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| Home Front: Politix |
| Corporations - Why Do They Hate Us? |
| 2005-09-30 |
| by Jonah Goldberg DC Examiner page 16 (.pdf) Republicans have been caught playing to their stereotype lately. House Majority leader Tom DeLay has been indicted by a Texas grand jury for a criminal conspiracy to circumvent campaign finance laws and Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist is under investigation by the SEC and the Department of Justice on allegations of insider-trading. If I had to bet, the indictment against DeLay wonât stick, not because he is any sort of angel, but because the indictment is flimsy on its face. Similarly, I doubt that Frist is in any serious legal trouble for his alleged insider-trading. Political trouble is another matter entirely, for the tin-eared heart surgeon seeking the Oval Office. Combine this with the campaign to vilify Dick Cheney and George Bush as shady oilmen, Halliburton as the World Headquarters of Evil and the GOP-controlled Congress as an ATM machine for oleaginous K-street flimflammers like Jack Abramoff and one could argue without fear of excessive contradiction that youâve got the makings of an image problem. With the exception of Abramoff â who really appears to be a brigand who swims with a knife in his teeth â I think most of these charges are lacking in seriousness. But that doesnât change the political reality. Democrats will tell you that Republicans are merely living up to their principles. This is simply who Republicans are. If you donât want Congress to be run by lickspittles to corporate paymasters, donât vote Republican. Democrats donât rollover for corporations, they bring them to heel. But itâs not that simple. The problem is that liberals and others wearing the âreformerâ label consistently offer the wrong remedy for the right diagnosis. They want more regulation, more oversight, more government. If you think someone is hugging you too hard, what do you do? You push him away. You donât hug him back. Yet, it is considered the height of enlightened policymaking to say the answer to corporate Americaâs bear hug with Washington is for Washington to hug back twice as hard. If you want to know why business takes such an interest in Washington, the answer can be found in your low-flow toilet, your warning-label adorned cars, your eight-zillion page tax returns. It can be found while waiting on hold trying to get a human to answer your questions about your health insurance. And the answer is most certainly somewhere at the bottom of your cereal box made with grains subsidized by Uncle Sam and coated in sugar that has no business being grown in the United States of America. Corporations meddle in Washington because Washington meddles with them. It is simply naïve to believe that a businessman will have no interest in politics when politicians have taken a great interest in him. And it is grotesquely unfair to assume businesspeople are corrupt simply because they want to support politicians less inclined to hurt them. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates used to brag that he barely spent a dime on lobbying â âI live in the other Washington,â he liked to say. He abandoned his view that the New Economy could ignore the Old Politics the moment governments â Federal and State â tried to tear apart his company. Now D.C. is awash in Microsoft lobbyists. Wal-Mart is only now learning the same lesson. If you donât get in the game, you might be regulated out of it. Of course, not all businesses who support politicians of either party are doing it out of self-protection. Sugar growers, for example, have ripped-off taxpayers and consumers to the tune of billions. If government stopped protecting the industry from competition, it would mostly disappear and stop gouging us at the same time. Liberals think Republicans are living up to their principles when they get cozy with fatcats. The reality is that Republicans betray their principles when they give fatcats a reason to come to Washington Examiner columnist Jonah Goldberg is the editor at large at the National Review Online |
| Posted by:Bobby |