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Monday, Feb 04, 2002

interest groupies

"From the advent of the New Deal until the 1980s, no such grand financial-and-political-corruption scandal took place, on either party's watch. That was partly because regulations were adopted, beginning in the 1930s, to prevent such corruption. The Reagan-Bush-Gingrich counterrevolution severely undermined those protections. A new way of thinking about business morality -- or rather, a very old way -- took over. The Gilded Age, "public be damned," caveat-emptor spirit of Commodore Vanderbilt came back from the dead, reincarnated as a self-evident, all-American truth. Indeed, the Enron saga exemplifies "the genius of capitalism," Bush II Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill recently proclaimed."

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