Molly Ivins on you fakirs,you know who you are..."...We are being stolen blind by crooks pretending to be fundamentalist capitalists. Your fundamentalist capitalist is, mais oui (as we often say in Lubbock), the one who believes The Free Market Answers All. This is a theological position, beyond reach of persuasion by either fact or logic--not to mention history, experience, and time. The market fundamentalist doesn't understand that when capitalism is not regulated, it screws up with monotonous regularity, and reading the newspapers lately gives you a sense of how it works.
Big scandal: Enron and other corporate players bilked California during the energy crisis! Do you realize how pathetic that was? A massive, hideous rip-off, and all these latter-day Joads in California (many with purple hair, rings in their navels, tattoos on their kidneys and toy poodles dyed-to-match--you have to allow for California) cried over the months of ruthless pillage, "Where the hell is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission? Where's FERC?" Well, FERC was occupied by regulators who came from a list supplied by one Ken Lay, chairman of Enron.
Then there's the gross conflict of interest of the stock analysts, who were recommending stocks they thought were "dogs" or "a piece of crap" so their firms could score investment banking fees from these same dogs.
Or take Dick Cheney's old firm, Halliburton, which, while he was in charge, "altered its accounting policies so it could report as revenue more than $100 million in disputed costs on big construction projects," The New York Times reported. The company's auditor: Arthur Andersen.
And who is supposed to be policing all this? An SEC led by Bush's man Harvey Pitt, a lawyer for financial institutions who once wrote a law review article that advocated shredding..."
Full piece at...
http://www.progressive.org/July%202002/ivin0702.html