Posted On: January 11, 2008, 1:16 pm CST

Posted By: media mogul

It is normal for companies to use accumulated capital in a monopolistic way. It is normal for them to spend some of it legitmately and illegitmately (and of course via lobbying, a unique mixture of the two) to distort market forces in their favor and to resist complementary efforts by regulators to distort the market.

Markets, especially the big-capital distorted markets of the US, create chaos at home and worldwide as well as fomenting hyper-stimulated technological change, the necessity for two earner families, globalization and objectifcation of labor, resource exhaustion, pollution and often but not always efficient distribution of goods. They are probably a good thing compared to the creeping Stalinism of state-directed economies such as those that failed in Eastern Europe and even those that are succeeding in Asia, especially in China, but time will tell.

As Rosie points out, the current regime, which has hijacked our government and military to serve the interests of the oil industry (including the Saudi royal family and other Middle Eastern dictators with Chavez and the mullahs in Iraq getting an unexpected boost and free-ride), has let the deregulation thing go to an extreme. Chaos (and wars of choice) have been the result. Hence the complaints by other commenters about other types of service providers. The actions of the current regime are the flip-side of deregulation--control of the government by commercial enterprises. The Latin Americans, in a nice irony, refer to such behavior as "Neo-Liberalism" although it has been the liberal-haters and -baitersin the US that have pulled off this cute switch to a govenment that neither represents nor serves its own people.

The pendulum will be swinging back in the near future, no matter how much fulminating there is by ardent and learned MBAs, Walmart supporters, and Wall Street/banking elitists. "As ye sow, so shall ye reap"--to put it in terms of that book all these crooks have been hiding behind since 1994.

Anyway, remember the important take-away that these people want you to believe in is "that war is good business. Invest your child or spouse." And have a nice weekend knowing the end (of the regime) is indeed and solely and entirely on constitutional grounds, near. One year, two weeks, one day---just like in Donnie Darko, except we can't go back and change everything so this nightmare never happened.