This is the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC out of Washington
Township, reaching metro Philly and South Jersey, sponsored by Opednews.com . Where you're
going to get news that you won't see in the mainstream media, where you get the
kind of news that the mainstream media blocks from the people that the
mainstream media won't cover.
Now, Paul, back to this article, While Left and Right Fight, Power
Wins - I want to start it off and then you can talk about it. What you wrote was, "My experience with the
American Left and Right leads to the conclusion that the Left sees private
power as the source of oppression, and government as the countervailing and
rectifying power, while the Right sees government as the source of oppression,
and a free and unregulated private sector as a countervailing and rectifying
power." A beautiful, clear way of saying
that! "Both are concerned with
restraining the power to oppress, but they take opposite positions on the
source of the oppressive power and remedy."
And you say, "The Right is correct that government power is the
problem, and the Left is correct that private power is the problem. Therefore, whether power is located within
the government or private sectors cannot reduce, constrain, or minimize power.
" And you talked about how the Founding
Fathers had a solution, that it didn't work, and now we've got accumulation of
new dictatorial powers in the Executive Branch in the name of protecting us
from terrorists, and with deregulation's creation of powerful corporations to
big to fail. Can you talk a bit more
about this?
Paul Craig
Roberts: (laughs) Well Rob, you covered it about as clearly as
-
Rob Kall: Well, OK, yeah, you said it beautifully and
clearly -- so, what's the answer? The
Left and Right are up against each other, do you see a way that the Left and
Right can find some common ground?
Paul Craig
Roberts: I don't know. They don't seem to be able to. They're locked -- you know, generals fight the
last war, and so does the Left and Right.
Now, there have been different times in our history when there was too
much private power, not enough government power as a countervailing force. the roaring twenties, and then we had
Roosevelt and the New Deal, and they put in financial regulation to put some
sort of social control over the private power, so things got in better balance. Then beginning with the Clinton
[administration], massive deregulations.
We had with Thatcher and in France the massive privatizations of State
companies. With Clinton, this moved so
far that they repealed the Glass-Steagall act, which had separated commercial
from investment banking. Once that happened,
we got the financial crisis.
In other words, from Roosevelt giving us some kind of a balance, what
really happened was the entrenched bureaucracy then got more and more arrogant
and abusive, and became gratuitously interfering in people's lives and in
business. I can remember, for example,
in the 80s OSHA would go around -- there are a lot of small businesses, there's
only one door in, one door out; OSHA would go around and fine people because
they didn't have an exit sign over the only door (laughs). This is an abuse.
There were other cases. In
Florida, for example, there was a father and son, and they had a State permit
to build a house, and they built the house, and the Federal Government declared
that they had built on a wetland and put them in prison for building a house
where they had a permit to build! This
is going too far. And other
environmental regulations went too far:
they gave farmers and ranchers lots of trouble for cleaning out the drainage
ditches for re-fencing property. They
claimed The Navigable Waters Act of the United States, and they claimed that
cleaning out a drainage ditch could lead to pollution of navigable waters, even
though there's no navigable water in sight!
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