Tag: corporate welfare

According to Dr. Angell on that 😉 right wing rag, the HuffingtonPost, here’s what we get with the House bill before the Senate even touches it.

* It enshrines and subsidizes the “takeover” by the investor-owned insurance industry.

* It expands Medicaid.

* It eliminates denial of coverage because of pre-existing conditions, but since it doesn’t regulate premiums, the industry can respond to any regulation that threatens its profits by simply raising its rates.

* It does very little to curb the perverse incentives that lead doctors to over-treat the well-insured.

* It is so complicated, it’ll cost a brazillion dollars to administer and enforce it.

(more)

 

Gee, it’s a good thing the governments rode to the rescue with billions of dollars in Corporate Welfare for the lying cheating fucktards who screwed everything up, no?

Otherwise, gosh, we would have had people not being able to buy bread, power shut off to everyone, riots in the streets …

No, we would have had the banks nationalized.  Which is what should have happened in the first place.

But here with the 1-year anniversary of the collapse, we are having a ridiculous level of retroactive propagandizing BY the criminals who fucked everything up in the first place.  The same people who STILL haven’t had any new regulations to control their activities, the same people who STILL haven’t faced any repercussions for nearly destroying the economy of the western world, are now expecting us to BELIEVE their bullshit about how they managed to dodge the bullet and keep us all from anarchy and starvation …

U.K. Faced ‘Bank Runs, Riots’ as RBS and HBOS Neared Collapse

This begs the question for me — why haven’t we had a run on the banks? Who in their right mind would continue keeping their money in banks?  How stupid are people?  Wait, I already know the answer to that.

“Hey, I know we almost destroyed the world economy, and took every dollar you owned with it, but hey, it’s all good now!  Trust us!”

Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) — A year ago today, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and HBOS Plc were close to collapse, causing a chain reaction that could have ended with riots in U.K. cities, security analysts and economists said.

Bank failures would have forced the government to cancel police leave and deploy troops as the breakdown of the financial payments system threatened the ability of utilities to provide essential services, said David Livingstone, a fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London, a former adviser to the government’s Cobra crisis response committee.

“You are talking about a situation with mass disorder and panic,” the former Royal Navy officer said in an interview. There would be “riots, pandemonium, everyone fending for themselves.”

Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King and Financial Services Authority Chairman Adair Turner met at 5 p.m. on Oct. 7, 2008, and readied a 250 billion-pound ($398 billion) rescue for the banks in the 16 hours before they opened for business the following day. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Bloomberg News one year on, the Treasury declined to say if it had a contingency plan for the two banks, then or now.

Releasing such information would probably “have a destabilizing effect on financial markets,” damage the government decision-making process and cause commercial harm to the banks involved, the Treasury said in a letter.

“In the current economic climate, economic perception, even if totally misconceived, is important and has the capacity to alter market behavior,” the government said. “To confirm or deny whether or not the information is held, either in relation to the banks mentioned in your request or more generally” would hurt the banks and the U.K.’s economic interests.

‘Catastrophic’ Costs

The crisis last year was the worst Britain had faced in peacetime, Darling told the British Broadcasting Corp. last month. The two banks were not “confident they could get to the end of the day,” on Oct. 7, King told the same program.

“You would have had unmitigated panic and a bank run,” said Tom Kirchmaier, a fellow at the London School of Economics. “People would not have been able to buy bread. The cost to the economy would have been catastrophic.”

RBS and HBOS, then in talks to be taken over by Lloyds TSB Group Plc, had more than 35 million business and individual customers with 475 billion pounds of deposits, 22 percent of the U.K. total, held at about 3,250 branches.

‘Contagious Effects’

“If RBS hadn’t been propped up as it was, in practice it would have been nationalized the following week,” former Bank of England deputy governor John Gieve said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “If RBS, HBOS, Lloyds had gone down, that would have had huge contagious effects throughout the rest of the world.”

The failure of Edinburgh-based RBS and HBOS would have had a domino-effect with customers seeking to take out their deposits from other lenders and causing a wider run on U.K. banks, said Vicky Redwood, an economist at Capital Economics Ltd.

“Trust in the banking system would have completely collapsed” and would have generated civil unrest, said Redwood. “People would have been rushing to take their money out of the other banks and you would have been heading back to the depression era.”

Dude, where’s my money?

There’s a scathing report in Vanity Fair right now about how all that TARP money was just thrown into the world with all the responsibility of someone shoveling it out the bank of an armored car while driving down a busy highway.

In other words, nobody knows where the money went.   Any of it.   There was no accountability, no rules for keeping track of it, heck, the banks didn’t have to do anything but take it, like lotto winnings, and do whatever the hell they wanted with it.

This whole crime is going right down the Memory Hole, which is right where the banksters, the guys who “run the place” to quote a few Congresspeople, want it to be.

But once the money left the building, the government lost all track of it. The Treasury Department knew where it had sent the money, but nothing about what was done with it. Did the money aid the recovery? Was it spent for the purposes Congress intended? Did it save banks from collapse? Paulson’s Treasury Department had no idea, and didn’t seem to care. It never required the banks to explain what they did with this unprecedented infusion of capital.

You can bet a lot of it was used for embezzlement “bonuses”, I mean, why not?   If someone gives you a few billion dollars and doesn’t care what you do with it, why not put it in your own little Swiss bank account?  

Exactly one year has elapsed since the onset of the financial crisis and the passage of the bailout bill. Some measure of scrutiny and control has since been imposed by the Obama administration, but even today it’s hard to walk back the cat and trace the money. Up to a point, though, it’s possible to reconstruct some of what happened in the first chaotic and crucial three months of the bailout, when Treasury was still in the hands of Henry Paulson and most of the money was disbursed. Needless to say, there is no central clearinghouse for information about the tarp money. To get details of any kind means starting with the hundreds of individual recipients, then poring over S.E.C. filings, annual reports, and other documentation-in other words, performing the standard due diligence that the government itself failed to perform. In the report that follows, we have no more than dipped a toe into the morass, but one fact emerges clearly: a lot of the money wound up in the coffers of some very surprising institutions- institutions that should have been seen as “troubling” as much as “troubled.”

I don’t really have time tonight to do much more than this, but I wanted to pass this along.   We certainly shouldn’t forget about this, not that it will matter with the Obama administration “putting corporations first” and the American people dead last.   They’re sure never gonna do crap about anything, especially this, and especially since Obama put his full 1000% support behind this crime anyway.  

Oh well.  

Meanwhile, millions more foreclosures are on their way.   But wait, didn’t the TARP money have something to do with mortgages?   Naaaahhhh, it was all about giving it to bankers, pure theft to fatten those cats.   The rest of us are left to melt down, even though the whole lie idea behind the bailout was to help out with the whole mortgage crash, right?

Pardon me while I puke.  

The war in Afghanistan, which we are losing, is costing us $133 million a DAY.   That’s right, $133 million a day.  That’s over 5.5 million dollars an HOUR, every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, forever and ever.

Why forever and ever?  Because we’re losing, not winning.

Says who, you might ask?  Some hand-wringing “liberal”?    No, none other than General Stanley McChrystal, the warmongering, warcriminal in charge of the whole mess for the Americans.

US losing in Afghanistan, top general admit.

The top American commander in Afghanistan declared that the Taliban are winning in Afghanistan in a startling interview published Monday – a striking contrast to the “Mission Accomplished” rhetoric of the Bush Administration as regards Iraq.

His remarks appear carefully tailored to lower expectations and shift public opinion in support of operations in the war-torn country where few foreign powers have ever seen victory. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, when they were routed by a US invasion.

Currently, US operations in Afghanistan cost taxpayers about $4 billion a month. That comes to roughly $133 million per day, or $5.5 million per hour.

Yeah, but we can’t afford anything here.  California is broke, prisons are melting down as prisoners riot for hours on end, schools are firing teachers, the entire social safety net is being set afire ….. why, so we spend money instead losing in Afghanistan?

Of course this begs the question:  why would the top General there actually admit to losing the war?  Well of course because we’re not spending enough money there yet.  And we’re not killing enough American troops!   So we need more American troops to sacrifice to the volcano gods of war:

McChrystal’s interview also appeared designed to augment support for increasing troop levels in parts of Afghanistan. Since President Barack Obama took office, the Pentagon has increased the number of US troops in the country. The strategy described suggests a “hearts and minds” approach which favors securing civilian areas rather than focusing on full-frontal engagement with militants.

“It’s a very aggressive enemy right now,” the paper quoted Gen. McChrystal as saying. “We’ve got to stop their momentum, stop their initiative. It’s hard work.”

The interview also quotes unnamed US officials arguing for a further increase in US troops.

Now to win an unwinnable war?   Spend more money.   Kill more boys.  Sure.  That works every time.  These people learn nothing from history.   Their egos are so huge they think they cannot lose, and the only reason they are losing is because those jerks in Washington aren’t giving them what they need!   Goddamn those jerks in Washington!   They’re not there man, they don’t know what it’s like!

Well, here’s what it’s like for some of the Afghani people we’re spending $5 million bucks an hour killing:

Killing children doesn’t come cheap.  Hell, you can’t do it here without getting in serious trouble!   But in Afghanistan, you can use the highest tech weaponry in the history of mankind to kill children and it’s just A-OK and the government will keep giving you more!

Cross posted at dkos

Am I talking about moms in mink coats driving Cadilacs and having babies for money?  Nope.  I’m talking about corporate welfare.  Here is a close up look at the handouts that have been going on in broad daylight; and most of the numbers are from the Clinton boom years, when there wasn’t even a pretense of an excuse.

Good Jobs First‘s list of these case studies include:

Biotechnology: This industry is regarded by many economic development officials as the key to local prosperity, and thus they are willing to shower subsidies on new projects.

Private prisons: Operators of for-profit correctional institutions not only receive lucrative operating contracts from government agencies, but they also get financial help to build new facilities.

(more)

Original article by Sherwood Ross via Dissidentvoice.org .

It gets more and more surreal.

Since the U.S. government is now a wholly owned subsidiary of a conglomerate of defense contractors and the fossil fuels industries, it’s important to find new and better ways for our tax dollars to support those murderous kleptocrats- preferably ways that attract little scrutiny, and play into the warped values so carefully calibrated by our corporate media. We can’t spend money on things that might actually help children, like ensuring that they have safe homes, nutritious food, clean clothes, and quality educations and health care. That would be socialism! But we can try to keep them from having sex! And we can try to keep them off drugs! Homelessness, hunger, and lack of opportunity are of little import, but kids on drugs is bad! And it exists in a vacuum. It has nothing to do with that homelessness, hunger, and lack of opportunity!

So, the Wall Street Journal is reporting today that:

A Defense Department contract involving antidrug training missions may test the durability of the political controversy over Blackwater Worldwide’s security work in Iraq.

The Moyock, N.C., company, which was involved in a September shooting in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqis dead, is one of five military contractors competing for as much as $15 billion over five years to help fight a narcotics trade that the government says finances terrorist groups.

Also competing for contracts from the Pentagon’s Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office are military-industry giants Raytheon Co., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp., as well as Arinc Inc., a smaller aerospace and technology contractor.

Of course, the first reaction is to wonder why in hell we’d be considering giving more money to a bloodsucking private army that murders civilians and is run by a fundamentalist religious fanatic. That’s the obvious question, and it will remain unanswered. As our nation is dismantled and sold for scrap, Blackwater is the future. But the bigger question, which is, of course, overlooked by the Journal itself, is why are we looking to spend $15,000,000,000 on the war on drugs?!

(more)