We'll start with this clip from Oct. 2008, right in the heart of the crisis, which I just found this morning.
What we have in this country is subsidized corporate communism...
Quotes...
RATIGAN: "We have a broken system right now."
JOE SCARBOROUGH: "It's a money party."
RATIGAN: "It's more than that. We allowed excess risk-taking. We allowed total detachment of checks and balances of capitalism. Capitalism is broken."
SCARBOROUGH: "Capitalism as practiced in republican Washington over the past eight years--"
RATIGAN: "Busted. Terrible."
SCARBOROUGH: "--is not capitalism."
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Next a clip from last year...
Video - Ratigan on corporate communism...
"$24 Trillion Of National Capital Is Being Sucked Into A Failed Banking System"
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First 30 seconds are health care, then it's banking and the bailouts.
- "The beneficiaries of an ongoing $24 trillion taxpayer-funded bailout...$24 trillion dollars."
- "That is national capital that is being sucked into a broken banking system at the expense of the rest of our country. They continue to use "Too Big To Fail" as blackmail to the taxpayer in order to get us to provide capital to them."
- "It is a system that takes resources from the citizenry and redistributes it to a tiny elite."
- "A handful of weak, un-competitive, outdated companies and industries are purchasing control of the American political system in order to stay in business using their cronyism.
- "It is coming at the direct expense of the rest of us in this nation. And it's a total betrayal of everything that represents America."
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Read Dylan's Accompanying editorial...
The Cost Of Corporate Communism
Lately I have been using the phrase "Corporate Communism" on my television show. I think it is an especially fitting term when discussing the current landscape in both our banking and health care systems.
As Americans, I believe we reject communism because it historically has allowed a tiny group of people to consolidate complete control over national resources (including people), in the process stifling competition, freedom and choice. It leaves its citizens stagnating under the perpetual broken systems with no natural motivation to innovate, improve services or reduce costs.
Lack of choice, lazy, unresponsive customer service, a culture of exploitation and a small powerbase formed by cronyism and nepotism are the hallmarks of a communist system that steals from its citizenry and a major reason why America spent half a century fighting a Cold War with the U.S.S.R.
And yet today we find ourselves as a country in two distinctly different categories: those who are forced to compete tooth and nail each day to provide value to society in return for income for ourselves and our families and those who would instead use our lawmaking apparatus to help themselves to our tax money and/or to protect themselves from true competition.
If you allow weak, outdated players to take control of the government and change the rules so they are protected from the natural competition and reward systems that have created so many innovations in our country, you not only steal from the citizens on behalf of the least worthy but you also doom them by trapping the capital that would be used to generate new innovation and, most tangibly in our current situation, jobs.
We are losing the opportunity cost of all the great ideas that should be coming from the proper deployment of that 23.7 trillion in capital. Everything from innovation in medical delivery systems to accessible space travel, free energy to the driverless car; all of these things may never come to bear because those powerful individuals who have failed, been passed over by technological advancements, innovation and flat-out smarts, have commandeered our government to unfairly sustain their wealth and power.
Unfortunately, they use our wealth and laws not only to benefit their outdated, failed companies, but also spend a small pittance of their ill-gotten gains lobbying and favor-trading with politicians so the government will continue to protect them from competition and their well-deserved failure.
The massive spike in unemployment, the utter destruction of retirement wealth, the collapse in the value of our homes, the worst recession since the Great Depression have all resulted directly from the abdication of proper government.
Even with all that -- the only changes that have been made, have been made to prop up and hide the massive flaws on behalf of those who perpetuated them. Still utterly nothing has been done to disclose the flaws in this system, improve it or rebuild it. Only true rules-based capitalism ensures constant adaptation and implementation of the latest and best practices for a given business, as those businesses that don't adapt fail, and those who deploy the latest innovations to their customers benefit, prosper.
The concept of communism is rightly reviled in this country for the simple reason that it is blind to human nature, allowing a small group of individuals near-total control, while sticking everyone else with the same crappy systems -- and the bill. America spent countless lives and half a century fighting against this system of government. So why are we standing for it now?
