It’s those other big corporations dragging down America!

Here’s the very first question from the Democrats’ recent radio debate (the pie-chart one):

The first question is for Governor Dean.

Forty years ago, in his State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty. Both Democrats and Republicans have controlled the White House and Congress since then. Why are so many Americans still living in poverty?

DEAN: I think a lot of it has to do with the extraordinary corporate alliances and rapaciousness that this president has encouraged since he's been president.

Let’s take a moment to process the vapidity of that response. OK? OK. Now, some quotes by P.J. O’Rourke in “Parliament of Whores”

You might think big business would be hard to define in this day of leveraged finances and interlocking technologies. Not so. Big business is every kind of business except the kind from which the person who’s complaining about big business draws his pay. Thus the “Rock around the Rain Forest” crowd imagines record companies are a cottage industry. The Sheen family considers movie conglomerates to be a part of the arts-and-crafts movement, something like the Morris dancers. And Ralph Nader thinks the wholesale lobbying of Congress through huge tax-exempt advocacy groups is similar to being a migrant farm worker.

Business and industry – trade and manufacture – are inherent in civilization. Every human society, no matter how wholesomely primitive, practices as much trade and manufacture as it can figure out. For good reason. It is the fruits of trade and manufacture that raise us from the wearying muck of subsistence and give us health, wealth, education, leisure and warm, dry rooms with Xerox machines that allow us to be the ecology-conscious, selfless, committed, splendid individuals we are.

Here’s more from P.J. in the chapter on ecology (this Amazon feature is amazing!)

I always cringe when I hear populist types like Al Gore and Howard Dean try to the paint “big business” as the scourge of society. Big business is society. Mammoth corporations make that sheetrock on your wall to keep you warm. Oil companies provide the gas for your VW touring van. And if you get sick, thank heaven those pharmaceutical companies developed a drug to help treat your illness.