…has some mostly-lucid ideas in a hereby-linked essay in the Guardian newspaper on why and how American pro-corporate ideology is spent, and is the chief reason for our current economic mess and biz-ethics scandals.

The guy’s wrong, however, when he puts the blame for this ideology on some particularly southern-U.S. legacy:

“The states of the Confederacy remain the heartland of the distinct brand of American conservatism that combines Christian, market and America-first fundamentalism to a unique degree, reinforced in the South by a legacy of barely submerged racism.”

In real life, some of our worst white racists have historically been in Northeastern cities and Midwestern small towns. The old northern oil and rail barons of a century ago successfully bought and sold politicians as routinely as financiers do today. And “America First” was historically a slogan that kept us out of WWI’s first four years, and was principally championed by the midwestern agitator W.J. Bryant and the Californian mining heir W.R. Hearst.

Yes, there’s a certain flavor to the type of conservative bombast that eminates from the likes of Texas and Florida. But equally rancid flavors of greed and arrogance can be found all over this vast land mass. Our own Nor’Western corporatethink cuisine is a deceptively mild stew, which hides its base of biz-as-usual crony favoritism under thick yet bland sauces of bureaucratic “process” and rigged “citizen input.”

So on this day when you’re going to hear umpteen gazillion mushy tributes to how wonderful we are, try to remember the nation is built on a fundamental contradiction between the concepts of individual freedom and capitalist licentiousness. The corporate libertarians, who openly invoke the former to excuse the latter, only make the contradiction more visible by pretending it doesn’t exist.