Sloshed
Does Bush have the willpower to cure our national hangover?
byArianna Huffington

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Who're you calling 'we'?
Newsflash: Everybody wasn't a 1990s daytrader
by Molly Ivins

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Is This America's Top Corporate Crime Fighter?
by William Greider

The cult of the CEO (as some business gurus now call it) promoted a celebration of testosterone and greed that has coarsened the culture and damaged economic life in severe ways. The adoration of corporate executives--those with a tough-guy disregard for their employees and social norms--seems to be receding now, along with stock prices and disappearing profits, but it does resemble a utopian cult, in which the followers obsessively worship a few strong guys said to possess superhuman qualities. The major media were taken in, but so were many sophisticates. The New Yorker published many admiring character studies of these new titans and even resurrected J.P. Morgan as a worthy icon for our time. Now that icons are falling all around, it seems daft that so many respectable, presumably rational citizens fell under the spell. The establishment's first line of defense- -"only a few bad apples"--has been completely crumpled by events. Leaders from finance are now solemnly promising "business ethics" reforms, anxious to restore "trust" in a system that runs on other people's money.
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Can Liberals Save Capitalism (Again)?
Seven decades after the Great Depression, Democrats have their work cut out for them.

In a few short weeks, America's political economy has been stunningly transformed. The Bush administration, the Republican Party and three decades of conservative ideology are facing a potential rout. Yesterday's conservative clichés are today's political embarrassments. Americans are getting a vivid if painful education about the limits of the marketplace and the salutary role of government. It will be a very long time before anyone can say with a straight face that markets always work better than governments. But market fundamentalism has been so ascendant for so long -- politically, culturally, financially -- that this is only the very beginning of an ideological sea change. It remains to be seen whether liberals will manage to save capitalism from itself, for the second time in the past 70 years.
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'Corporate Socialism'
By Ralph Nader

The relentless expansion of corporate control over our political economy has proven nearly immune to daily reporting by the mainstream media. Corporate crime, fraud and abuse have become like the weather; everyone is talking about the storm but no one seems able to do anything about it. This is largely because expected accountability mechanisms -- including boards of directors, outside accounting and law firms, bankers and brokers, state and federal regulatory agencies and legislatures -- are inert or complicit.

When, year after year, the established corporate watchdogs receive their profits or compensation directly or indirectly from the companies they are supposed to be watching, independent judgment fails, corruption increases and conflicts of interest grow among major CEOs and their cliques. Over time, these institutions, unwilling to reform themselves, strive to transfer the costs of their misdeeds and recklessness onto the larger citizenry. In so doing, big business is in the process of destroying the very capitalism that has provided it with a formidable ideological cover.
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thanks to Ethel the Blog