Noam Chomsky’s new book, Requiem for the American Dream: The Ten Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power, based on the film of the same name, is a primer in Chomsky’s analysis of the faults of the American political and economic system. Taking as its backbone the idea that “a significant part of the American Dream is class mobility: You’re born poor, you work hard, you get rich,” Chomsky systematically documents the many ways the system is rigged from top to bottom to ensure that corporations always win.
As journalist Chris Hedges notes in a blurb for the book, “Its power to write its own laws and regulations, Chomsky points out, has ultimately created a mafia economic system and a mafia political system that is exemplified in the rise to power of the demagogue Donald Trump.”
In this book excerpt, we present here Chomsky’s Principle #6: Running the Regulators.
Running the Regulators
If you look over the history of regulation — railroad regulation, financial regulation and so on — you find that, quite commonly, it’s either initiated by the economic concentrations that are being regulated, or it’s supported by them. And the reason is because they know that, sooner or later, they can take over the regulators and essentially run what they do. They can offer what amounts to bribes — offer them jobs or whatever it may be — it’s an advantage to the regulators to accommodate themselves to the will of the powerful. It happens naturally in many ways, and ends up with what’s called “regulatory capture.” The business being regulated is in fact running the regulators. The banks and
— source billmoyers.com | Noam Chomsky | May 11, 2017