It’s corporate conservatism that is going to be the defining feature of the Bush White House.

Pushing beyond the corporate corrupting frontiers blazed by the Clinton administration, the Bush team is making clear that it intends to deliver on its campaign promises to strengthen Big Business’s grip over government policymaking.

The Bush cabinet is drawing on corporate executives as much or more than any previous administration. Andrew Card, set to be Bush’s chief of staff, moves to the White House from a posting as General Motors’ vice president. Previous to that position, he ran the auto industry’s lobby shop. Bush has tapped Paul O’Neill, chair of Alcoa, to head his Treasury Department. Bush crony Don Evans, the Commerce Secretary-designee, is CEO of Tom Brown, Inc., an oil company. Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush nominee to head the Pentagon, is former CEO of G.D. Searle and of General Instrument, and has held a variety of other top corporate posts. Bush’s nominee for Veterans Affairs Secretary, Anthony Principi, is president of a wireless telecommunications company. National Security Adviser-designate Condoleeza Rice is a member of the board of directors of Chevron (which has christened an oil tanker, the Condoleeza Rice) and Charles Schwab, and is a member of J.P. Morgan’s International Advisory Council.

Of course, both George W. Bush and D|ck Cheney (CEO of Haliburton, the oil services firm) themselves both come from the oil industry.

Bush’s transition team is dominated by high donors and corporate interests. Of the 474 individuals on the transition team, 261 made political contributions during the last election cycle, the Center for Responsive Politics reports—and 95 percent of the $5.3 million they contributed went to Republican candidates or the Republican Party.

Even more telling is the overwhelming corporate background of the transition team members.

Washington—Corporate lobbyists pulled off one of the most remarkable raids on the public treasury in American history when, just days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, they grabbed $15 billion in federal payments and loan guarantees for the airline industry.

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Eliminating the law, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, would mean that “some of these corporations will be able to pay little or no U.S. income tax, forever.” Worse, besides eliminating the alternative minimum tax for the future, the GOP “stimulus bill” includes a proposal to refund every cent that corporations have paid since 1986 under the alternative tax rule. The payouts to profitable corporations would be dramatic, and include rebates totaling billions of dollars to the likes of IBM, Ford, GM and GE. Huge payouts would also go to energy firms closely tied to President Bush and Vice President Cheney:

More than any administration in recent memory, the Bush administration has relied on corporate officials to staff key policymaking positions in the White House and major federal agencies. The role of former energy industry executives, consultants, and shareholders in the administration has received considerable scrutiny in connection with the Enron scandal and the operations of Vice President D|ck Cheney’s energy task force, but it is not widely known that the administration has even more extensive ties to the arms industry. A World Policy Institute review of major Bush appointees found that 32 major policy makers had significant financial ties to the arms industry prior to joining the administration, as compared with 21 appointees with ties to the energy industry (see Appendix A for the full listing).[55]

The companies that will benefit from the Bush nuclear policy are particularly well-connected within the administration, with numerous former executives, consultants, and shareholders in key positions involved in the implementation of nuclear weapons and missile defense policies.

Eighty-two of America’s largest and most profitable corporations paid no federal income tax in at least one year during the first three years of the George W. Bush administration — a period when federal corporate tax collections fell to their lowest sustained level in six decades. This is one of the many troubling findings of a major new report on corporate tax avoidance by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). The report covered 275 profitable Fortune 500 corporations, with total U.S. profits of $1.1 trillion over the three-year period.

“The sharp increase in the number of tax-avoiding companies reflects the results of aggressive corporate lobbying and a White House and a Congress eager to do the lobbyists’ bidding,” said Robert S. McIntyre, director of CTJ and co-author of the report with T.D. Coo Nguyen of ITEP.

Skyrocketing Corporate Tax Avoidance

In part due to a major expansion in corporate tax breaks in 2002 and 2003, along with continued failure by Congress and the White House to curb abusive corporate offshore tax sheltering, corporate tax avoidance has skyrocketed.

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Conclusion

The study points out that the losers from widespread corporate tax avoidance include:


• The general public, who must pay higher taxes, lose public services, or be responsible for big future debt burdens.


• Relatively disadvantaged industries and companies that will find it harder to compete for investment capital with tax-favored corporations.


• The U.S. economy, which is harmed by the distortions that corporate subsidies produce.


• State governments and state taxpayers, which see their corporate tax systems erode along with the federal system.


• The integrity and sustainability of the tax system as a whole.
  “Most of the loopholes and tax dodges that corporations use to slash their taxes may be technically ‘legal’ in the sense that the tax law allows them,” said McIntyre. “But remember that these subsidies got into the tax code because corporations lobbied to put them there. Saying something is ‘legal’ doesn’t mean that it’s right.”

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Originally posted by Theophilus

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Again, please don't dismiss the points too quickly.

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I am only dismissing the point that fiscal policy, care for the poor, or whether to commit military forces to Iraq is morally equivalent to abortion. I dismiss that point because the Church does.

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OK, now we are building strawmen. I'm not talking about cheese, Allen. I am talking about centralization of financial institutions and health care, redistribution of wealth, massive deficit spending, etc., not the fraction of 1% of the federal budget that goes to food programs.

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But, I would argue that military power is one of the FEW things that the government should be handling. That's clearly spelled out in the Constitution. The Constitution makes no provision for Government providing the general welfare, but rather promoting it, and the 9th and 10th amendments indicate its belief that the federal powers are to be limited, the state and local powers expanded (there's subsidiarity, yet again).

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In terms of military spending, I'd like to see the source for your point here. In particular, I'd like to see the comparison of spending as a % of GDP, because I think you will find other nations spend greater percentages of their GDP on military than the US does. We spend more because our economy is larger, and because we have deployed forces in Korea at the request of the UN and South Korea, Japan at the request of the Japanese, the Balkans at the request of the European Union, and of course in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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You might be interested to know that there is conservative outcry about the military deployment. Many conservatives, myself included, did not agree with the deployment of forces to Iraq at the time, thinking that fighting on two fronts was strategically unsound.

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However, once forces were committed, what I believed (and still believe) is that the fastest way to get them home is to resource them to be able to stabilize the country, restore infrastructure, and stand up Iraqi security forces that can deal effectively with sectional conflicts. I also believe that they should have body armor, armored trucks and Humvees, etc., in order to do that well. That costs money. The same people who complain about that budget for military spending are the ones who criticized the Bush administration for having ill-equipped soldiers vulnerable to IEDs.

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Finally, I should note that it is a matter of historical fact that it was the industrial and military build up of the WWII war economy that got us out of the Great Depression, not the New Deal.

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The only issue is whether it is clear cut or not.

Government has the responsibility to fall within the lines of proper morality in war - it doesn't get to make up the rules. Just as it cannot declare abortion morally licit, neither can it declare intrinsically immoral acts (targeting innocent civilians, use of immoral weapons, etc.) as being moral.

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Indeed this is true. But the last time innocent civilians was targeted as a matter of military policy was WWII.

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Both sides violated jus in bello by targeting civilians.

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The use of atomic weapons, OTOH, could be argued to have been a proportionate use of force vs. the alternative, which would have been an invasion of the Japanese home islands.

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Or, are you saying that the US government, as a matter of policy, currently advocates the killing of non-combatants? A pretty serious charge.

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I happen to know about the rules of engagement in Iraq, since my brother just got back from there. If anything, there was disproportionate risk on the side of soldiers. They were basically told, and rightly so, that they were to put themselves at greater risk before targeting civilians deliberately.

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Yes, it was speculative, but as he said, it was based on sound rational and moral reasoning. While it would never say what it says to a Catholic doctor in an abortion clinic as a general statement to all soldiers, it would say the same thing to any soldier who knowingly executed an innocent child or family.

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Of course it would. But that is a particular event, not a matter of political policy.

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There are, as I am sure you know, two components to JWT: jus ad bellum (which spells out criteria that are to be met before forces are deployed), and jus in bello (which spells out proper conduct of war). The former is a prudential moral judgment by the government. The latter is typically the province of military regulations, laws of land warfare, rules of engagment, and standard operating procedures. The former is whether to go to war, the latter is how to wage it. The former is more akin to public policy on abortion (with, yet again, the caveat that it is prudential moral judgment about the criteria, vs. something that is always wrong in all circumstances). The latter is more akin to an individual doctor performing an abortion in an environment where abortion is illegal.

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As a military officer, I was trained in the law of land warfare, and I was told it was my responsibility as a leader always to adhere to it. I was trained that illegal and immoral orders were to be disobeyed. My comrades in arms were trained similarly. Violations of the law of land warfare, where innocents are explicitly targeted and killed, are very rare. When civilian casualties take place, they are unintentional, and likely due to poor intelligence, poor fire discipline, and poor communication--the same things that are the leading causes of "friendly fire" deaths. And they are always regrettable and subject to formal inquiries to determine culpability.

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One other point on military spending. My Senior Thesis in college was about the Base Realignent and Closure Act, the law that led to formal reviews and closures of bases all over the world as a result of the end of the Cold War. When I analyzed multiple variable to identify the driver of whether a Rep or Senator voted in favor of closing a base (or not), party didn't matter. Scores by independent think tanks on ideology (conservative or liberal) didn't matter. Gender didn't matter. Prior military service didn't matter. Multiple other variables considered were not drivers of the decision. The only variable that popped was whether the base in question was located in the district or state of the member of Congress. The most liberal senator voted to keep a base open if it happened to be in his state. The most conservative senator would vote for closure of a base outside his state.

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I agree with Astralis that you don't really know true conservatism. As a conservative,

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I will tell you that the last 8 years of Bush were NOT conservatism.

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The last conservative we had as President was Reagan. He drove toward a "New Federalism" where states and local governments were more empowered, and his reduction of top end and capital gains jumpstarted the economy out of the stagflation of the Carter years.

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We have yet to see a single example of governments that were able to deficit spend their way out of severe economic downturns in human history except during times of war. Japan tried what our stimulus package is doing, and suffered an 18 year recession as a result. What we all need to grasp right now is that the bubble we lived in over the past 10 years was the aberration. It was a false bubble, shored up by Fed policies that artificially drove up real estate values and expanded access to credit to people who were not credit worthy. On top of that, banks had to all get in on the action to keep investors happy. Notice that the only banks still sound right now were the ones who did not jump on the subprime bandwagon, and many of them suffered short-term stock price issues as a result.

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But what these government policies fed on and catalyzed was an entitlement mentality. I deserve to own a home with a low-rate ARM, even if I can't afford it, since rates are so low. I deserve to put a second mortgage on my home to buy a new car, since interest rates are so low and I can deduct the interest on my taxes. Classic example of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. During the bubble, our savings rate was NEGATIVE as a country if you include credit in the calculation. Government monetary policy helped get us into this mess, and now government is telling us it can get us out of it by spending more than the GDP of the majority of countries in the world on short-term projects, leaving the bill for it (along with the Social Security of the boomers) for future generations to pay for. That is certainly not responsible, either.

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Again, please don't dismiss the points too quickly.

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To use your phrase, this is a matter of prudential judgment of who is doing better or worse. If we can't trust federal government to hand out cheese to the poor, then we sure as hell shouldn't be trusting them with tanks and nuclear warheads. We spend more in our military budget than the rest of the world combined, and massive amounts of fraud and waste, yet where is the conservative outcry?

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The only issue is whether it is clear cut or not.

Government has the responsibility to fall within the lines of proper morality in war - it doesn't get to make up the rules. Just as it cannot declare abortion morally licit, neither can it declare intrinsically immoral acts (targeting innocent civilians, use of immoral weapons, etc.) as being moral.

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Yes, it was speculative, but as he said, it was based on sound rational and moral reasoning. While it would never say what it says to a Catholic doctor in an abortion clinic as a general statement to all soldiers, it would say the same thing to any soldier who knowingly executed an innocent child or family.

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If we can't trust federal government to hand out cheese to the poor, then we sure as hell shouldn't be trusting them with tanks and nuclear warheads.

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We spend more in our military budget than the rest of the world combined, and massive amounts of fraud and waste, yet where is the conservative outcry?

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Originally posted by Theophilus

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... but please don't dismiss the points he is raising.

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In the Church's view they are not, Allen. Supporting issues that are prudential moral judgments is not on the same level as supporting that which is intrinsically immoral.

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I disagree. By reducing tax burdens on companies and by attempting to expand government support for faith based initiatives and state/local solutions, conservatives do seek solutions that are in line with subsidiarity. What they don't do is centralize responsibility in the single biggest and inefficient apparatus in US society--the Federal government.

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One cannot advocate abortion, which is intrinsically evil.

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But we need to ask why abortion is intrinsically evil. It is because the taking of an innocent human life is always wrong. Thus any unjust acts of war or aggression or use of immoral weapons are equally intrinsically evil and must be equally and unequivocally condemned.

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When you read the CCC, you see that the decision of whether the criteria for a just war are present rests with those entrusted with the common good--government. It is not entrusted to you, or to me. There are criteria that we must weigh the facts against, and judgment is necessary to determine if the criteria are met. Contrast this with abortion, which is always wrong.

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So, any unjust act of war is equivalent to an act of abortion or murder.

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Wrong, because, as Cardinal Ratzinger said, this isn't a matter of doctrine, as abortion is, and he is asking a speculative question here. The Vatican said at the time that Catholic soldiers, for example, could in good conscience serve in Iraq. It will never say that about a Catholic doctor at an abortion clinic.

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Actions are intrinsically immoral under all circumstances do not hold the same moral weight as those that may or may not be immoral depending on prudential judgments. Full stop.

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Originally posted by alcovey

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Originally posted by Theophilus

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am not saying that Liberals are totally holy and conservatives are totally immoral, what i am saying is that it is pure hypocrisy to beat liberals over the head with Catholic Social Teaching and not Conservatives, because they are both equally as wrong.

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No, they are not.

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In your view they are not equally wrong, but please don't dismiss the points he is raising.

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One can disagree on means to take care of the poor--again, this falls within prudential moral judgment.

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While theoretically true, the fact is that conservative policies tend to overlook these areas to a very significant degree.

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One cannot advocate abortion, which is intrinsically evil.

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But we need to ask why abortion is intrinsically evil. It is because the taking of an innocent human life is always wrong. Thus any unjust acts of war or aggression or use of immoral weapons are equally intrinsically evil and must be equally and unequivocally condemned.

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Cardinal Ratzinger on the Abridged Version of Catechism

Q: Eminence, a topical question that in a certain sense is inherent to the Catechism: Does the Anglo-American war against Iraq fit the canons of a "just war"?

Cardinal Ratzinger: The Pope expressed his thought with great clarity, not only as his individual thought but as the thought of a man who is knowledgeable in the highest functions of the Catholic Church. Of course, he did not impose this position as doctrine of the Church but as the appeal of a conscience enlightened by faith.

The Holy Father's judgment is also convincing from the rational point of view: There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a "just war."

So, any unjust act of war is equivalent to an act of abortion or murder.

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Liberals, by and large, are pro-choice in the US and outside the US. Both sides do fail to live up to elements of CST, to be sure, but not all violations hold the same moral weight.

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Not all the same, very true, but taken in an aggregate, I can see how the case could be made for either side (assuming an either/or position).

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I am opposed to unfair corporate lobby interests which very much brutalize the poor

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