In this administration, the efforts to regulate the excess of the banks and Wall Street, have been severely impaired by, not the Left, but the RIGHT. The RIGHT wants to remove most regulations from Corporations, including EPA regulations, in order to give a "blank check" to big corporations.
When corporatism rears its ugly head it does so through legislation not through the lack of legislation. The regulation you are admiring just might be corporatism. But the lack of regulation will not be corporatism. Corporatism cannot exist without legislation/regulation.
The RIGHT is waging a war on the Unions, because Unions give too much bargaining power to individual workers, which interferes with the corporations need to control their workers and provide them ONLY with the minimum of their demands.
Unions are in fact a very big corporations. The illegitimate support of unions IS corporatism.
Those three recent exemples are enough to convince me that, although the majority of politicians on both sides of the aisle will bend over backward to please their corporate sponsors, the Right is obviously more committed to giving corporations what they want
You were supposed to say that my giving an equal number of examples was not proof that the amount of corporatism is equal. If you had you would be right. At best it was proof that it happens on both sides but does not tell us by how much.
[As an analogy I could tell you that there are more odd numbers than even numbers by pointing out that 3,5,7, and 9 are all odd numbers. But that would not be good evidence.
I could even say that for every one even number you name (for example 4) there will be two odd numbers that follow it ( 5 and 7). But that too would not be proof.]
Then saying that you would know that just giving three examples (all false) against one side is also not proof that one side has more corporatism. If you want to count corporatism you have to have a way to measure it and then compare it.
The way corportism works is that a lobbyist gives money to a politician or a party and then that politician or party makes a law that favors the lobbyist. We could try to measure how the legislation favors which business and who made it but that would be pretty hard. Or we could get a rough picture of to whom the lobbyists give more money.
And what do we find;
" Democrats have taken more money from lobbyists than Republicans during the past 15 years, according to an independent analysis of campaign contributions. Since the 1990 election cycle, Democrats have accepted more than $53 million from lobbyists while Republicans have taken more than $48 million for their election campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Data provided by the nonpartisan group also shows that when Democrats controlled Congress in the early 1990s, they consistently hauled in more than 70 percent of the town’s lobbyist money. The group is a leading critic of Texas Republican Rep. Tom DeLay’s ties to lobbyists. “When the Democrats were in charge, they were getting an incredibly higher amount of lobbyist money compared to Republicans,” said Brian Nick, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Now that the tables are turned there is parity between the two parties.” Last year, for instance, Republicans took in 55 percent of the lobbyist money, which roughly corresponds to their majority share in Congress. "
What I am not saying is that dems take more money. What I am saying is that the party in power takes more money. The corporations are not stupid they don't give just to one party. They often give to both and they give more to whoever is more likely to give them what they want.
The corporation is slimy but it is far slimier for an elected representative to take that money and reward it with legislation.
