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The corporate predator state
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Washington Post


Washington Post, March 26, 2013
Posted: April 2nd, 2013
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/katrina-vanden-heuvel...

Bipartisan agreement in Washington usually means citizens should hold on to their wallets or get ready for another threat to peace. Beneath all the partisan bickering, bipartisan majorities are solid for a trade policy run by and for multinationals, a health-care system serving insurance and drug companies, an energy policy for Big Oil and King Coal, and finance favoring banks that are too big to fail. Economist James Galbraith calls this the predator state, one in which large corporate interests rig the rules to protect their subsidies, tax dodges and monopolies. This isnt the free market; its a rigged market. Wall Street is a classic example. The attorney general announces that some banks are too big to prosecute. Despite what the FBI called an epidemic of fraud, not one head of a big bank has gone to jail or paid a major personal fine. Bloomberg News estimated that the subsidy they are provided by being too big to fail adds up to an estimated $83 billion a year. Corporate welfare is, of course, offensive to progressives. But true conservatives are or should be offended by corporate welfare as well. Conservative economists Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales argue that it is time to save capitalism from the capitalists, urging conservatives to support strong measures to break up monopolies, cartels and the predatory use of political power to distort competition. Here is where left and right meet, not in a bipartisan big-money fix, but in an odd bedfellows campaign to clean out Washington. For that to happen, small businesses and community banks will have to develop an independent voice in our politics.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the collusion between the US government and corrupt financial corporations, click here.


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