Greg Palast, from his book Vulture's Picnic:
Regulation, the rules they tell you to hate, are the way we apply democracy to the economy. Votes versus dollars. I think you can understand that. Yes, I know, the government is deeply fucked up. That's the U.S. government, the UK government, and let's not even talk about the Chinese, Malaysian, and Tanzanian governments. People have been belly-aching about rules and regulations ever since Moses schlepped the first ten down from Mount Sinai.
But the Big Problem with government is that we don't have enough of it; the rules aren't tough enough to stop BP from blowing Cajuns to Kingdom Come. Or the rules are corrupted, made by politicians who are greased....
If you're screaming for the "guvmnt to git off" your back, I see your point. But you're still a loser, a cheap mark, a decoy duck, a dim, unwitting stooge for forces even more powerful than that ugly guvmint, a toy for powers who are shitting on you while telling you it's raining chocolate.
But then, who regulates the regulators? Well, Shaw Construction for one. Shaw is now constructing a plant that will turn plutonium from old atomic bombs into nuclear plant fuel. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission exempted Shaw's bombs-to-nukes plant from anti-terrorist security measures. A commissioner who voted for this take-a-terrorist-to-tea exemption, Jeffrey Merrifield, now works for Shaw. And the Secretary of Energy who promoted the plan, Spencer Abraham, is now Chairman of Areva USA, partner in Shaw Areva MOX Services.
Heinrich Himmler's solution to the problem of having to look into the eyes of your kill was to industrialize the process, using gas from I.G.Farben Corporation and ovens from Siemens AG. They just took the orders.
But there's a regulator of regulators we must rely on. The Fourth Estate.... That's our job as journalists, to rip away masks...."
Unfortunately, we have very few "reporters," and many "repeaters." Jon Stewart makes a living off of showing us the laziness of the Fourth Estate, who are usually asleep at the wheel. Greg Palast finds that he has to earn his living in the UK, because few on this side of the Atlantic will pay for this kind of investigative reporting. Yet we must rely on this Fourth Estate to regulate the regulators. Because the regulators sure won't.
I would have like to have a better ending for this, but there is no ending....
9:00 AM PT: UPDATE: Edited the titled to make it more appropriate.