End Corporate Welfare Now
I have a suggestion for a nervous Democratic Party going into the November elections. They should run on a simple platform: End Corporate Welfare Now.
A story in this morning’s New York Times brings this issue to Page One. The oil industry while ruthlessly fighting any sort of carbon tax, is the beneficiary of Billions in corporate welfare tax breaks and subsidies.
But an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.
According to the most recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, released in 2005, capital investments like oil field leases and drilling equipment are taxed at an effective rate of 9 percent, significantly lower than the overall rate of 25 percent for businesses in general and lower than virtually any other industry.
It’s not just Big Oil on corporate welfare. How about Big Agriculture.
The Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM) has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers. Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM’s annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30.
The Cato Institute calculates that corporate Welfare programs cost the taxpayers about $100 billion per year. So if the Democrats were really serious about reform (including earmarks) in corporate welfare, they would attract some libertarian votes as I am fairly sure the Republicans will stand shoulder to shoulder with Big Business in support of more corporate welfare.
Given the obesity rates in this country, perhaps its not so much the eliminating of Agriculture subsidies, but the shifting of subsidies to fruits and vegetables, which people need to be able to afford before make them a larger part of their diets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/business/economy/19leonhardt.html?ref=business
(http://www.good.is/post/why-does-a-salad-cost-more-than-a-big-mac)
A healthier populace would be a worthwhile return on investment, no?
Though if all food stuff subsidies were eliminated, I wonder where prices would naturally land without any intervention
[...] the rest of this great post here Comments (0) Posted in Oil Spill [...]
[...] End Corporate Welfare Now – [...]
Bravo!!
You are one of the few writing about this. I think that, at least, this idea would form a coherent democratic platform. I don’t know if it would yield many votes since the real difficulty is those Democrats themselves. They support corporate welfare because their campaigns depend on corporate donors. They can denounce anything they want; no on believes them.
I don’t think there is much real space for a libertarian-liberal coalition, but I do think there is a real opportunity for free market democrats to distinguish themselves from their republican opponents who still depend heavily on the Christians to win races in the mid-west, south and mountain states. Americans on the coasts (outside the rural south) are wary and weary of social conservatives and everywhere else Americans are looking for an alternative. Might be some room for an upstart.
Add nuclear power plants to that list. Investors know nuclear power plants are a bad risk, but the government is doing guaranteed loans backed by the taxpayer to companies such as KKR.
http://salon.glenrose.net/default.asp?view=plink&id=12685
http://salon.glenrose.net/default.asp?view=plink&id=11836
But speaking of the Democrats, and Chet Edwards in particular
http://salon.glenrose.net/default.asp?view=plink&id=12469
Hi Zak. Yours is a good point. Were the Fedheads to wean us from ag supports while transitioning to the foodstuffs you mention, well, that would be a salutary way to go.
On the other hand, the gradualism of such a course would obviate the urgency and sheer clarity of Jon’s call, which looks like a winner, as both policy and politics. Gradualism also would preserve for a time the arguably ill-advised central control of ag production and non-production.
My sense is that the Feds should concentrate on three ag roles, playing at once the Preservationist, the Educator and the Customer, and should stop hogging the limelight. By Prervationist, I mean soil preservation and ag-related environmental protection; by Educator, I mean an underwriter of the R&D (soil science, husbandry, plant diseases, vector control, ag engineering, genetics) and ag extension activities conducted mainly through the states’ land grant universities under the Morrill Act; and, by Customer, I refer to the purchase of agricultual products to feed e.g. the U.S. Military and undernourished persons abroad. Our central government, in short, should be the chief patron and champion of enviro-agricultural sustainabilty and should leave it to the private-sector to rear and grow what the market will bear.
As for the idea of healthier and more humane subsidies, consider the case of food stamps. The Feds provide the scrip and then fund state and local efforts to engender the healthiest and most efficient uses of the stamps. More to the point, the Feds do not dictate a menu, much less a vegetarian one.
Today’s aggies, big and small are fettered by enough multi-level, multi-agency red tape to encompass the Equator. by reducing the players and the paperwork, ending the agricultural version of corporate welfare post haste would bring more small players [back] into farming and ranching, would help to level the playing field on which the small vies with the gargantuan, and would lower the cost of production.
It’s ironic. This was one of the central planks of the Reagan candidacy back in 1979, and I think that he, and at least some of his team, genuinely believed in it. (Until they tried to make it happen, got their fingers slammed in the political car door a few times, and moved on to other things like pumping up defense spending and turning the EPA into the lapdog of energy companies.) Now the left is talking about eliminating corporate welfare.
Time will tell whether the left can do better than the right; I won’t be laying any bets.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Derek Markham. Derek Markham said: RT @christackett: Have known we need to end corporate subsidies for Big Oil & Big Ag. but chart makes it even more clear. http://ow.ly/27e3C [...]
Here’s how the Libertarian Dream works:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/energy/as-oil-gushed-bp-quickly-hired-lawyers-scientists-and-experts-to-fight/1106941
Sue the pants off ‘em, hey?
As a former attorney who did both EPA enforcement and private practice work, the latter with a defunct firm that represented the State of Alaska in the Exxon Valdez, the linked story about the suits that operate BP’s legal machinery (better than the roughnecks and their managers did the drilling machinery) was a shoe I have been waiting to hear drop. Anybody know the tax consequences to BP of (a) all that legal and technical talent, and (b) the “contingency fund” waved at Obama and (c) the costs of “cleanup” (a fraudulent notion in this particular context from the git-go) and “restitution” as if that is possible and the unlikely or minimal “retribution” that the situation ought to call for?
“We need to stand up to the special interests, bring Republicans and Democrats together, and pass the farm bill immediately,” Barack Obama 2008
Ending corporate welfare is a no brainer… unless you are a thieving DC crook. Then it’s your sole purpose in life. That, and lying about the nature of your give aways, as Obama did in this bizarro-world quote.
Jon,
Can we agree that the end to corporate welfare must be across the board. No oil subsidies. No so-called “green” subsidies. No farm subsidies. End government funded research. All that nonsense.
I think compromise between us should/could be that government withdraws from the market, but remains in place for the so-called “social safety net” with welfare and medicaid, unemployment benefits (though not too long, as they cause structural unemployment).
The European Way is coming to it’s inevitable end. Let’s not make the mistake of learning nothing from it’s failure.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/02/the-european-way-may-be-c_n_634172.html
Love the argument. Kind of like Creation Science versus what’s shorthanded for convenience (and deprecation) as “evolution theory.” Study deeply the anomalies of fossils being found “out of place” in the geologic strata, as “proof” of the invalidity of the conveniently simplified notion of How It All Came To Be And Goes On From Here. Set up the “straw man” assumption that the “evolutionists” believe the planet was laid down in uniform layers over time, and so any deviation from a stratum-derived matrix must be proof of God’s hand doing His work of putting it all together in just 5 or 6,ooo years. Ignore the chaotic nature of geologic processes that inconveniently fit much better with the notion of billions of years of Being rather than 6,000.
Same trick works for “economics” arguments. Just assume “the European system,” a fictional entity or convenient epithet, take your pick, in all its variations, has some magical inherent flaw that is somehow tied to the Evils of Pursuing Social Justice or some other Randian Original Sin. (Paper over, ignore or explain away decades of apparent stability and what would one call it, panoramic humanism? comity? mass-hysterical decency? Ignore the bits of human nature that always drive every socioeconomic system into greed-driven disorder.)
The argument, of course, has nothing to do with an examination of the tissues and elements of the complete organism from its genesis to its dissolution, tissues that suffer other forms of cancer than the Assumed Cause, and also suffer from diseases acquired by contact with Capitalism, New World Order-style, where What Really Happens in large market economies with subornable imperial governments and stealable surpluses and apparent future Real Wealth that can be “borrowed against” (actually, stolen, of course, by the Grover Norquist-GoldmanSachs-MICMECetc. factions) runs up against generations of people studiously unequipped to stop the parasites and carcinomas from stripping all the flesh away until all you go left is Dry Bones.
Yeah, apply Hayek’s Razor, or whatever Chinese-menu assortment of identity-forming “libertarian” ideas one wants to, then try to get everyone else to “at least agree” to the camel’s nose under the tent: “Across-the-board end to Corporate Welfare.” Check. “Government Somehow Limited to finding funding for and distributing a ‘safety net,’ and applying just exactly the correct limited regulatory/suethepantsoff vector to ‘the Marvelous Market.’” Check. If first we slay the Beast of Big Government Regulation (except the parts that I happen to think ought to survive,) everything will be beautifu-a, in its own wa-ay…
Looks like the “deficit hawks” (WHY oh WHY can’t they be called the “deficit vultures,” or maybe “deficit maggots,” or how about “deficit Komodo dragons” that often hunt by getting close enough to bite their prey and then let the witches’ brew of pathogens in their saliva kill the unfortunate animal by accelerated sepsis, since eating rotting, dead flesh is so much more what they are all about?
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
@JP-My guess is that you did a bit of creative editing on that quote from Obama. Can you give me the source?
here’s the Obama quote in question…
http://www.barackobama.com/2007/11/21/obama_statement_on_food_shorta.php
JP,
Ending, altogether, government support of R&D is unwise for a host of reasons. It’s infeasible, counterpructive and hidebound. Such absolutism is characteristic of the simpler libertarian thinkers, but ergo uncharacteristic of you in particular. How about we treat the problem with a scalpel rather than a cudgel?
There are straightforward, tested measures the Republic could take to curtail porkbarreling under the guise of worthy R&D that serves the commonweal and to keep bureaucrats from disturbing the ghost of William Proxmire with boneheaded research grants. Members of Congress are, as a class, the all-time gamiest of gamers, with the civil servants also placing somewhere in the Top 10.
Rather than abolishing federal funding, we must change the rules of the game. When it comes time to model and kriegspiel prospective rule changes, I hope len & Co. will win the bid!
I like the idea but the Republicans will bash it as “job killing” a phrase I have come to detest. I think the trick is to be able to spin cutting corporate welfare as a way to create jobs. If you can do that, you’ve got a chance with the soundbite driven pundits and public.
Want a nice take on one of the real roots of the problems of The Republic? <a href="http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/reformers-vs-riches/1107059"<Klein has a piece of his mind in the WaPo of all places that includes a little actual reporting on what kind of people it takes to staff (I almost committed lese-politcal-correctness and wrote “man”) the regulatory apparatus that’s needed to have a prayer of reining in the same impulses that eventually sap so much of the “smarts” out of the administrative corps.
I guess I was not smart enough, or the time was wrong, or my expertise was not currently in demand (since nobody offered me that private helicopter) when in 1990 I fled the Heritage Foundation-inspired nonsense that the Reaganauts buried “sensible” regulatory functioning in, when they Took Over (with at least as massive an eventual effect as any Taking Over By The Godless Commies would have done)in 1980. Ten years of watching the deadly process of Regulatory Capture work its magic, and doing my little bit to fight a rear-guard action, was enough for me.
You want a liberal-libertarian temporary coalition? (There are chemicals, as I recall, that can be mixed and will do stuff together for quite some time before they detonate — fulminate of mercury, maybe?) Maybe figure out how to weed out the Fifth Columnists installed by the Forces of Darkness, and figure out how, over time, to attract and hold, out of that cohort of Brave New People that Worgon tells us are breeding up just now, folks with some learning in the notions of governance and comity who are willing to live on A Reasonable Amount instead of All They Can Grab.
<a href="http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/reformers-vs-riches/1107059"<Klein on regulatory capture
There must some topics where everybody agrees. Overlapping consensus is what Eleanora Roosevelt described as the necessary tool to reach an agreement at the UN on the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.
Ending basic science funding is the highest on my priority list of cuts, so I’ll concede that if we can kill the all corporate subsidies.
Also, Jon, that graph should put Corn Ethanol in the same vector as Oil in the bad-for-the-planet matrix. It also happens to crowd out arable land use for food and literally starves kids with higher food prices. It’s a moral travesty of global, and globally recognized, proportions. Obama’s support for it is horrible opportunism and cowardice, never mind being essentially murderous.
I totally agree with you it’s happening in Brazil now.
Here’s a sham we should all reject:
http://mashable.com/2010/07/05/obama-solar-energy/
In my humble opinion backing Solar power is not a sham.
Bernard, it’s a sham.
But what magical power can our central planners at the utterly failed department of energy determine that $2 Billion (all of which borrowed) would be best put into Solar and into these particular firms instead of other technologies and other firms.
The way they do it is by political clout, which is exactly why the WORST oil alternative on EARTH, corn-based ethanol, gets more subsidies than all the rest. It’s all a sham.
Markets work better. The best gauge of which solution is the best is which solution can be profitable and which solution can attract private capital. There’s no way in hell ethanol would get a nickel were it not for the Iowa Caucus which got this president elected. No way. Political allocation of resources is the definition of corruption and the child-starving ethanol policy, which is a net energy destroyer, is undeniable proof of that.
I wrote a blog on this subject – I think the same head – last winter. Nevertheless, Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, has an opinion piece in this week’s Business Week that should merit discussion. The nation needs a serious discussion of its policy priorities view a view towards the next 25 to 50 years and what kind of nation we want. I’m not talking about puffery stuff like “more liberty” or “more freedom” but an actual discussion of what we want the country to look like in terms of education, jobs, prosperity, etc in the next several decades.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-american-job-before-it-s-too-late-andy-grove.html
“what kind of nation we want”
Who is this “we”? The notion of somehow fashioning a single nation of 300 million people to suite some ill-conceived notion of a unified “we” is part of the problem.
“We” deserve choice, not one size fits all. That means decentralization of power and competitive structures of governance with the ability for “us” to pick and choose. What more freedom? Move to a state that isn’t dominated by paternalist tyrants. Want to be lorded over ripped off by corrupt morons and paternalist busy bodies, move to New York, New Jersey or California. Take your pick.
Nationalism sucks. It’s one of the great evils of human history. We don’t need one national sense of anything. The very idea that we have a unified national identity or should want one is something I simply reject.
Let’s move our focus onto local decision making, freedom of movement and choice.
This interesting site shows you what we should be headings towards.
http://www.newurbanism.org/newurbanism/principles.html
And what this expert on oil says is what I believe is the actual truth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3_Kl6xkQIA
Tony Sirna,
Good political advice.
JP,
Actually, over the years I too never quite glimpsed a plausible justification for underwriting basic research through federal budgets. The porcine element aside, it always seemed to me, even when I was a rainmaker and project manager at research universities, that the Feds should fund e.g. pure science only when the prospective benefits of such pristine work promise on sound evidence to outweigh costs. (So, Manhattan Project, Human Genome Project, but not the Superconducting Super Collider, thank you)
But what really is basic or pure or original? What can these words, the descriptors possibly mean in this context? Do they connote the search for some breakthrough, some quickening discovery such as the federally funded identification of the HIV? Are these descriptors, in the research realm, meaningful only in contradistinction viz the derivative? Is not everything derivative, under the Sun?
In any case we might as well acknowledge that the U.S. Government seldom operates as sole finders of big-ticket research, and only rarely co-sponsors non-military development work.
JTM,
Yep, applying the term “clean-up” to any aspect of the Gulf Spill–except perhaps in the sense that the venal federal non-response to the disaster is the latest proof of the need to clean up DC–is deceitful and devious in the extreme. Journalists are saps if they fall for viral euphemisms planted by the petro-flacks, but they’re doing the Devil’s work when they casually refer to such massive and permanent and multiform damage in such infantile, powderpuff terms.
P.S. Thanks for the observation on Ham’s Code, and for the excellent index appertaining. It never occured to me, but you’re right: it’s principally concerned with commerce, property, money, lending, taxation, etc.–just like the Constitution. That’s really interesting.
How on Earth you propose to predict beforehand what value the super-collider would have is a mystery to me.
It makes more sense to me for one to be funded by a government than the human genome project which was at least of a scale private investment could afford with predictable direct benefits to private industry.
But super colliders are on a scale unlikely to be affordable by private investment or charity and their discoveries more unpredictable and likely of less obvious benefit in any short term.
@Hugo,
It’s a thorny issue and I’ve not studied it much. I do know that innovation that actually materially improves our standard of living doesn’t seem to correlate with levels of basic research expenditure. Look at the relative output of Apple vs. Microsoft in terms of real innovations and their relative R&D budgets.
R&D is just as prone to the knowledge problem as everything else. Deciding to spend 1 trillion on cancer cures doesn’t ensure a cure. It is a random world, science. The cure is likely to emerge from some unforeseeable, unplannable tinkering and trial and error.
Trial and error is literally the foundation of progress. Government as an institution is pretty much the WORST at trial and error. They instead engage in trial, error and more error. Error begets more funding and more error until we have the public school system.
Nassim Taleb, one of my personal gurus, is especially hard on government research spending and especially insightful (and hayekian) in his recognition of bottom-up tinkering and real-world-problem oriented research (market driven, in other words). That alone makes me skeptical of it’s effectiveness. It’s the central planning that I ultimately have a problem with.
Good grief, JP, most research occurs in universities. Most gov’t funding goes to universities.
Valerie, facts tend to confuse the argument.
Valerie and JTM,
Precisely. The U.S. only ostensibly scrimps on research, relative to the EU and China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and others. And sure, it’s an apples & oranges comparison because the U.S. relies so much on the research universities, though the Feds, for years, increasingly have required academic bidders to partner with the private sector to win the big projects.
The Yankee approach to these matters is unique among nations, and it seems to have worked impressively–at least it impresses me. We could specify the differences between the European, Asian and American approaches (Canada’s is an interesting amalgam), but I don’t want to belabor the matter further.
I’d only add that the U.S. Government’s reliance on the big universities is a product of WWII, with the first G.I. Bill as denoument and the Sputnik response as epilogue. It’s an interesting story but youalready know how it goes.
One article I read said the use MIT, Harvard etc. during the war set the ball in play and Stanford kicked it through the goal posts.
One problem with American procurement over research is Americans believe everything to do with their security systems should be all secrets. So you have to design something like border security surveillance with levels of protection you might see around a base system (say Area51 if you want the guy on the street to get the point). So Obama stands there and says, it’s too vast, it can’t be done.
Then you look at the local weather guys aggregating all those cameras and web cams simply because the server is there and the URL is published, and you wonder, if all you want to do is watch, do you really care if anyone else has the same public view?
The problem is not the cost of the sensor; it’s the cost of maintaining the assets for the response. Vastness is not a problem. Precision is.
Fentex,
Agreed. I was unclear, vague. Believe me, please, I am enthralled by sheer exploration in scholarly form and I do reckognize that sometimes it’s course involves imponderables and, sometimes, requires more money than any given state of the U.S. could, alone, afford.
So let me switch to questions. Does tthe federally funded “pure” research promise a public good or two? Is thits prspective public benefit sufficiently compelling to justify the projected cost? Do the benefits sought fall under the Constitutional purview of the central government? (For example, the national security interest, or the health and safety of the People?). Is the federal government overstepping its express bounds? Is it usurping the authority of the states, which chartered and delimited it? Does the federal contract work an unfair govermental interference and competition with the private sector? &tc.
JP,
A thorny subject indeed.
I share your preference for Locke over Mill because, by the time Mill had discovered his own voice, he gave voice to a brand of utilitarianism one step short of social instrumentalism, which is, to to the lowest form of Liberal seized with power fever, as a brass ring beckoning the carousel to centrifugal destruction.
Hugo, re public benefits of “pure” research” — does the “defense research” funded at huge cost by public money and debt show any “public benefit?” A good bit of it just goes into the Worldwide Screw-the-Soft-Targets Brain of the “defence sector,” so THEIR people can “threaten” OUR people using stuff that OUR people paid to have reduced to practice, in a closing, downward spiral that ends when somebody finally “deploys” Ice-9, so the poor Troops We Support won’t have to struggle to build fascine causeways through quagmires, taking fire from Wogs hidden behind the dikes and in amongst the foliage.
On the other hand, the GUI was done, as I recall, with public money handed out so largely and freedomly to DARPA. So, is “The Mouse and Icon” a public benefit, or just a pub?
One and the same. The problem as I alluded to with having defense driving research is requirements that have little security value in the public sector becoming the limiting factor in research funding for what otherwise can be useful and beneficial technologies. For example, optics got a tremendous boost from SIGINT research but it takes about two decades for it to show up in commercial products.
There are few really good solutions to that. Even so-called open collaboration still has a veil around it and always will have even as the web technologies for collaboration are applied.
It’s a pub, Goofball. Right down the street from the Dog and Flea and ’round the corner from the Chat ‘n’ Chew.
No, JTM, I don’t. Thus far I’m the only to who’s tried to pencil some broad criteria that would spell drastic contractions of federal expenditures on defense and agriculture. In response to Fentex I tried to be a bit more specific about the former category of “investments”. I’ll specify further that my own beliefs and experience lead me to a hybrid set of principles for MIC spending.
In broad strokes, I’d say that the Jt. Chiefs should continue to provide the Secretary of Defense with regular updates on prospective war fighting, in a chronological window admitting of room for procurement and force strength; and that the Secretary, in consultation with our elected C-in-C, should prioritize those military threats which seem on sound evidence most exigent, while starving or even eliminating preparations to meet the lesser threats. The prioritization should take into account the level of actual danger to the realm (assiduously excluding the imperial impulse as well as protection of non-vital or suspect U.S. commercial interests) It further should contemplate the prospect of the prospective conflict’s expansion and also the likelihood of quagmire. The calculus should gauge the reliability of the Staff’s forecast of exchange rates and costs (the Sec’y, in his own thinking, probably ought to begin by doubling both. Next, a kind of cost-benefit analysis naturally should be applied. Most importantly, the hypothetical U.S. commitment, be it symetrical or otherwise, should be averted rigorously and, when push comes to shove, should be prosecuted as humanely and efficiently (in re blood and treasure) as possible. Above all it must be just.*
The term “just” of course requires some definitional criteria of its own. It’s an inescapably metaphysical question, touching inevitably both supernatural and moral/civil concerns. Its careful contemplation leads, as a discrete theology or aesthetic does, to the formulation and articulation of a leader’s particular set of beliefs on the subject. For this reason, it is well to keep the the formulation under the close control of those closest to the people, the civilian head of DoD serving at the pleasure of the elected C-in-C. My own personal formula is a hybrid of Wesleyanism, which permits very few exceptions to Wesley’s innate pacifism; of pre-JP II Catholic Just War Doctrine (John Paul over-reduced five justifications to one, defense of the innocent); and of the civil and ethical commitments and constraints implied by the President-Elect’s asseverations on Innaugural Day. American presidents are sworn to protect and defend not only the Constitution but the U.S. and her People. That oath binds a president doubly, in that it both obligates him and restrains him. Protection and defense of our constitutional democracy, of our own democratic republic and its folk does not mean or authorize U.S. protection and defense of other nations’ constitutional democracies, of other lands, of other folk. These implicit civil constraints provide a rather firm foundation upon which the President and his Secretary may adjucate candidates for U.S. martial conflict and any expenditures preparatory to military intervention.
If you’d like, I’ll attach to Jon’s string on the Paul/Frank open letter an enumeration of the still more specific criteria I’d like to see operate as principles restricting military expenditures and constraining bureacratic rules for contract bidding. I just wouldn’t want want such an offering to look like a draft model of rules themselves. That would be fatuous here.
Finally, you and I on occasion have sworn two separate oaths pertaining to this discussion, variously the oath to defend the USA’s Constitution and people and the civilian one obliging us only to defend the charter. Never having tried it, I can’t know whether it’s true that one cannot be holier than the occupant of St. Pete’s Throne, yet I do know that an American President cannot afford to be even that holy. The Pontiff authorizes only the protection of innocents. The President is required to protect both the innocent and the culpable. The one reigns, while the other rains upon the just and the unjust alike.
Leaner & meaner, McPhee. Leaner & meaner. “Oro en Pas, Fierro en Guerra”.
Len,
Yes. Spin-On good, Spin-Off better. Much to be said, but now here and now.
Hi Jon,
I can’t agree with you more regarding the Corporate Welfare Matter. It’s time that the public becomes educated and proactive on this issue. The problem is as long as the Oil companies are sleeping with the powers that be, and the powers that be continue to be spineless, power hungry cowards, real change on this front is far from happening. I’m passionate about this issue, so much so I’ve dedicated 4 years to a series of paintings on the subject. Check out my site. http://www.neilklassen.com
All the best,
Neil
[...] Jon Taplin’s blog 15. Jul, [...]