Forget Bill Clinton’s Oval
Office escapades or the issue of whether donations from Chinese interests
found their way into the Clinton-Gore campaign. Instead why not concentrate
on a crime that the Justice Department is currently actively pursuing
all over the country and which Clinton has conveniently confessed to committing
himself on dozens of occasions. Bill Clinton should be indicted and/or
impeached for repeated violations of antitrust laws.
I’m sure Michael Andreas wonders
when Reno is going to get on the ball. Andreas walked out of a Chicago
courtroom on Sept. 17 facing jail time for his violation of antitrust
laws. Along with fellow Archer Daniels Midland employees Terrance Wilson
and Mark Whitacre , Andreas was convicted of organizing a price-fixing
scheme in the citric-acid and lysine markets. Basically, Andreas and his
co-defendants met with other companies that make lysine and citric acid
and agreed to sell their products at roughly the same price rather than
compete for customers by cutting prices.
Whitacre, working as a mole for
the FBI, secretly taped ADM meetings caught former ADM President James
Randall as summing up the company’s philosophy as “our competitors
are our friends. Our customers are the enemy.” As U.S. Attorney Scott
Lassar told the jury, “This was a crime of greed – a crime by
an extremely large corporation that wanted to make even more money at
the expense of their customers.”
If this is the test for criminal
culpability — participating in a scheme that knowingly fixes the price
of a commodity above the market price in order to increase profits —
then the Justice Department has an open and shut case against Bill Clinton
and plenty of others.
After all, not only has Clinton
signed numerous bills that fixed the price of commodities well above their
market level, but both he and his co-conspirators in the Congress have
repeatedly bragged about their violations of antitrust laws. A couple
of years ago, for example, when Clinton ordered the federal government
to buy cattle in order to drive up the price of beef to help cattle ranchers,
Clinton didn’t even try to hide his actions — in fact he held a press
conference where he bragged that he was colluding to fix the price of
cattle at higher than market levels.
Similarly Clinton has signed numerous
bills that subsidize farmers and thereby increase the cost of food to
consumers. In fact Clinton recently said that the government doesn’t do
enough to fix the prices of food — he’s threatening to veto an appropriations
bill unless larger subsidies are given to farmers.
And then there are the numerous
tariffs and other protections on everything from peanuts to sugar to milk
to which Clinton has gleefully affixed his signature after his cronies
in the Congress have given him anti-competitive legislation to sign. The
extent of Clinton’s effort to help “extremely large corporation
that wanted to make even more money at the expense of their customers”
easily dwarfs all private efforts in that vein.
If the Department of Justice wants
to set an example to deter the Bill Gates’ and Michael Andreas’ of the
world from anti-competitive practices, what better way than to indict
the man responsible for costing consumers untold billions through price
fixing schemes? Isn’t it time to impeach Bill Clinton for violating antitrust
laws?