Corporate Evil
(Nowadays synonymous
with "Government Evil")
America's citizens have been sold out by big business and Washington politicians. Enron, Quest, Lucent, Halliburton, Motorola...the list is endless. We've been sent up creek without a paddle, headed for a raging waterfall. Enron was just the tip of the iceberg. Enron executives and their Washington accomplices cost American citizens hundreds-of-billions of dollars.
Enron employees lost their retirements, some over a million dollars. Insurance premiums skyrocketed nationwide. K-mart attributed their bankruptcy in part to the collapse of Enron. The bond market was devastated because of Enron. To add more insult and injury to criminal activities, Enron employees were given golden parachutes to exit from their burning ship while it was going down. The CEO and other Enron bandits made off with hundreds of millions of dollars. They all got away with their crimes against the American people, while our Washington politicians looked the other way.
Most people wouldn't consider Walt Disney a corporate threat to America but the amount of corporate welfare they have received over the years of taxpayer's money is staggering. As a matter of fact, large fat-cat corporations across America receive hundreds-of-billions of dollars in corporate welfare. U.S. citizens are fed the excuse that it's for our own good, for the benefit of the overall economy. The truth is that corporate leaders nationwide are getting richer while U.S. citizens who do all the labor are getting poorer. The only economy being helped is that of the rich. Our trade deficit continues to widen every year, which simply means that Americans are buying a whole lot more than they're selling to other nations.
Let me put it another way, all of our money is going to China and their economy is surpassing ours (we're making our Communist enemies rich!). Trillions of U.S. dollars are leaving America for foreign nations, but the money is not being replaced in our economy by manufacturing or any tangible assets (nothing is made in America anymore). So where does the money come from to replace the missing money in the U.S. economy? It is borrowed from the evil Federal Reserve (the central bank). In other words, America as a nation keeps going further and further into massive debt.
Corporate welfare is evil, a shame upon America. While steel workers and other U.S. lifetime laborers go without their pensions, Washington politicians give away hundreds-of-billions of dollars to mega companies who DON'T need the money. While the poor go hungry, the rich get richer. It's sickening!
Corporate Welfare, Inc.
Laugh, we're paying for it!
War-fiteering:
In this time of "national crisis", it's troubling--
some of the "Republican" party "leadership" choices...
granting highly selective tax roll-backs as follows:
$1.4 billion for IBM
$833 million for General Motors
$671 million for General Electric
$572 million for Chevron Texaco
and $254 million for EnronThe Tax Cut of 2001 - Bush: 10
America: Minus $4 Trillion
It's a good thing that top-down, supply-side works so well, because this much less government will mean that there will be less cash flow from the bottom to the top of the economy - meaning the wealthy of us will get richer more slowly. This is a good thing, right?White-collar crime costs us at least $250 billion annually. Street crime costs us less than $20 billion. Go figure!
Why we cannot afford to feed the hungry and help the needy and homeless...
$125 billion (not including tens and hundreds of billions more in local business "subsides" and "incentives") of your tax dollars every year is given away in direct cash disbursements as Corporate Welfare, Inc., to profitable national and transnational corporations like:
- Archer Daniels Midland (Price fixers to the World?)
- "The News Hour With Jim Lehrer," [ brought to you by ADM, and you, Mr. Ms.& Mrs. Taxpayer. Thank you for your generosity]
- McDonalds (to advertise overseas)
- Gallo Winery (to advertise overseas)
- Plush Colorado Ski Resorts
- Weyerhauser
- Georgia Pacific
- Walt Disney (Also received special patent extensions to keep product prices inflated and uncompetitive -- granted by "y'our" government)
- Martin Marietta
- Mining Industry interests
- National Meat Association
- Energy and Petrochemical Industries
- Pepsico's Frito-Lay
- Anchor Glass Container Corp.
- Federal Express
- Nucor
- Kidder Peabody Group, Inc.
- Nebraska Beef, Ltd.
- Mercedes-Benz (bends?)
- Time Warner (Ted Turner gave a big chunk to the UN...?) Check out Bill Moyers' "Free Speech: For Sale", on video (1-800-336-1917), where it is shown that the broadcast-media-monopoly and cartel was given $70 + billion in public airwave channel rights free of charge... by y'our gov't.
- General Electric (GE)
- ABB Instrumentation Inc (subsidy of ABB Asea Brown Boveri Lt., the giant Swiss and Swedish power generation and distribution conglomerate)
- General Motors (who takes the goodies then moves its operations south)
- Intel
- Allied Signal
- Eastman Kodak
- Caterpiller
- Union Carbide
- Georgia Pacific
- Microsoft
- Hughes Aircraft (now part of Ratheon)
- Motorola
- Boeing
- Corporate farmers
- Sugar industry subsidies
- RCA (now part of GE)
- Searle & Co.
- and a few select more fat cat porkers feeding at the public trough...
- [A heartfelt thanks for your contributions, they mean so much to us].
These are profitable national and multi or transnational corporations that DO NOT NEED nor do they or we benefit by incontinent and unconservative (where are the fiscal conservatives when we need them) public largesse...but there are many needy companies and small businesses that could use this money if it were only redistributed through the economy by direct top-down handouts, or by giving it to the poor and homeless in meaningful amounts for public work received... money sucked out of the system by the corporate swine above is money denied more deserving and needy elements of our economy... like our local small businesses which are the real jobs- machinery, engine and fuel of our economy... so lets stop subsidizing the downsizing of American jobs and lets begin helping needy small businesses and the poor and homeless... for these are far better investments than helping those corporate giants that don't need help. If you are a small business or corporation that is not receiving direct or indirect corporate welfare, make sure that you let your local and national chapters of the Chamber of Commerce know that you think the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in direct and indirect corporate welfare should be better invested to benefit all Americans... and make sure that your representatives know how you feel about corporate welfare being recycled into the fraudulent financial merry-go-round system of financing political campaigns...and demand that this shoddy governance stop...
The "Conservative"-"led"
"House of Representatives" recently
approved alternative minimum tax
roll-backs retroactively to the late 1980s, costing
other taxpayers a loss of more than $12 Billion
in revenue next year alone. If large, profitable
companies are permitted to store their profits
overseas in tax shelters, why not you or other
average Joe Q. Publics?(See Time Magazine, four issues beginning November 9, 1998, "What Corporate Welfare Costs You," A special investigation by Donald L. Bartlett and James B Steele, authors of "America: What Went Wrong") -- Another (Jan-Feb 2000) Time Magazine article by these authors further describes what happens to your tax dollars when the government goes to bat for individual foreign (not even American) companies (Big Bananas) against foreign economies and governments via the World Trade Organization. Every small businessperson should have such clout in Washington, DC.
Corporate Welfare Shame Site...
Corporate welfare would make sense if it didn't cost us more than it gives us back as it doesn't do time after time... it actually would make more sense to merely give these tens of billions of dollars to the poor through poverty maintenance handouts (sometimes called welfare) because at least the money would be spent in the economy on a regular basis, and it would then float (percolate) up to the wealthy positioned at the top of the economy... and along the way it might help some of the more seaworthy boats rise higher in the water... as opposed to dumping this public money in at the top of the economy where it finances costly jobs, wages and economic downsizing. Perhaps someday we will discover that the same economic carrot and stick regime works to discipline the wealthy as it does the poor. If impoverishing the poor works so well in motivating them to self betterment and productivity, imagine what it might do for the well-healed.
Why corporate welfare? Because, democracy like economics, is merely a matter of whatever traffic allows... as long as we eat what's being served economically, democratically and socially, then that's what'll be for breakfast, lunch and dinner...24/7/365...
... and Because your government hasn't gotten your message, or is ignoring it! Are you getting your money's worth? Some of us are, why aren't you? How long are you going to permit your "representative" government to give away your money to profitable corporate slouches like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), to help it pay its fines for fixing prices for which it recently was found guilty.Apply for your welfare reform dividend today...?
Common Cause (a non-partisan public non-profit) is working to put an end to these outrageous federal giveaways to large profitable corporations (not small businesses which provide the majority of America's jobs). Consider joining this effort.
Common, because: (202) 833-1200, (202) 659-3716 (fax), 1250 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington DC 20036
A couple of government waste references:
"The Government Racket 2000: All New Government Waste [$325 billion worth] From A to Z" by Marshal C. Gross. [Identifies $325 billion in legislative sausage--waste you likely would not approve if you merely had a direct and meaningful voice in your national government]
"The Buying of The President 2000"
by Charles Lewis
- "Shoveling Fuel For A Runaway Train" by Brian Cech
"The Activist's Handbook" by Randy Shaw- "Unmande In America: The True Costs of a Global Assembly Line" by Barry Lynn (Harpers, Later May 2002)
- "Natural Capitalism?" (See Mother Jones Magazine, April 1977) See what most traditional economists leave out of their theories and models (Perhaps this is the wave of the future...whether we choose it or whether we are forced into it due to diminished resources and increasing populations...)
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