The four business gangs that run the US

Sydney Morning Herald:
The four business gangs that run the US














http://m.smh.com.au/business/the-four-business-gangs-that-run-the-us-20121230-2c1e2.html

The four business gangs that run the US

ROSS GITTINS December 31, 2012
Illustration: Michael Mucci.

IF YOU'VE ever suspected politics is increasingly being run in the
interests of big business, I have news: Jeffrey Sachs, a highly
respected economist from Columbia University, agrees with you - at least
in respect of the United States.

In his book, The Price of Civilisation,
he says the US economy is caught in a feedback loop. ''Corporate wealth
translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate
lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry;
and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts,
deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry.
Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,'' he says.

Sachs says four key sectors of US business exemplify this feedback loop
and the takeover of political power in America by the
''corporatocracy''.

First is the well-known military-industrial complex. ''As [President]
Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the
linkage of the military and private industry created a political power
so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless
wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars
since then,'' he says.

Second is the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the
financial system towards control by a few politically powerful Wall
Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan
Stanley and a handful of other financial firms.

These days, almost every US Treasury secretary - Republican or Democrat -
comes from Wall Street and goes back there when his term ends. The
close ties between Wall Street and Washington ''paved the way for the
2008 financial crisis and the mega-bailouts that followed, through
reckless deregulation followed by an almost complete lack of oversight
by government''.




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