Reply #6: And if you liked that, here's what Conason says today...

[Octafish]

Bush’s Tangled Past Is Relevant Today

George W. Bush cannot raise his hand against the ‘malefactors of great wealth,’ because they’re his backers, his friends.

by Joe Conason

People who never wondered about the "relevance" of the Whitewater story now claim to be puzzled by journalistic interest in Arbusto Oil, Spectrum 7, Harken Energy, the Texas Rangers and other curious artifacts of George W. Bush’s business career. These same people, who once obsessed over the details of an obscure Arkansas land development from the 1970’s, ask why anyone should care today how the President made money 10 or 15 years ago. (Actually, the sale of the Rangers to a powerful Texas investor—which made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire—occurred just four years ago.)

Let’s assume, perhaps naïvely, that these peevish questions are sincere. And let’s try to answer them by starting with a few general observations.

This country has not one but two economic systems: free enterprise for the many, and crony capitalism for the few. This is hardly a new discovery; crooked and connected insiders have always fattened their wallets at public expense, as Kevin Phillips illustrates in great detail in Wealth and Democracy.

But the decay of the crony system is suddenly strangling free enterprise and endangering the nation’s future. The sanctions that were expected to discourage excessive indebtedness, management self-dealing and fraudulent accounting have failed; the insiders sidestepped the risks and assigned them to the rest of us. That’s what ordinary investors are learning every day when they glance up from their horrifying mutual-fund statements to read how much the white-collar looters took when they absconded.

CONTINUED...

http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=6128