"Our rulers deliver favors to their clients. These range from the Native American casino operators, to Appalachian coal companies, to Saipan sweatshop operators, to the would-be oil field operators of Iraq. They include the misanthropes who led the campaign to abolish the estate tax; Charles Schwab, who suggested the dividend tax cut of 2003; the "Benedict Arnold" companies who move their taxable income offshore; and the financial institutions behind last year's bankruptcy bill. Everywhere you look, public decisions yield gains to specific private entities.
"For in a predatory regime, nothing is done for public reasons. Indeed, the men in charge do not recognize that "public purposes" exist. They have friends, and enemies, and as for the rest-we're the prey...
"The predatory model can...help us understand why many rich people have come to hate the Bush administration. For predation is the enemy of honest business. In a world where the winners are all connected, it's not only the prey who lose out. It's everyone who hasn't licked the appropriate boots. ..
"In a predatory economy, the rules imagined by the [school of] law and economics crowd [according to which people are rational, markets can be "contested," memory is good and information is adequate] don't apply. There's no market discipline. Predators compete not by following the rulers but by breaking them... A predatory economy is criminogenic: It fosters and rewards criminal behavior.."
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Galbraith's portrayal of "the predator state" --a virtual band of plundering thieves-- helps to bring into focus the way the table has been slanted in America, thus leading all the chips to roll in that unjust direction --in which a gang of the richest get richer, the rest get fleeced, and the weave of the social fabric gets ripped apart-- depicted in the brushstrokes of Sam's handful of facts.
"For in a predatory regime, nothing is done for public reasons. Indeed, the men in charge do not recognize that "public purposes" exist. They have friends, and enemies, and as for the rest-we're the prey...
"The predatory model can...help us understand why many rich people have come to hate the Bush administration. For predation is the enemy of honest business. In a world where the winners are all connected, it's not only the prey who lose out. It's everyone who hasn't licked the appropriate boots. ..
"In a predatory economy, the rules imagined by the [school of] law and economics crowd [according to which people are rational, markets can be "contested," memory is good and information is adequate] don't apply. There's no market discipline. Predators compete not by following the rulers but by breaking them... A predatory economy is criminogenic: It fosters and rewards criminal behavior.."
Galbraith's portrayal of "the predator state" --a virtual band of plundering thieves-- helps to bring into focus the way the table has been slanted in America, thus leading all the chips to roll in that unjust direction --in which a gang of the richest get richer, the rest get fleeced, and the weave of the social fabric gets ripped apart-- depicted in the brushstrokes of Sam's handful of facts.
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