Enablers

I'm about to puke hearing Republican strategist Tony Jeffery on "The Situation Room" making a stirring speech about how Big Business is too powerful in Washington, and they're covering for China and its awful human rights record. Of course this was all Clinton's fault. Then he says we need to start squeezing on China, pressuring them with economic leverage. He apparently didn't realize that we borrow billions of dollars from China every month, and that if anything we're being slowly squeezed by them.

Who do you think is responsible for the rise of Big Business in America, which has led to the unquestioning endorsement of globalization, the outsourcing of millions of jobs to cheap labor markets (which, you remember, Gregory Mankiw, the President's top economic advisor, called "a good thing"), and the death of virtually every American manufacturing industry? Did this happen out of thin air? Or was it shepherded along by a decade of pro-business policies under a pro-business Republican Congress? I love how the Republicans are trying this pivot, positing themselves as the country of human rights as it pertains to, say, China, or Iraq (we're the liberators!), when they've been the party of Big Business since the Gilded Age.

These so-called idealist conservatives are bullshitting the public. They like to think that their pro-growth, anti-tax policies spring from some ethically pure fountain, but in actuality they end up pummeling the working class, and providing the greatest stratification between rich and poor in over a century. If Big Business is now the problem, well, guess who made it that way?

China should be pressured to reform their human rights abuses. And business groups should be pressured not to work with them, and certainly not to send jobs over to what amount to sweatshops. But don't try to kid me by standing up as some committed conservative and telling me that you're shocked, SHOCKED to find the power of corporate America in the corridors of power. Who do you think gave them the key?