Earth out of balance: The challenge of controlling corporate greed

Earth out of balance: The challenge of controlling corporate greed | Grist
And when the suits start to change -- (the other suits start arming)
"....love it when Ron Paul says, “If we get rid of government, freedom will sweep right in.” That’s just not what happens. What happens is that a bunch of elephants stampede in because they’re in a position to take advantage of it. Meanwhile, if you get government out of the way, the people who need government, they don’t have it.
There’s this myth that government doesn’t belong in the marketplace. If that were true, there would be no canals, no railroads, no highways, no internet. The government was a critical partner in many of the biggest innovations in U.S. history.
But if you buy into that for 20 or 30 years, and you say, “smaller government, smaller government programs,” who gets squeezed by that? It’s the cities. And the problem is that, as that happens, it accelerates. Kids drop out of school. Neighborhoods decay. Businesses leave. The tax base goes down. Cops get fired. Teachers get fired. It’s a cycle of pain...
Today, Rothkopf is CEO of both Garten Rothkopf, a global consulting firm that specializes in energy and climate issues, and FP Group, the company that publishes Foreign Policy magazine. He is also a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In his free time, he writes books, most recently Power, Inc., a sharp rebuke of free markets run amok and a loud call for rebalancing public needs and corporate interests.
The message will no doubt be music to the ears of all the “muppets” out there who have recently had their eyeballs ripped out by Wall Street fat cats.
Rothkopf still looks comfortable in a really nice suit — but at times he sounds weirdly like Noam Chomsky. “Corporations were given rights by people to serve society,” he told us, “and the moment they stop serving society, those rights can and should be revoked.”