Ed Foster writes:
In medieval days, a peasant could be executed for stealing a crust of bread, while the lord of the manor could abuse every peasant in sight without fear of legal retribution. Does it strike you that we seem to be reverting more and more to a similar society, one in which the punishments no longer fit the crimes?The wingnuts love zero tolerance. It matches their angry and vengeful God.
But, to serve the limitless greed of Republican crony capitalists, it gets worse.
Even if we were to believe the exaggerated estimates the various copyright industries put forth for how much they lose to piracy each year, is it as much as the Enrons, Worldcoms, Adelphias, etc. cost us the economy? Notice also that while Congress is mandating increasingly severe punishments for the copyright equivalent of petty theft, it can't be bothered to do anything serious about crimes like identity theft that are costing millions of citizens billions of dollars. With powerful lobbying from the RIAA and MPAA, federal law enforcement agencies have no problem getting funding for enforcement of copyright crimes, but individuals who've had their bank accounts cleared out by a clever phishing scam have nowhere to turn.There are many other examples: the bankruptcy bill, the way drug enforcement imprisons the little fish while it catches and releases those with something to trade, attempts to end overtime, the end of the billionaire playboy tax, tax reductions that prefer investment to labor, the effort to end Social Security, media emphasis on sensational crime over much greedier financial misbehavior, the continued destruction of unions, and on and on.
So, fellow peasants, had enough of droit du seigneur?
Originally posted on DailyKos.
1 comment:
Corporations are...
... the enemy only when they corruptly and greedily pervert our society, our politics, and our fair markets. Does that ever happen?
Corporations currently have way too much power, aided and abetted by official corruption as worst exemplified by Tom DeLay. The lobbying culture is part of it. Examples of their excessive power:
# Any copyright legislation passed in the past 20 years, particularly the Mickey Mouse protection act passed with purchased Democratic support
# The recent disgusting bankruptcy bill (debt peonage, said Paul Krugman)
Corporations are amoral and only serve an economy for all if they are carefully hemmed in by laws and regulations. (Note: People need to be hemmed in, too, though not all are amoral.) It's a delicate balancing act.
Even most business people know that regulation is essential to working capital markets. If accounting is not transparent and it's clear that klepto-capitalism dominates, what fool would continue to invest? Stack that up against the huge self-entitlement that corporate officers feel nowadays when they loot the companies they "lead".
The only way for Democrats to return to government is to give voice to the concerns of people, whose needs should come before those of corporations. Who could argue with that? Corporations were invented as an instrument of betterment for people. It's just that they are only bettering a few people in today's economy.
That's going to take class warfare, and too bad if you don't have the stomach for it. But the middle class are getting killed, and it's time we fought back.
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