Fundamentalist capitalists.

[Matthew X]

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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 2118 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks-legacy/attachments/19990409/856d1f9f/attachment.txt>