Tweet
Hey, you know what conservatives really really hate? I’ll give you a hint: It’s right up there in the title. No, seriously, conservatives just can’t stand it when rich people and corporations use their vast wealth to game the system! Just don’t ask them to support any kind of public campaign financing or limits on corporate political spending…
- Deroy Murdock/Heritage Foundation/WSJ, 1/17/12: Another problem: “Corruption is a growing concern as the cronyism and economic rent-seeking associated with the growth of government have undermined institutional integrity,” the [Heritage/WSJ] Index [of Economic Freedom] says.
- Newt Gingrich, 1/11/12: [C]rony capitalism, where people pay each other off at the expense of the rest of the country, is not free enterprise.
- Michele Bachmann, 11/7/11: Much of that spending and taxing occurs because government does what both the Constitution and decent morality prohibit, that is crony capitalism, or forcefully taking your money for the purpose of paying off a politician’s political friends. The problem is one set of standards for individual Americans and another set of standards for those who make political donations to candidates. This practice, whether at the state level or the federal level, is letting the interest of the few outweigh the majority of Americans who don’t have access to the system.
- John Stossel, 10/21/11: If by “capitalism” [the Occupiers] mean crony capitalism (let’s call it crapitalism), a system in which favored business interests are supported by government, I’m against that, too.
- Sarah Palin, 9/3/11: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare…. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys.
- Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, 5/2/11: [Dodd-Frank is] going to deeply entrench crony capitalism into the very fabric of our financial system, which I am terrified about.
- Charles Koch, 3/1/11: Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want.
And George Will must hate crony capitalism most of all (almost as much as he hates public campaign financing):
- 1/6/12: Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.
- 10/12/11: Unfortunately for OWS, big government’s scandal du jour, the Obama administration’s Solyndra episode of crony capitalism, does not validate progressivism’s indignation; it refutes progressivism’s aspiration, which is for more minute government supervision of society.
- 9/14/11: The economic policy the “federal family” should adopt can be expressed in five one-syllable words: Get. Out. Of. The. Way. Instead, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department has become a venture capital firm for crony capitalism and costly flops at creating “green jobs,” praises the policy of essentially banishing the incandescent light bulb as “taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”
- 12/23/10 (with an assist from Dave Camp): The tax code, says Camp, “should not be a tool of industrial policy” or of “crony capitalism”: “Politicians should not pick the industry of the day.”
- 5/13/10: Under crony capitalism, when government and corporate America merge, both dissemble.
As I said in my original response to Sarah Palin’s insincere diatribe, it’s a through-the-looking-glass view of corruption where the only villain that needs to be reined in is (Democratic) Big Government redistributing wealth to its cronies, and the obvious solution is to make it so shrunken and weak that it’s no longer worth buying.
At least I presume that’s the reasoning, since conservatives don’t show much interest in reining in the corporations, or their lobbyists, or their front groups. Supposedly all-powerful “special-interest groups” like labor unions and environmentalists are likely another story, and some of the above quotes and examples (“political friends”, “connections”, “handouts”, “politically favored”, Solyndra, light bulbs) are careful to imply their inclusion.
In addition to blaming the sheep for being too plump and tasty, the anti-handout, anti-redistributionist conservatives never talk about corporate America’s determined and largely successful campaign to disembowel any regulations and enforcement it might be subject to, even though that has arguably been more lucrative than any government handouts could ever be. To them, corruption can only take the form of “handouts,” because looking the other way is what government is supposed to do. Eliminate the government as a functional entity, and you eliminate the problem of corruption.
Conservatives want to beat up the puppet; progressives want to remove the hand.
47 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About Firedoglake
Eli!
Buzz!
Eli:
The figures you are citing, sadly, are so bereft of any credibility whatsoever insofar as seeing them as sincere public leaders is concerned, that nothing they say can be taken seriously when it comes from they themselves. These figures are in general so profoundly corrupt or driven by agendas aside from the public interest that you might as well start citing Josef Stalin on civil liberties or the former heads of the East India Trading Company on fair trade and respectful foreign relations. When a malevolent liar inadvertently mouths the truth the best he will do is add insult to the injuries he already commits.
That’s kind of my point, though. They’re talking about “crony capitalism” to push an anti-government agenda, not an anti-corruption agenda.
This is true, what you say, and your meaning may have been lost in the list of citations.
I think you could also serve this point you make a bit by publishing some of the lies and dissembling of Democrats who have attempted to mouth “liberal” positions while themselves serving only the rich and the end of creating a Dickensian reality. Focusing on the Republican scoundrels alone fails to punish the Democratic scoundrels.
Yeah, it was a bit of a dilemma – if I front-loaded too much of my argument, I wouldn’t have much of anything to say at the end.
And I absolutely agree that Democrats are equally corrupt – at least Republicans are acting in sync with the principles they claim to have – but I’m kind of fascinated by how much conservatives love this “crony capitalism” frame, even though it describes a status quo they will fight to the death to defend.
I’ve come to see the American political class as tending towards becoming antithetical to broader human hope, myself. I guess I mention this in the context of “Democrats vs. Republicans” – the entire political class edifice is rotted to the core. And arguing against the politicians’ statements, versus the reality of what the politicians’ (and their richer owners) create, it’s like arguing with a huge, ugly, black tsunami washing over your land that what the tsunami is doing is destructive, and negative, even if the ocean is supposed to be a pretty thing for us. The tsunami doesn’t care and you don’t slow it down.
—
Irony, hypocrisy, and juxtaposition are kinda my triggers, so that’s what I usually write about.
And if only it *were* Democrats vs. Republicans”, instead of “Democrats and Republicans vs. us”.
I bet you’re fun on a date.
To conservatives,
That’s it.
And Solyndra.
*heh* Extremely Dangerous Americans…
Aloha, Eli…! Another masterful post…! *g*
I understand. I see some lines, important lines, as having been crossed, and offenses at this point sufficiently sustained and egregious, that I wholly reject what politicians say, the obvious reality of their lies and dissembling, the idea that they stand for something, really anything at all, I reject anything aside from the long, patient wait for what they sew to germinate and bloom for them.
I also reject the idea that the words “liberal” and “conservative” have any real meaning at this point, they are illusory terms residing in a fictional cultural life increasingly at odds with the real socioeconomic structure that keeps them going.
And I’m less fun on a date than you.
Aloha, CTut…! Thanks!
Well, there still exists a left-right political continuum in this country, or FDL would not exist. We have to call the two poles *something*, though I prefer “progressive”, as “liberal” has been co-opted by too many DLC/Blue Dog types and *slightly* leftier Obama loyalists.
Our political class are just honing their Orwellian doublespeak to co-opt what they can from the rabble in the streets. They have used this tool for years to muddy the waters, stir up the base and deflect the debate from real problems.
Conserva-tiff, Inc.
they suffer from intellectual Crone’s diss-ease.
Left and right are illusions in a single-dimensional fiction that impedes working people across the nation from being able to relate to each other better. Political reality insofar as we discuss the breakdown of ideological views and cultural bents across the population of working people is a complex multi-dimensional reality currently manifested in the fractured, separated, demoralized, and dis-integrated working American population.
FDL resides in a nexus of political views and cultural backgrounds amongst individuals, but there is no single, aligned axis here, not at all.
If anything, web sites like this exist easily because so many of the people need not hear each other’s voices, visit each other’s part of the country, see how each of us lives, what we look like, how we see the world each day. FDL is aligned on some issues. It’s a good site, I like it, but it certainly does not represent any unified singular axis, no, not at all.
Also, the word “progressive” has a much earlier history. Hear it in your mind just as you remember a deco masterpiece like “Metropolis” or as you hear an imagined voice of Samuel Clemens reading one of his written pieces aloud. It’s an old word.
The problem with our Brands is that the vocabulary we use has been corrupted.
We are facing a Radical Right Wing assault from both parties and only a Radical Left Wing response from the People will counter that assault.
Yep, I know. I was oddly and indirectly reminded of it yesterday when reading this 1911 compendium of predictions for the 21st century, and marveling at the utopian optimism of the blurb on education:
ELI!!! Recently I’ve been thinking that the inscription on the Statue of Liberty should be replaced with a line from Dante’s Inferno “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
BLUETOE!!!
That probably would be more honest these days…
It’s amazing just how much clearer the obvious goals for people were so long ago, when we lacked mass media let alone an internet. It’s also so much clearer reading what you cite there just how much more in contact with the reality of poverty and struggle people might have been, to have a published statement on future hopes and progress reflect a deep desire to escape the most impacting consequences of poverty. Today, after we have attained the economic capacity to escape the worst consequences of poverty, we don’t seem to so easily grasp these easy ideals you see in that writing.
Nice.
In Zinn, he remarks about the large percentage of immigrants who returned to their own countries bc those were better than here.
Corrupt crony capitalism is the only kind there is or ever has been.
U.S. citizens, or more appropriately “consumers”, no longer see themselves as instruments of historical change but merely the victims of historical forces of which they feel they have no control over. What fight is left is directed at 3rd world nations, the ever present “bogeyman” that “threaten” capitalism and empire and with ever climbing poverty there will always be enough cannon fodder to wage wars of choice in the service of the plutocracy.
In my post about it on my home blog, I indirectly noted the irony that while the people of 1911 couldn’t even conceptualize things like nuclear power, genetic engineering, cellphones, or internet, it seems that *we* can no longer conceptualize the idea of taking a dramatic, decisive step to help people escape from poverty.
Finally, these “slightly leftier” Obama loyalists … I assume you mean people in and around his administration, or in higher Congressional roles? Can you identify any of them, and what they have actually done to be “slightly leftier”, and what that term itself might mean therefore?
For my part the only change from George Bush I have seen since Obama took office is a reduction of the emphasis on religion. Other than that, Obama has only continued the Bush administration’s policies, withdrawing from economically non-viable wars just as Bush would have had to do, bailing out banks and the plutocracy the way Bush started, pursuing a corporate-profits-first vision of health care “reform”, doing nothing to improve public education, he’s married himself to bankers, bluebloods, and capitalists as closely as he could assuming that wasn’t the case all along, and he’s carried on military missions involving drones, assassinations, and covert warfare. He’s always emphasized corporate profit and interests at all turns and he really hasn’t acted as if he wanted to be anything other that what Mitt Romney offers to be for us.
So when you point to “leftier” Obama “loyalists” I really wonder if you are thinking of anyone with any power in his administration. The few people he forwarded who had any real determination to move things “left” (Van Jones, Elizabeth Warren, etc.) he threw under the bus the moment they became an unpleasant dinner party topic in Washington DC.
Well put.
“Escape from poverty?” Are you some kind of socialist? Without the ever present fear of destitution what motivation will anyone have for improving their lot?
No, I’m actually referring more to his loyalists in the online and progressive org worlds, who are far enough to the left to have similar policy goals to ours, but not far enough to the left to be dissatisfied with Obama’s miserable failure to deliver on just about any of them.
Heh. Conservatives are the people who tell you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps while making sure you can’t afford boots.
I learned today that Rev. Jermiah Wright had married the Obamas and baptized their daughters. That O rejected him so easily says buckets about O’s lack of character.
Commies want to amputate the puppeteers.
How can you say Obama has done little for education? Why just this week the national media was touting how on MLK Day he help build some bookshelves in a Washington D.C. school. We have to be content with small steps because the “alternative” is just too awful to contemplate. Is this a great system or what? If you’re a 1%er.
*Bows To The Master*
Eli !
*heh* Eli is a flaming Fire Bagger, if I ever did see one…! ;-)
Even if you have the boots it’s hard to pull yourself up when “they” have their boots on your throat.
Petro !
…when “they” have their jackboots on your throat.
Edited for clarity…! ;-)
Newt claims that a Romney victory is a defeat for Conservatives & “real capitalism”.
I’m frankly disheartened the ReThugs can’t seem to nominate a more entertaining pair than McCain/Palin …
What is “crony capitalism”? i bet its the kind of capitalism that democrats practice, you know like affirmative action, environmental and health regulations etc., etc., but seriously, is it like “globalism” or “finance capitalism”? because conservatives love that shit. how can they be agaisnt it? more evidence, and more is always welcome, that there has been a ground shift, or rather that its in the process of shifting under our feet, or otherwise rightwing nutzos and hangers on like palin, would not feel the need to find a way to jump on the bandwagon, albeit in a phony, cynical, completely undefineable way,a’la “crony capitalism”. Thanks for this post Eli, this is very important acutally, under its mask of hilarious. controling the language and defining the boudaries of the argument are the ways people who have a weak argument, make it a winning argument.
Shorter conservative crony capitalism argument: “It is necessary to destroy the government in order to save it.”
This is really blockbuster good news to have conservatives finally admitting the truth. Now, if they can figure out how to blame ACORN for crony capitalism, they’ll be golden!