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Corporate Earmarks: Free Market, Indeed!
In all the partisan jockeying around whether or not to ban some or all Congressional earmarks, a small detail has been overlooked—the fact that Congress gives away some $1.7 billion per year in completely unaccountable, uncompetitive, sweetheart deals to private industry. Here we are still bickering about the $100 billion-over-10-years price tag to give health care to over 30 million uninsured Americans and fix our ailing system, but pols on both sides of the aisle have nary blinked an eye in handing out a tenth of that, without public debate, to defense contractors and developers.
With families across the country suffering from the downturn and tightening their belts—and pleading for even the most meager of unemployment benefits and other aid programs to be extended—Congress handed bags of cash to for-profit businesses in contracts based not on, say, comparative estimates about how many jobs would be created versus other potential projects but, blatantly, based on personal friendships, payback for campaign contributions and promises to base some work in the Congressperson’s home state or district.
When you really look at how the legislative sausage gets made in our United States Congress, it’s enough to turn you into an anarcho-vegan…
Is it really any wonder that the supposedly superiorly efficient and cost-effective for-profit health insurance companies are whining like babies about the prospect of actually having to compete with a publicly-funded health insurance option? Of course they prefer non-competitive handouts and monopolies. What smart businessperson wouldn’t?
In February, the Justice Department launched an investigation into five members (Dems and Reps) of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee for allegedly accepting $840,000 in campaign contributions in exchange for funneling $2.4 million in federal monies to just one defense contractor, 21st Century Systems. The charges were dropped, but the specter (and evidence) lingers. It’s too bad that all those poor folks without health insurance can’t scrape together a few hundred grand to line the pockets of those Members of Congress who are holding back health care reform.
In the mid-20th century, as New Deal economic investments in public spending and, well, the public in general were making Americans happier, healthier, better-educated and generally better off, and as surging social movements were starting to question even more deeply the pro-corporate economic policies of the past that had ruined regular people and ruptured the common good, Milton Friedman and his band of pro-corporate economists quickly stopped using the phrase laissez faire capitalism and switched to free market capitalism. Genius! Free market, after all, sounds like we’re taking the cuffs off the lean and mean market machine to let it fairly compete in the economic ring. Laissez faire, on the other hand, sounds… um… lazy. Lazy capitalists. And Freedman would be damned if that image of greedy robber barons who sit and get fat off the hard work of others would be permanently sealed in the public imagination. As long as you call it the free market, the illusion of fair effort masks the reality of backroom deals and biased handouts.
The reality is the free in free markets stands for free money. From our pockets.
Americans got angry about the bank bailouts, but not angry enough. There’s a deeper problem afoot in our nation, a problem cemented in our economic policies, defended by our politicians, exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling to even further open the floodgates of corporate money into politics. We are a nation by, of and for corporations.
In 1816, Thomas Jefferson prayed, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” Almost 200 years later, our work is still cut out for us.
9 Comments so far
Show AllWell done Sally!
Till you see restoration of economic laws, rules and oversight, till you see revisions to our Trade and Tax laws, till you see "earmarks" and lobbyists cut off at the knees, you know that these buffoons are not serious about doing their jobs. In fact they betray the American people on a daily basis.
This President, this administration and this congress grow more disgusting and shameful by the day.
I agree 100%!!!
It's sickening to hear these figures of wholesale millions being given away as "earmarks" for no other reason than the beneficiaries are close to people in Congress!
While giving millions and millions of taxpayer's money away in this wholsesle betrayal of the tax-payer, they talk about cutting Medicare (the last refuge for healthcare for the elderly) to pay for budget deficits!
DISGUSTING!!!!
Corporations rule. It's as simple as that. Congress is bought and paid for, and so is the Oval Office. Also as simple as that.
The contest Jefferson so sagely warned about has been won -- by the wrong people. By those that give not a damn for the people or for the country that has made them rich. They are ungrateful slugs whose slime trail is choking the planet.
Gary
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
-- Isaac Asimov
30 years ago, when Reagan spouted the BS about giving the rich they money and they will give you jobs, I questioned the sanity of anyone who bought that crap. I got called all kinds of names for questioning the Alzheimer's president. Now, after 30 years of his policies, it's amazing how NONE of those who called me a traitor, an idiot, a know nothing buffoon, or any of the other things I was called remembers that for a heartbeat. In fact, they STILL think Reagan did something OTHER than start us down the road to the sewer we are now in.
It is gong to take a complete redo, here, and I personally think that those who made all that money over the last 30 years are the ones who need to be PAYING for it. They made out like bandits, which they ARE, and now it's time for them to pay the piper. I couldn't care less if we took EVERYTHING they have and made THEM start over, like they have done to so many of us. They have destroyed us, it's time they get what is coming right back.
If God really wants them to be rich, then they will be again, won't they? They should have to find out what the freaking BOTTOM is like, just like the rest of us are having had to.
Sorry, rich bastards, but I for one have ABSOLUTELY NO RESPECT for you, your families, your money or your lives. And that is no more or less than you have offered your fellow CITIZENS. You deserve as much animosity as the American people can POSSIBLY have for you. You have certainly earned mine.
WJM,
Great post. I agree with your sentiment.
If you really want to get pissed off, go see the movie "Precious." Underlying this tragedy and drama is the policies of the rich ruling elites.
Meanwhile the Government of the United States saw fit to send out two of its agents from the IRS to a citizen to pressure him to pay taxes that were due.
The total amount of the taxes this miscreant avoided was.....
4 CENTS.
With interest and penalties, the final bill came to 200 dollars.
This at the same time the IRS cuts back on investigation of the Wealthiest of Americans evading taxes.
GW
Its getting hilarious! My wife recieved a bill from a dept. store for one cent. She dropped in and paid it (saving us the .40 plus thast the store paid to send it to us, and the sales ladies are still laughing.
In case I miss you on the education string, your posting on reading was ...magnificent!
Though people here on this blog are well informed and vote their own self interest, I believe; I will bet that the ruling elite bring out the circus to entertain and fear to scare the masses into voting the same shills back into office.
I just don't know what can be done to change the momentum of the ruling elite.
Maybe a crushing Depression will be necessary to break the control of the ruling elite. I don't know.
Trouble is, then, we will all suffer more than the ruling elite.
"In February, the Justice Department launched an investigation into five members (Dems and Reps) of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee for allegedly accepting $840,000 in campaign contributions in exchange for funneling $2.4 million in federal monies to just one defense contractor, 21st Century Systems. The charges were dropped, but the specter (and evidence) lingers."
The charges were dropped! Well, here's why: "...economic and government policy forming organizations, along with their private military and intelligence corporations, form the core of the Economic Elite power structure."
The full article can be found here:
(http://www.alternet.org/economy/145996/the_most_powerful_destructive_corporate_business_club_most_americans_have_never_heard_of)......