Big Business Makes Wish List for GOP

By Tana Ganeva | Sourced from AlterNet
Posted at November 3, 2010

Now that Republicans have been propelled to victory by resentment over the nation's crippling economic problems, they can get to work making them worse by pandering to big business.

According to the Wall Street Journal, business leaders have begun articulating the specific ways they'd like the newly Republican Congress to promote their interests at the expense of the country, environment, and world:

The head of the National Association of Manufacturers, John Engler, said his group's members want an across-the-board extension of the Bush tax cuts plus new cuts to stimulate hiring; a rollback of selected pending regulations unfriendly to manufacturers in the Environmental Protection Agency, labor, and energy departments among other moves.

Mr. Engler and Ms. Schneider said big GOP gains would force a change in approach and tone at the White House. Mr. Engler said he hoped that would include a housecleaning at regulatory agencies.

Roundtable members like International Business Machines Corp., Merck and Company Inc. and Caterpillar Inc., could get a reprieve from higher taxes on overseas profits and potential penalties for moving jobs to overseas under a GOP-led Congress.

Bankers would also like for Obama to stop hurting their feelings. And to roll back the tiny, incremental finance reforms that squeaked by Congress a few months ago:

Cam Fine, CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said he wanted a GOP Congress to act immediately to overhaul the nation's mortgage finance system and change a provision in the financial markets overhaul legislation passed earlier this year that allowed the Federal Reserve to set banking interchange fees.

But business leaders are also concerned! "Some business leaders worry that some of their priorities could be rejected by tea-party legislators, whose small-government stance was a key to their election." Shocking how big business claims they want government out of private enterprise -- just not when it comes to pro-business government interventions like subsidies, trade promotion and the whole range of corporate welfare.

Can the Teabagger candidates be counted on to sell out their pretend populism in order to kowtow to business interests? Chances are, yes! (See: the economic policy proposal Rand Paul presented post-election: "Don't tax yachts, because that hurts everyone!")