Dear Senator Whitehouse:
I am writing to thank you for your speech to the Senate on June 17 regarding corporate influence in government. However, I do not think you went far enough in your proposals.
I support your idea that government agencies should be cleaned out "whenever an agency or element of government is no longer credibly independent of the industry and businesses it is intended to regulate." But the problem is knowing when that point has been reached. It seems that we learn of the marriage of convenience between regulators and those they regulate only after a crisis, at which point the damage inflicted is so great as to cause major disruption to the entire country, not to mention its impact on the rest of the world. Are you suggesting regular audits of government regulators? Who should do these audits: the Department of Justice or the GAO – and shouldn’t the GAO have been doing this all along? And how do we circumvent the possible collusion of the auditors and those they audit?
I would suggest an even simpler solution: get rid of the gross inequalities in wealth, and by extension, in power between the entities that need regulating and those that do the regulating. In short, bring back the tax rates, adjusted for inflation, that existed before the "Reagan Revolution." Get rid of the incentives for the obscene accumulations of wealth that allow a tiny percentage of people to wield so much power that they can direct the economy to their advantage at will. Take away the ability of these monetarily bloated behemoths to dangle shiny objects in front of the eyes of government regulators. Right now, they know that the lure of similar wealth and perquisites to many of these comparatively grossly underpaid workers can encourage them to turn a blind eye to what is in the best interests of the country. Take that power away from them.
The erosion of the progressive tax rates that once made this country a model of middle/working class prosperity has created a monster master class of outrageously rich greed-grubbers whose wealth is all out of proportion their numbers. Not only has this gross accumulation of wealth robbed our economy of the capital needed to expand industry and improve the lives of Americans of modest means, but it has also robbed those same Americans of any trust in its government to stand by them in the way of the growing plutocracy that threatens to enslave all of us.
This is a simple solution because it does not involve creating any new government agencies or redirecting the focus of any that now exist. I acknowledge, however, the political difficulty given the rabid opposition of the republican party to anything that smacks of socialism. But I believe that we have reached a tipping point in our history, and that the no-tax, free-market policies of the past thirty years have proven themselves disastrous for this country. It is time draw lessons from what has worked in the past in comparison to what hasn’t. I would like to believe that we can recapture, in new ways, what made this country so great to the common man and woman: a level playing field where the rules apply to everyone.
Thank you for indulging me and letting me vent.
Sincerely,
Marleycat