Tuesday, January 15, 2002

Remora

Why do they hate us department.

Limited Inc means the CEOs of major corporations. And the us in question are the poor sweating masses who labor, pay taxes like suckers, and regularly get shellacked on both ends -- corporations who claim that utter faith in the market should prevent any government interference in spreading their costs to third parties (witness revelations about Monsanto's pollution fiesta in a small Alabaman town in the WP:

In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided "there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges." In 1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered its conclusion changed from "slightly tumorigenic" to "does not appear to be carcinogenic.") or going about their financial actions with riotous abandon of pirates on board a ship full of nuns, as in the case of 'Ken Boy''s company; and then, when downside time hits, those same corporations racing for the government tit, in a scramble that makes old Gipper Reagan's legendary welfare queen look like a piker.

Paul Krugman's op ed in the NYT this morning can be summarized in the words of that old Beatles standard: have you seen the little piggies/in their starched white shirts... In the last administration, the donors list revolved through the Lincoln bedroom as though Mr. and Miz Clinton were running a bed and breakfast for cheesy tv producers on federal time; in this administration, forget the bedroom. Give em a cabinet post, give em offices, give em lax or no enforcement of anti-trust regulation, give em the store, the keys, the ear of every policy maker cranked out by some crackpot rightwing thinktank. With so many friends in high places -- like Cheney, who believes an energy crisis means power company equities aren't achieving the cap levels his broker tells him they should be -- this country is being run openly as a country club for the rich, with tax breaks to fatten up the portfolios of the undeserving upper 5% in a public policy version of some Scrooge's wet dream.

Here are one and a half grafs:

"The real questions about Enron's relationship with the administration involve what happened before the energy trader hit the skids. That's when Mr. Lay allegedly told the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that he should be more cooperative if he wanted to keep his job. (He wasn't, and he didn't.) And it's when Enron helped Dick Cheney devise an energy plan that certainly looks as if it was written by and for the companies that advised his task force. Mr. Cheney, in clear defiance of the law, has refused to release any information about his task force's deliberations; what is he hiding?

"And while Enron has imploded, other energy companies retain the administration's ear. Just days before the latest Enron revelations, the administration signaled its intention to weaken pollution rules on power plants; late last week it announced its decision to proceed with a controversial plan to store radioactive waste in Nevada. Each of these decisions was worth billions to companies with very strong connections to Mr. Bush."

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