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Kathianne
01-07-2011, 04:13 PM
Getting harder and harder to think the Tea Parties aren't a real threat, eh? Links and more at site:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-turn/2011/01/crony_capitalism.html


Posted at 11:15 AM ET, 01/ 7/2011
Crony capitalism
By Jennifer Rubin

Big Labor and Big Business are teaming up to protect Big Government. As Greg Sargent put it yesterday, in describing the budding alliance between the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce: "The two groups rarely agree on anything, and frequently target each other in the harshest of terms, but one thing they agree on is that they don't want the House GOP to make good on its threat to subject highway and mass-transit programs to budget cuts."

This is a golden opportunity for Republican lawmakers and the 2012 contenders. Independent voters mistrust both government and Wall Street, and the sight of those entities in cahoots with organized labor should alarm them as well as Tea Partyers.

Then you have to add into the mix the cast of characters in the White House. There is William Daley, whom Michael Crowley at Time describes as follows:


Daley, 62, is an archetypal face of the 1990s pro-business wing of the Democratic Party. He joined the Clinton administration in 1993 with the specific mission of helping the president pass the North American Free Trade Agreement over strong opposition from labor and Congressional liberals. As Commerce Secretary Daley also led the fight for permanent normal trade relations with China, also anathema to the unions. Labor animus was so great that, when Al Gore named Daley his 2000 presidential campaign manager in 2000, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney declared Daley's positions had put him "squarely on the opposite side of working families." (Daley may be best remembered from that campaign for his dramatic appearance onstage at 3:10 am on election night in Nashville to declare that Gore had called George W. Bush and withdrawn his earlier concession in anticipation of a recount.)

Since then Daley has been making a handsome living as a corporate executive, most recently on the executive board of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and on the boards of several other big corporations, including Boeing and the giant drug maker Merck.

Republicans were quick to point out that Daley was on the board of Fannie Mae, the government-owned mortgage lender that contributed mightily to the financial meltdown...