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News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Washington: Open for business
The Christian Science Monitor has nice coverage of what we have been reporting for some time now: that the Bush administration and the GOP-controlled Congress are making Washington “more open to business than usual.” The article takes a big picture approach:
In what could be the most business-friendly climate since the days of President McKinley, President Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress are moving to extend corporate tax breaks, pass pension reforms, allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and limit lawsuits — including a settlement of asbestos litigation that has driven 70 companies into bankruptcy.
Most encouraging to business lobbyists are prospects for a less visible agenda: a lighter hand on regulation well into the future. The resignation of William Donaldson as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, effective June 30, sent a signal to Wall Street that the post-Enron crackdown on corporate accounting tricks may be winding down. His proposed replacement, Rep. Christopher Cox (R) of California, is expected to be open to business concerns.
”On balance, this is as good as it gets for business,” says John Pitney, a political scientist at the Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.
Good stuff. There is one argument worth quibbling about: Pitney’s argument that one factor making the pro-business, anti-public interest climate possible is widespread ownership of stock. Says Pitney, “A majority of Americans now own stock either directly or through pension funds. If you look at the electorate, it’s more than two-thirds. That’s much higher than it was a couple of decades ago. Increasingly, people don’t see a business agenda as separate from their own well being. They see it as part of their own.”
The truth is, for most Americans stock ownership has not really democratized business matters or closed the gap between the public interest and the business agenda. In a larger shift away from pensions and defined benefits for retirement, most of us have been given really only one option for retirement planning: the 401(k) and its equivalents. In those 401(k)s, we are given a menu of investment options, which boil down to mutual funds with varying degrees of risk in their investment patterns. Unlike wealthy Americans with their financial advisors and brokerage accounts, the rest of us have no real say in our investment portfolios: we have a more alienated relationship to the business agenda, that is, than the wealthy. We experience the consequences, however, as we receive our periodic statements and see our wealth declining or just beginning to return to 1990s levels. And we are not dumb: we know from the recent mutual fund scandals, as we all suspected without that empirical evidence, that the wealthy and privileged few have received special advantages that were not given to the rest of us (and that actually disadvantage us). The business agenda is quite hostile to the public interest; now, not only the air we breathe and the food we eat are at risk from the business agenda, but our retirement savings are as well.
Posted by Robert Shull
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