many instances, it's merely a case of the two major parties colluding to protect the interests of their corporate sponsors. This is precisely why we need try multipartyism in the United States, like every other western democracy has.
"The bill is anti-consumer and anti-community," said one public figure quoted in that CNN report. "It will mean higher prices and fewer choices for low-, moderate- and middle-income families across the nation... Personal privacy will be virtually eliminated" under provisions allowing affiliated businesses of the newly merged companies to share customers' personal financial data as they offer one-stop shopping.
If we had multipartyism, then that public figure might've been a Congressman from a smaller, non-corporate party on the floor of the House. But since we don't have that, the public figure was consumer advocate (and 2008 presidential candidate) Ralph Nader.
This prediction was made in 1999. Does any of it ring true today?
But Nader, like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich or anyone else who goes against the corporate parties' consensus, was burnt at the altar of the gods of bipartisanship.
Part of the problem lies with government, with Freddie and Fannie: large, government entities with little oversight, with privatized profits and socialized losses. Believe it or not, McCain called for more oversight and regulation of both as far back as 2006.
ReplyDeleteAnother problem was this unrealistic goal of universal home ownership: Too many people who simply did not deserve home loans were granted them. The old rules on home mortgages worked, yet many were pushing these financial giants, not just Freddie and Fannie, to give out loans to these unqualified candidates.