Clearly, What America Needs Now Is Another Deregulatory Binge-- After All The Multimillionaires Who Would Benefit Create The Jobs And Wealth, Right?

There are some good people in Congress-- at least 10. For the most part, though, it is a grubby place filled with self-serving hacks like Ken Calvert, Jerry Lewis and Gary Miller, three southern California real estate swindlers who have enriched themselves mightily while "serving." Yesterday's NY Times editorialized about the need to not allow crooks like these three to weaken-- effectively eliminate-- the "quasi-independent" and relatively effective Office of Congressional Ethics. It's already recommended action against 13 lawmakers and pressure is building in the House to shut it down. We all like being the final arbiter of our own behavior, but only Congress gets away with it-- Congress and the Big Businesses that pay Congress enough to extend the same courtesy to them (i.e., deregulation).

Reading the Times editorial and thinking about how Members of Congress stack the deck for themselves and those who bribe them, helped me recall a page in Thom Hartmann's edifying book, Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture and how he tried reminding readers that the economy is here to serve society as a whole, not just the owners who are able to manipulate society and it's rules for their own selfish purposes.

The Reagan-era "greed is good" mantra so corrupted us that we celebrated moments like June 3, 2006, when representatives of five of the Bush Administration regulatory agencies held a press conference in which they brought pruning shears to "cut regulations" from the federal code on banks that issue mortgages. [Do you need Hartmann or I to tell you where they led-- and quite directly?] One, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, as Paul Krugman pointed out in a December 21, 2007, New York Times column, brought a chainsaw to the party. [And, no, Gilleran hasn't been asked to face up to the responsibility for the billions of dollars in household wealth he destroyed or the millions of lives he impoverished by serving the goals of his corporate masters. Who would ever even think of such a thing?]

The cultural assumption underlying this behavior was that greed, rather than community, was the ultimate regulator.

As Krugman notes, Ayn Rand devotee Alan Greenspan was in charge of the Fed at the time, and:

In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”

It’s no wonder, then, that he brushed off warnings about deceptive lending practices, including those of Edward M. Gramlich, a member of the Federal Reserve board. In Mr. Greenspan’s world, predatory lending-- like attempts to sell consumers poison toys and tainted seafood-- just doesn’t happen.

As a result of a twenty-eight-long deregulatory spree, we've reached the point where it's painfully difficult for government to undo the damage done to our economic infrastructure by a few thousand millionaires and billionaires playing Monopoly.

It's why Krugman's warnings about the siren call (for even more radical Randian deregulation) of another dangerous Ayn Rand disciple, an even more clueless one than Greenspan-- and one Wall Street is determined to eventually install in the White House-- Paul Ryan are so important to pay close attention to.

DeLay got a lot of blame for the era of corruption that marked the time he was in control of the House-- Denny Hastert always just a front man-- and he deserved it. But it certainly wasn't all DeLay. His predecessor, Dick Armey, may have been less concerned about graft and corruption for it's own sake and more caught up in ideological fanaticism-- while Armey was screaming about privatization of Social Security and how to engineer the extermination of the Palestinian people, DeLay was figuring out how to line his own pockets-- but that doesn't mean Armey was exactly a model for ethical probity. Armey was a severe hypocrite and sex pervert who routinely sexually harassed his female students when he was a teacher and any woman unfortunate enough to have worked for him. Although he was in line for the Speakership, Republicans passed over both he and his deputy dawg, DeLay-- neither being ethically plausible-- for a political nonentity and intellectual lightweight, Denny Hastert.

Today Armey is the ghastly figure behind the curtain of the Tea Party movement, Mr. Astroturf himself. Few of the teabaggers-- who almost have to be a moron and historically ignorant to be admitted to teabaggery-- know that Armey's political career was largely built around pushing for cheap imported labor for his corporate backers. "Illegal immigration," one of the biggest deals in Teabag World, was always something Armey tried to protect. Yesterday he was lecturing mainstream conservative Republicans to get behind Paul Ryan's radical privatization schemes and implying that if they don't, he can turn the Teabaggers loose on them!

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), now the chairman of Freedomworks, a major backer of the Tea Party movement, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the modern Republican Party's lack of courage is a "big reason" for widespread frustration with both Democrats and Republicans.

Armey cited the GOP's distance from a controversial budget plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) as a prime example of what is behind the grass-roots uprising known as the Tea Party movement, and how that movement could spell trouble for both parties come November.

Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, has called for the partial privatization of Social Security and for health insurance vouchers instead of traditional Medicare benefits for Americans over 55 as a way to reduce the long-term deficit.

But Ryan's plan has been slow to pick up steam, as GOP leaders have kept their distance and only 13 Republicans in total have signed on as cosponsors.

"The fact that he has only 13 cosponsors is a big reason why our folks are agitated against the Republicans as well as the Democrats," said Armey, who called Ryan "probably the most creative-thinking and most courageous guy in Washington."

"The difference between being a cosponsor of Ryan and not is a thing called courage," Armey said. "And we have watched American public policy dominated by Democrats that don't care and Republicans that don't dare for a long time."

That, Armey said, could result in significant losses for Republicans as well as Democrats during the midterm elections.

"We're saying to the Republican Party, get some courage to stand up for the things that are right for this country. Don't stand there and hide from the issue because you're afraid of the politics," Armey said. "The issue of public policy that governs the future of my children is more important than your politics, and if you can't see that we'll replace you."