Thom Hartmann: Corporate Tentacles

Thom's blog
Corporate Tentacles

Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, just after Rep. Joe Barton's "off the wall" apology to BP, laid out how deeply "corporate tentacles" have reached into our regulatory agencies in Congress. He said, "The scope, the extent, the insidious nature of corporate influence in regulatory agencies of government--this question of regulatory capture--is something we should attend to here. It is the lesson, and it raises the question beyond the Minerals Management Service: How far does this corporate influence reach into our agencies of government? The wealth of the international corporate world is staggering. The five biggest oil companies just this quarter posted profits of $23 billion--that is a 23 with 12 zeroes behind it--in just one quarter." And now that the Supreme Court has ruled that these foreign companies have full human rights under the First Amendment here in the USA, they're free to drop billions into the upcoming or 2012 elections. Meet your new government - corporate rule.

http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2010/06/corporate-tentacles

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A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.