"The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - men who are creative, inventive and discoverers" ~ Jean Piaget [Swiss Psychologist. Pioneer in the study of child intelligence. 1896-1980]
"The purpose of education is to enable us to develop to the fullest that which is inside us" ~ Norman Cousins [Essayist, Editor associated with Saturday Evening Post 1912-1990]
"America's noble experiment, universal education for all" may have become but an idealized theory. In practice it long seemed the impossible dream. However, for the hopeful this statement was a reverie, although the veracity was virtually unrecognizable at best. Still the notion lived on. The powerful prose marveled many. That is all but believers in a for-profit privatized educational system. Today, corporate aficionados have conquered. Commerce controls School District Administrators. It shapes decisions made. Countless elementary and secondary school campuses are transformed in accordance. Big business buys and sells city classrooms. Our forefathers would have thought present-day headlines could only appear in fictional accounts. Nonetheless banners blare, "This Class Is Brought to You By. [fill in the corporate enterprise of your choice]"
War chests from right-wing billionaires and corporate titans are funding tremendous portions of political activity, from the so-called grassroots activism of the Tea Party to the streamlined lobbying assaults of the nation's largest corporations.
The day was Sunday, August 1, 2010. Former Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan appeared on Meet the Press. When asked to discuss the Congressional debate on tax cuts, the man known to move markets, a person who leans to the "Right," offered a decisive decree. In direct disagreement with Republican officials and the profitable corporations that fund countless political campaigns, Mister Greenspan declared, "Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day, that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here on it."
This statement was as a slap in the face to corporations, or more correctly to the tycoons who head these firms. Multi-millionaire media moguls might understand this best. These television and radio Executives experience firsthand that influence over an industry can translate into influence over an outcome. Cable News Network Chief Officers are among those who actively make use of this truth. Tax cuts expired? "Never;" say network Administrators and the newscasters such as Allan Chernoff, who do their bidding.
I apologize. My belly, my bloated body, only belatedly do I understand. It never was in the genes. The abundant meat that weighed heavily on my bones was not caused by my chromosomal structure; it was piled on by Congressional and corporately funded campaigns. Mommy and the husband who helped make me, much to my embarrassment, today I acknowledge my error. I was spoon-fed, and not by the two of you. Legislators, Lobbyists, and big businesses that place misleading labels on chemically cooked up cuisines put corn fillers on my every plate. I chowed down. My little body bulged out. From the inside out, I grew bigger and wider.
When the Republicans do their version of populist class warfare, they only target two categories of rich people: Hollywood celebrities and wealthy trial layers. They go after these two kinds of rich people because they are the only kinds that don't shower the Republicans with money and share their conservative worldview. A lot of Hollywood celebrities care about issues like freedom of speech, gay rights, choice, funding for the arts, separation of church and state, and other issues that make Republican social conservatives crazy, plus Hollywood folks are famous and make easy targets.
Trial lawyers are a different story. They are hated by Republicans because they make a living by helping regular folks without much money who are doing battle with (mostly) big corporate interests. Republicans deride them, scorn them, and try to do everything they can to destroy their business model because the GOP don't like anyone taking on their big business allies (trial lawyers do take on individual doctors in malpractice cases, but most of their business is in suing big corporations who screw people over). For example, they don't want trial lawyers to be able to get much in the way of contingency fees, because they know that the contingency fee system allows lawyers to take poor people's cases on for free upfront, which means more people have the ability to take on big companies' high-priced legal teams.
I mention all these basic facts about our tort system for one reason today: my friend Linda Lipsen has been named head of the American Association for Justice, the trial attorneys' trade association.
Linda comes out of the consumer movement originally, and has been a stalwart friend of progressive causes her entire career. She is a great strategic thinker, a savvy legislative tactician, and an innovative organization-builder. It will be a very good thing for the broader progressive cause, and great for AAJ, to have her at the helm.
Along with the labor movement, there is no other well-resourced institution in America that understands the dangers of too much corporate power, and takes that corporate power on directly. I am thrilled that they have a great new leader in charge.
As I watch the latest and greatest e-coli conservativism travesty unfold I'm reminded of an idea I've toyed with at times - or more of a question: What purpose does limited liability for corporations serve, and does that purpose still make sense?
Atrios worries this may be the "worst caused human disaster" short of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. BP is clearly on the hook for a big clean up bill, but here's the thing - if the bill is larger than BP is able to raise, in theory the company could just declare bankruptcy and the remainder of the clean up bill drops on society at large. BP's shareholders don't want to see the value of their shares go to zero, but then again, isn't it handy for them to know that losing their investment in this company is the most harm they could suffer?
Some BP executives may pay some price down the road, but likely they won't since they'll just claim they were trying to maximize shareholder value. Capitalism has created a neat little vortex of unaccountability for these things, where everyone is just playing their part in the grand game. Well if the idea is that everyone in the company is just serving the interests of their masters, the shareholders, maybe the shareholders should bear more responsibility for what their servants do to the world.
We should certainly re-regulate the oil industry severely. But I'm tired of fighting the fires of e-coli conservativism piecemeal and want broader change that alters the incentives. If you own part of a company that does something really bad, maybe you should bear more risk than just the money you originally invested. It's one thing to offer limited liability to some entrepreneurial startup. But do the shareholders large, stable, long profitable companies need such protection?
If my condo board does something stupid and incurs some big uninsured liability, I'll get dinged with a "special assessment" to cover my share of it. Why should BP's shareholders be able to escape the same consequences of the actions of the company they own?
From yesterday's oral argument in Rent-A-Center v. Jackson, it appears that corporate America, and apparently some Justices on the Supreme Court, believe that there are basically only two situations in which a court can invalidate a broad, mandatory, pre-dispute arbitration agreement signed by an applicant for a job with a corporate employer as a condition of being hired. First, arbitration might not be required if the would-be-employee signed the agreement only because the employer put a gun to her head or got her drunk and had her sign under the influence. Second, the courthouse doors might be open if it were discovered that it was not the now-employed person's signature on the agreement, but rather the handwriting of "Joe Bananas," some weirdo (courtesy of Justice Breyer's imagination) who has been running around impersonating the poor employee.
It should be noted that these fanciful hypotheticals discussed at yesterday's oral argument do not cover the most frequent, real world "gun-to-the-head" scenario faced by job applicants, in which their only "choice," if they want the job, is to agree to arbitrate, on the employer's terms, any and all future disputes -- a "choice" characterized by Chief Justice Roberts as "economic inequality or whatever." Only the literal gun-to-the-head scenario will suffice, apparently; not being free to assert your right to access the courts because it means you won't be hired and maybe won't be able to support your family, does not.
While the hypotheticals were plentiful at argument yesterday, the actual facts of the case before the Court were little discussed. The petitioner, Antonio Jackson, signed an agreement when he was offered a job at Rent-A-Center that required him to give up his right to access the courts in the event of a future claim against his employer, and instead submit any and all future claims to a private arbitrator. Jackson did not have a real choice about whether to sign this agreement; he was given no opportunity to negotiate its terms, and the failure to sign would have meant he would not get the job. The terms of the agreement were lop-sided in favor of Rent-A-Center, particularly with respect to fees and discovery procedures. Moreover, corporate employers like Rent-A-Center are repeat players in the arbitration system and their continued patronage keeps arbitrators in profitable business, which means that arbitrators may well be predisposed in the employers' favor.
Later, when Jackson believed he had been subjected to racial discrimination as an employee at Rent-A-Center, he sought to bring a claim in federal court under section 1981, a statutory provision originating in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that prohibits discrimination in contractual relationships, including employment. He argued that the arbitration agreement he signed was "unconscionable" in that it was unfair and was forced on him by his employer, and that he had not meaningfully agreed to give up his right to go to court. Rent-A-Center argued that even this threshold question of whether there was a valid, fair agreement to arbitrate must be considered by an arbitrator, not a court. As discussed previously on Text & Historyhere and here, and in the brief filed by CAC and other civil rights organizations in this case, precluding access to courts is particularly troubling in Section 1981 cases like Mr. Jackson's, because the Reconstruction Congress that passed the statute was expressly concerned that federal courthouse doors be open to victims of discrimination.
The Supreme Court's current pro-arbitration stance is not just in conflict with the Civil Rights Act of 1866-it goes far beyond what Congress intended when it enacted the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), the statute from which the Court purportedly draws its pro-arbitration policy. The federal pro-arbitration policy that is embodied in the FAA simply means that if two parties have entered into a valid, consensual agreement to arbitrate, the courts must then construe the scope of that agreement just like any other contract. There is textual and historical evidence that Congress meant to safeguard the ability to choose arbitration instead of court proceedings for commercial partners making contractual decisions from similar positions of bargaining power and sophistication. There is also textual and historical evidence that Congress did not intend to include within this "pro-arbitration" policy employment contracts like the one involved in this case.
Unfair, forced arbitration is not just a problem in civil rights cases, however. As Justice Ginsburg noted at oral argument yesterday, mandatory arbitration agreements are "very common in consumer, credit card agreements, in employment contracts," and "one party has no say except to sign or not to sign." This is quite true-as Mr. Jackson's counsel pointed out to the Justices today, it was likely that many people, even in the gracious courtroom of the Supreme Court, were subject to arbitration agreements they didn't even know about. If you have a cell phone, see a doctor, or have signed just about any employment contract with a large, corporate employer, you're likely subject to mandatory arbitration of claims that haven't even arisen yet. The terms of this arbitration agreement could be incredibly unfair to you, while favoring the big corporation on the other side, and even if you might have agreed to arbitration had you focused on it, you likely had no opportunity to negotiate these terms to something more equitable.
But don't look to Justice Scalia for any sympathy if you want access to justice and find the terms of the mandatory arbitration agreement unfair. In his view, you haven't been coerced into anything-you're just "a stupid person who voluntarily signs an unconscionable contract." According to Justice Scalia, the law may in some circumstances "protect you because you are stupid, but you haven't been coerced."
This is an astonishing statement given the broad swath of Americans who are swept up into the category of people who have had no choice but to sign mandatory arbitration agreements that are lop-sided in favor of corporate entities and fundamentally unfair. Maybe you signed that agreement in the medical office, even though it seemed wrong, because you had to get in to see the doctor to have your sick child examined and didn't want to make a fuss. Maybe you signed that mandatory arbitration agreement, even though it seemed unjust, when you took that job because you had no choice and you needed the work to put food on the table for your family. But you certainly didn't sign up for forced arbitration because you're "stupid."
If ever there were an oral argument that drove home the need to have a Supreme Court that understands, as President Obama and others have put it lately, how the law affects "ordinary Americans"-this was it.
Elizabeth Wydra is Chief Counsel of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a think tank and public interest law firm dedicated to showing how the text and history of the Constitution support progressive outcomes. Cross-posted at Text & History.
There are a lot of angry people out there, and we have plenty of reasons to be mad. But that doesn't mean we have to be stupid.
The Tea Party movement claims to be a populist organization that spontaneously erupted from the grassroots to protest Barack Obama's usurpation of the White House and his "socialist" attempt to provide an economic stimulus and health insurance for the 44 million working poor who earn too much for Medicaid but are too young for Medicare.
But those "grassroots" were groomed by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, political advocacy groups linked to oilman David Koch and other Republican operatives. Events were promoted by Rupert Murdoch's Fox "News" and the Wall Street Journal. Also, there are several Tea Party groups, but Tea Party Nation, a for-profit corporation, charged $549 for a convention in Nashville that drew about 600 teabaggers to hear such luminaries as former US Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who longed for the good old days of literacy tests for voters, and former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), who thinks we should abandon hope for change.
In a landmark decision last week, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited funds to influence American elections, overturning a century of legal precedent. The Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC undermines the integrity of the U.S. government, as President Barack Obama emphasized at his State of the Union address. But the decision also deals a damaging blow to the U.S. economy by encouraging lawmakers to write economic rules that benefit specific companies at the expense of everyone else.
The editors of The Nation lay out the High Court's hubris in no uncertain terms:
The Citizens United campaign finance decision by Chief Justice John Roberts and a Supreme Court majority of conservative judicial activists is a dramatic assault on American democracy, overturning more than a century of precedent in order to give corporations the ultimate authority over elections and governing. This decision tips the balance against active citizenship and the rule of law by making it possible for the nation's most powerful economic interests to manipulate not just individual politicians and electoral contests but political discourse itself.
Citizens United and the financial crisis
How does this ruling have any bearing on the economy? Markets are not simply the product of random interactions between consumers and producers. Even under the most radical, laissez-faire economic theories, markets are defined, coordinated and policed by the government. For the economy to function at all, we need the government to define what constitutes fair play.
But over the past few decades, we've watched Congress and the executive branch rewrite those rules of the game under heavy corporate influence, creating artificial profits for a set of favored companies with very bad consequences for the broader economy.
The U.S. banking industry serves as a prime example. Since the 1980s, banks have been spending like crazy in all kinds of elections, and getting just about anything they want in return. I interviewed Harvard University Law Professor and TARP Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren for AlterNet, and she presented a concise but unsettling economic history of consumer protection law:
Thirty years ago we had laws that put some basic fairness into the consumer credit market. Over time, the large financial institutions captured the regulators who were supposed to be the cops on the beat to enforce those laws. They also pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Washington to make sure that no new cops were put on the beat. Without good laws, the industry started selling ever-more-deceptive products, and their friendly regulators looked the other way.
The bank lobby and the AIG bailout
In Mother Jones, Corbin Hiar reveals how even a bank that engineered a massive tax fraud scheme was able to benefit from the AIG bailout. Major financial institutions convinced Congress to block any regulation of credit default swaps (CDS) all the way back in 2000. CDS contracts were essentially insurance on the value of financial assets-if the assets lost value, banks would still get paid as if they were highly profitable.
CDS insurance encouraged banks to engage in risky mortgage lending, and allowed them to book huge profits on those risky mortgages during the housing boom, even though many of those mortgages were doomed from the get-go. AIG binged so heavily on CDS that the company was on the brink of bankruptcy in the fall of 2008. But an AIG bankruptcy would have hammered the major banks who served as AIG's betting partners, most notably Goldman Sachs. Those banks would have received just pennies on the dollar from a bankrupt AIG. But under the bailout, the New York Federal Reserve paid the banks off at full value, without demanding any concessions whatsoever.
"The credit crunch was an existential threat to every over-leveraged big bank. What's most shocking about the AIG bailout ... is that these endangered banks were able to extract such a sweet deal from the government," Hiar writes. "The banks were paid the full value of all the CDS contracts they had made with AIG-including those mortgage-backed securities they had bought when it was clear the subprime market was collapsing."
The only AIG counterparty to even consider taking CDS losses was Swiss banking giant UBS, which was negotiating a separate settlement with the U.S. government over a massive tax evasion scheme. But even the tax fraudsters at UBS ultimately received full payment on their CDS exposure, and it now appears that the Swiss bank will be able to protect its wealthy tax-evading clients.
With the AIG bailout, the corporate takeover came full-circle. The banks purchased radical deregulation in Congress, and when the deregulated banks destroyed themselves, the government paid out billions to save them. The rest of the economy was ravaged by predatory lending, and taxpayers, not bankers, footed the bill for bank losses.
Redefining corruption
So the Citizens United decision will not introduce corporate influence in elections. Instead, it takes an uneven playing field and tilts it further in the favor of corporate executives. The Roberts court didn't just open the floodgates for corporate cash in U.S. elections and call it a day. It also explicitly redefined "corruption" to give corporations-and anyone else-greater leeway to financially curry favor with politicians. Heather K. Gerken details the new definition for The American Prospect:
The most important line in the decision ... was this one: "ingratiation and access ... are not corruption." For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become "too compliant with the[ir] wishes." Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of "undue influence" or the public's "cynical assumption that large donors call the tune" was enough to justify regulation. "Ingratiation and access," in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned.
Most of us would consider the key lawmakers ensnared in the Jack Abramoff scandal as fundamentally corrupt-Abramoff flew former Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas to Scotland for golfing vacations in an effort to win greater leverage over DeLay's legislative agenda. The court's ruling claims that this kind of activity is not corrupt, and bars Congress from passing any laws to counteract it. As filmmaker Alex Gibney emphasizes in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the court has essentially taken Tom DeLay's corporatist philosophy and made it a piece of constitutional law.
"Tom DeLay's view is, we spend more money on potato chips than we do on political campaigns. His view would be, let the money rush down like great waters,," Gibney says. "I think the court was channeling Tom DeLay when they issued their recent decision."
Why citizens need to speak out now
So what can we do about this? As GRITtv's Laura Flanders discusses in a roundtable discussion with several progressive leaders, there will be a long fight for a Constitutional Amendment to ban corporate influence in politics. Until then, as progressive strategist Mike Lux explains, citizens will have to take an aggressive stance against Corporate America as shareholders. Corporate power is exercised by a handful of executives, but the resources that support that power come from ordinary Americans who own stock in those companies, primarily through retirement plans. By demanding that the giant firms we own do not highjack our democracy with lobbying, we can limit some of the damage from the court's recent decision.
If you liked the bank bailouts, then there's plenty for you to love about the Citizens United decision. If you didn't, then it's time to speak up.
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A Chris Bowers Golden Oldie
From Tue Oct 09, 2007. Original HERE.
Amidst the series of Bush Dog fueled Democratic capitulations in Congress that have become so regular it has become possible to organize around them several weeks ahead of time, it is important for progressive movement types to keep their eyes on the most important legislation and potential legislation facing our movement. No, I am not referring to Iraq or FISA, and to a somewhat lesser extent I am not referring to health care or clean energy either. Instead, I am referring to those key areas of legislation and Democratic Party behavior that have the potential to build progressivism itself. As Matt as discussed in recent length pieces such as Emergence Politics and Rush Limbaugh, and The Broken Market for Democratic Primaries, what progressives need are the creation and institutionalization of "positive feedback loops" that will make America a more progressive place, and thus make all other progressive policy more likely to be enacted.
What are these policies? Here is an incomplete list that I compiled this afternoon:
The Employee Free Choice Act, that would, ideally, increase union density and collective bargaining power in America. Union members are much more likely to support progressive economic policies, and to vote Democratic, than other non-union workers. This would effectively create an ideological shift within the American workplace that would favor progressives, as long as it came with union leadership willing to ramp up new organizing efforts.
Clean Election Laws. While I am well aware that Democrats have demonstrated an ability to surpass Republican fundraising in Presidential elections, the fact is that progressives will never be able to match corporate PAC money in all federal elections. Until some form of public financing removes this corporate advantage, progressives will always be at an influence disadvantage over Congress.
Reversing Corporate Media Consolidation. Using improved ownership regulation of American media to help destabilize the impact of the Republican Noise Machine, and create a more diverse, responsive national media, is another key progressive feedback loop.
Progressive Immigration Reform. Securing the ideological and partisan loyalties of expanding demographic groups in America is a pretty obvious key to long-term political success. This remains as true among Latinos and Asians in our current era as it was among Irish, Italian, and Slavic immigrants a century ago. Whoever captures emerging political markets is well-positioned for electoral and legislative success over the next few decades. One of the keys to pulling this off always starts with immigration policy and rhetoric that improve the lives of newcomers to America, and make them feel welcomed. Truly, a no-brainer for long-term progressive success.
Colonial Reform. Perhaps I am using overly provocative language to describe this one, but granting full congressional representation to those areas of America not current represented by full voting members in Congress would be a big step forward for progressives. This obviously includes anti-Republican strongholds in D.C. and Puerto Rico, but should also include territories like Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa. These are not places that are particularly friendly to the values of the conservative movement, and granting them equal representation within their own country would expand progressive and Democratic power long-term.
Re-locating government spending. It isn't a secret that the conservative economy is fueled significantly by government hand-outs in the form of military industrial complex spending, reliance on oil companies, "faith based initiatives," and tax breaks / loopholes for corporations and the wealthy alike. De-funding the conservative economy, and re-locating spending in programs Americans won't want to give up, such as universal health care or cheaper, clean energy investment, would to at least some extent shift the economic balance of power away from conservatives and toward progressives.
Voting Reform. Same day voter registration, the end of felony disenfranchisement, and secure voting mechanisms will all help increase voter turnout in ways that favor progressives. When more minorities vote, more young people vote, more people have confidence in the vote, and it is easier to vote overall, the longstanding conservative tactic of voter suppression as a means of winning elections will be significantly reduced in effectiveness.
I am sure that there are more potential positive feedback loops for progressives than these, and if you have more I'd love to see them in the comments. The seven I list here are a mix of good government reforms, spending relocations, and shifts in control over ideological apparatuses that I think would undoubtedly make the country more progressives. This are the low-hanging positive feedback loops, so to speak. I am sure there are others, but I wanted to get these out there as a way of reminding progressives that no matter what the major issues of the day might be in the short term, there are fundamental goals we must always seek in order to build a more progressive America long term.
Have you ever wondered why corporations like Exxon Mobil have free speech "rights" under the Constitution when corporations can't "speak," and when the Constitution was written to protect "We the People" and never mentions "corporations"? Do you worry that maybe, just maybe, the Supreme Court is putting the interests of corporate America over the rights of hard-working Americans?
If so, then you probably want to learn more about a piece of legal fiction called "corporate personhood." And you should probably start with this terrific lecture from that preeminent legal scholar, Stephen Colbert:
If, after watching Colbert, your interest is piqued - as it really should be -- then I urge you to take a look at this discussion draft of a report on corporate personhood, recently released by the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC, where I work), which tells you more than you probably ever wanted to know about the topic. (CAC is planning to release a final version of this report in January 2010). While we've already distributed this to a number of legal blogs in an effort to get feedback, we also wanted to publish it here, to reach a broader audience.
This Tuesday Obama is supposed to announce his decision on troops and Afghanistan (the last guess I heard was 30,000 as opposed to the 40,000 the General asked for) and we will once again see our middle-east battle commitment increase.
But is there a reason why the President didn't turn the problem over to the State Department for a negotiated solution? Sherwood Ross in OpEdNews writes an extended article on why diplomacy wasn't even considered. here's a clip:
There has been a lot of public discussion lately about the federal government's role with private business. Banks, insurance companies, and car companies have all been bailed out. There may be deeper public involvement with the energy industry if a cap and trade bill passes. If health insurance is mandated and subsidized, billions of dollars will be going towards health insurance.
Conservative libertarians argue that all of this is bad, that any government subsidy of private business of any kind is wrong. Of course, conservative Republicans who claim to be libertarians still seem to be happy to subsidize farms in their home districts, military contractors still producing obsolete weapons systems, and oil companies who get subsides for drilling oil that they make billions of dollars of profit off of. I guess to these kinds of politicians, it's only big government if it's benefiting someone other than your constituents and campaign contributors.
For those of us who are not Ron Paul style libertarians, though, there is no way for government not to have working relationships of various kinds with the private sector. The government needs to be hiring contractors to build/repair roads, bridges, schools, etc. Defense contractors are needed to supply weapons, ammo and uniforms. Companies are needed to build police and fire stations and supply the uniforms and equipment for the folks that work for them. And yes, in dysfunctional sectors of the economy like health care, finance, and energy (where the energy industry is dysfunctional enough to be destroying the planet), and especially when the economy is dysfunctional in general like it's been the last year, government has the duty to step in and play a bigger role.
What progressives would argue, though, is that when government and industry need to interact, industry needs to be accountable to certain rules and expectations the government sets up. Some examples come to mind:
When a contractor builds a school building, they have an obligation to build it safely so that it doesn't collapse on the children inside.
The weapons supplied to our police and military ought to work the vast majority of the time.
If you are an industry that constantly cheats people when they are sick, or sells products that regularly hurt people, the government should change the rules of the marketplace.
If you get bailed out and subsidized by the government like the Wall Street banks, and yet are showing no change in the problems that caused the crisis that forced the bailout in the first place, the rules need to be dramatically altered so that you can change your behavior and can't keep causing harm to the entire economic system.
These are basic rules that seem fairly obvious to me, but apparently aren't to some people. When Hank Paulson last year said there should be no restrictions on what banks could do with the bailout money being handed to them, I was utterly astonished, but I guess that just seemed to be the way of the world to the Wall Street guys. When the big insurers wanted government to force everyone to buy their products, provide subsides to those who couldn't, but then were rebelling at the idea that they would have any serious competition, I was stunned that anyone (at least in my political party) was taking them seriously. But hey, I guess that makes a radical leftist.
This should be a basic rule, but apparently It needs to be a "new rule," as Bill Maher would put it: if government bails you out, subsidizes you, forces people to buy your product, or otherwise does business with you, we the people are owed some basic accountability on the other end of the deal. It should be painfully obvious, but apparently it isn't.
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