Corporate entitlements fail the test again

Now that everyone knows the economy is in the toilet (after years of denial), is it fair to say the free market is to blame?

If you use the definition normally employed by our corporate overlords, yes. But if you break down the phrase, what does it mean? There's nothing free about the free market as we know it. It's free for Wall Street greed merchants - but not for us.

While the financial services industry and other Big Business interests enjoy a lack of regulation, we're hamstrung by price-gouging, work-for-less laws, and various legislatively imposed mandates that dictate how we spend our hard-earned money.

Under corporatism, that paradoxically is called a free market.

Corporatism means entitlements for Big Business - in the form of corporate welfare and a friendly regulatory climate. This has contributed heavily to the foreclosure crisis - one of the latest wrinkles in modern America's chronic recession.

In the phony "reform" binge of the '90s, the government actually created a new entitlement: the so-called "right" for Big Business to be free of regulation - and for dealings with consumers to seesaw in the corporation's favor by default. At the same time, it effectively created a new restriction for the public: deference to Corporate America.

Everything was to be within Big Business's framework. From your home to your job to your schooling to your mere existence, everything was ultimately to depend wholly on the whims of the corporate empire.

The greed merchants gave lip service to supporting smaller government. But they actually favored it only when it benefited them. They and their followers blasted poor families who received welfare - yet they demanded corporate welfare for themselves.

What's amazing though is that Wall Street and our political "leaders" use the economic crisis caused in part by corporate welfare as a pretext for yet more corporate welfare! That's exactly what the bailout is.

And you know what? After Bush signed the bailout bill into law on Friday, I bet things will be even worse next year than they are now. It's a vicious cycle: Greed kills the economy, leading Wall Street to demand more money from the taxpayers, which makes matters worse, which leads to bigger demands, and so on.

It's a shame this vicious cycle hasn't ground to a much-needed halt.