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• Overhaul current accounting standards. After a disgraceful lapse of time, in April 2003 we finally got a chairman for the new accounting standards oversight committee.

• Dump Phil Gramm’s Financial Modernization Act, which repeals safeguards going back to the New Deal separating commercial and investment banking.

• Strengthen the independence of corporate boards, and use antitrust laws.

Not strictly a matter of corporate governance but still an urgent economic matter is pension reform. The Bush administration is again dragging us in exactly the wrong direction.

In thirty years of nonstop right-wing attacks on the very concept of government—government can’t do anything right, privatize everything, the free market works best—we think the greatest loss may be our sense of “us-ness.” Government has done great good for the people of this country over two centuries. To now pretend that it is a villain, that all institutions that have been built up so slowly over the years should be shredded in favor of some for-profit entity, strikes us as idiotic. We are now at a point when the Bush administration is proposing to end the forty-hour workweek (via some bills charmingly misentitled “Family Flexibility Act” by ending workers’ right to choose time-and-a-half pay for overtime, rather than comp time, to be selected at the company’s discretion).

Friends, it is time to become alarmed. This administration has gone far beyond anything they ever talked about in the 2000 campaign and far beyond anything that was ever voted for by us, or even mentioned to us. Our country, our government, our representatives, our responsibility. Government has become “them,” “those people.” Those people in Washington, those people at the state capitol, those people who take your money and never do anything for you. “I’m just not interested in politics.” “It’s boring.” “Oh, they’re all crooks.” “There’s nothing I can do.”

Politics is not something you can stand off and look at as though it were a television program or a painting on a wall and decide you really don’t much care for it. This is the warp and woof of your life: everything from how deep you will be buried when you die, to the textbooks your kids study in school, to the qualifications of the people who prescribe your eyeglasses or contact lenses, to your health, education, home insurance—you name it, what doesn’t government touch or set the rules for (or set no rules for)? It’s always fun to take one of these government bashers like Phil Gramm and just start counting how many ways they’ve been helped by government. Started when Gramm was born in a military hospital, owes his schooling to the taxpayers, his college education, his Ph.D., never had a job that wasn’t a government job, and so forth. So he dedicated his life to destroying all that, go figure.

The programs that help people are the ones being dismantled by ideological zealots. The programs that help corporations at the expense of the taxpayers are being left in place. “Un-American” is not a word we are given to tossing around, nor is “fascism”—we have spent years making fun of humorless liberals who hear the sound of jack-booted fascism around every corner. But there is something creepy about what is happening here, and the creepiest thing about it is that no one is talking about it. Mussolini said, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” That’s pretty much what we’re looking at here, and the results are not good for the people of this country, no matter what it is called. Jim Hightower has an old speech where he says all the reporting on the Dow Jones Average needs to be replaced with the Doug Jones Average, Doug Jones, Average American Report, how’s he doin’? How’s it goin’ for ol’ Doug?

So we went out and talked to ol’ Doug. He’s in big trouble. So are you. So are we all. Time to raise hell.

ENDNOTES

* Greg Abbott was a Karl Rove candidate for the Supreme Court and has now moved on to the office of attorney