The GOP is not pro-business.

The GOP is not pro-business. It's pro-CEO.

Just as Wall Street morphed from a capital funding service industry for American manufacturing into a fiscal manipulation operation benefiting only itself, America's CEO class have morphed from business leaders into board of directors manipulators intent on lining their own pockets at the expense of shareholders, employees and customers--and America.

Business don't make political contributions. CEOs and Wall Street insiders do--mainly to Republican politicians. And the payback they want is whatever helps them in their decades-long campaign to redistribute America's wealth from the middle class into their own pockets.

This has been hugely successful. CEOs made 20X what their low-level employees made back in the 1950s. Now it's more like 400X. And I don't see their business decisions and leadership being 20X better than CEOs' decisions were in the 1950s.

This shift came out of middle class pockets. And they have the brass to claim that President Obama believes in wealth redistribution! They're the ones who do, and this is simple fact, easily verified from nonpartisan sources.

The Republican Party leadership comprises the nimble and devoted servants of these billionaires, who feel no sense of allegiance to this country or even to their own businesses. They've jiggered the rules so that if their business prospers, they prosper. And if their business sags or even fails, they still prosper. Ditto the country as a whole.

Only when the fortunes of the leaders rise and fall with those of their organization do leaders lead well. Otherwise, if they've become uncoupled from their organization's fortunes, they will work for their own ends regardless of how it affects that organization. That's just human nature.

The Democrats are no saints, and I strongly oppose their efforts to help Mexican citizens living here illegally at Americans' expense, as well as their pandering to public employee unions and every ethnic/racial/religious group they can single out for special favors.

But their policies aren't driving America into the ditch.

The real problem is that in their six years of ruling all three branches of government, the Republicans did so much damage to the economy that it will take over a decade to repair it.

Yet presidents are elected every four years, and President Obama can't possibly undo the Republicans' damage in that timeframe. This is the advantage dictatorships like Communist China have over us--their solutions' timeframes can match reality.

So we'll let the foxes back into the henhouse, most likely.

After all, they are the experts on hens.

Bank regulation

President Obama is pushing for bank regulation reform. Liberals will applaud this while calling for even stricter regulation, while folks identifying themselves as conservative will condemn it as Socialism.

But I've figured out how to translate GOPSpeak into actual English. "Socialism" once meant "government owning big business." That's how Marx/Lenin/Mao etc. defined it.

But in GOPSpeak "Socialism" now means “any regulation of business whatsoever.”

The rightists’ screeds will contrast evil "Democrat Party So-shul-ism" with the “Free Market.” This now means “Big business owning government.” Not explicitly of course. However, if government hops whenever the Masters of the Universe say "frog" that's what it means. That's what "too big to fail" means.

Which the big business owners and CEOs pulling the GOP’s strings think is just ducky—and the natural order of things. This is what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston lays out in his book Free Lunch: How the wealthiest Americans enrich themselves at government expense (and stick you with the bill).

And the GOP will get the people most oppressed by big business—small business owners and rural Republican rank and file—to enthusiastically endorse these perversions of the language, because the GOP has learned how to get people to betray themselves and their loved ones and their future generations.

They accomplished this hat trick through three principles. They’ve discovered that even the most flat-out outrageous lies will be believed by half the people and than some, as long as you and your cohorts repeat them constantly, weave them into an emotionally satisfying narrative, and get the public to turn a deaf ear to the truth-tellers by invoking tribalism.

Tribalism is built into our DNA. It’s what gets us to excuse darn near anything someone we think is on our side does, and disbelieve everything someone we think is in the other tribe does. This is why the Republican attacks on the Democrats are so venomous and personal—they don’t attack the principles the Demos are espousing. They attack Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, saying their names with the same inflection you might use to describe dog droppings you just stepped in.

After all, you aren’t going to listen to someone you loathe—someone whose tribe is out to get yours.

And the tribe the GOP has built isn’t America. It’s just American self-identified conservatives. Well, in GOPSpeak “American” and “the American People” now means “people who vote Republican.” Democrats aren’t American. They’re enemies living here illegitimately. That’s why the nonsense about Obama not being a citizen has persisted so strongly. GOP rank and file FEEL that he isn’t American. They did the same thing to Kerry, and Gore, and Clinton, and Dukakis---just not quite so overtly.

Adam Smith, the bespoken deity of the Right, would have endorsed this NYTimes editorial, because he understood that the true enemy of Capitalism isn’t Socialism—it’s Monopoly. And that’s what banks too big to fail are homing in on.

But it’s fitting that the GOP has perverted its core beliefs so much that often not much more than the names are left. It has become, philosophically, a big hollow shell, whose only principle now is to obediently rage against anything that might even slightly constrain the richest 1/2 percent of Americans.

Look at the right wing rants about business regulation in the right wing blogosphere. Aren’t most of them consistent with what I’ve laid out here?