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Monday, July 8, 2002
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"And now a new administration takes office, with the narrowest political base in memory, consisting of no more than corporate power, the professional military, and the Christian Right. Lacking theories or theorists, this coalition will attempt to govern without fresh rhetoric. Meanwhile, vast constituencies---including the African-American and Jewish communities, labor, environmentalists, feminists, and the intellectuals---have already withdrawn their consent to be governed. What Birnbaum seeks, "not a promised land, but a terrain of dialogue and experiment"could, just possibly, be about to open across the wide fissures of the American opposition, motivated in part by shared rejection of rule by markets alone."
...James K. Galbraith
 12:32:36 PM Google It! comment
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On Tuesday, George W. Bush is scheduled to give a speech intended to put him in front of the growing national outrage over corporate malfeasance. He will sternly lecture Wall Street executives about ethics and will doubtless portray himself as a believer in old-fashioned business probity.
Yet this pose is surreal, given the way top officials like Secretary of the Army Thomas White, Dick Cheney and Mr. Bush himself acquired their wealth. As Joshua Green says in The Washington Monthly, in a must-read article written just before the administration suddenly became such an exponent of corporate ethics: "The `new tone' that George W. Bush brought to Washington isn't one of integrity, but of permissiveness. . . . In this administration, enriching oneself while one's business goes bust isn't necessarily frowned upon."
NYTimes
12:30:23 PM Google It! comment
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