Fortune 100 Companies Have Received a Whopping $1.2 Trillion in Corporate Welfare Recently

ErgoTheMirror
reply to post by neo96

 

You misunderstand... I agree with you. That's the simplest response to give to someone stating "Give them a living wage!"

Challenge them to explain why raising minimum wage to $50 isn't viable then.

What the does any of this have to do with multi-trillion dollar corporate welfare?

reply to post by SaturnFX

wonder if corruption is too big to fail

The corruption is too big to prosecute.

That's what happens when u have big government u get crony capitalism. Limit the governments power and there would be less of these handouts.

reply to post by deadcalm


This report demonstrates how much most people have their thinking and hence their minds, controlled by the mainstream media.

Its amazing to see just how easily people can be 'trained up' to be such 'true believers' in the mainstream media. But, then again I was one my self once.

freedomSlave these kind of people are greedy beyond belief

i'm not even sure they're people.

RoScoLaz

freedomSlave these kind of people are greedy beyond belief

i'm not even sure they're people.

Naa, they are people like anyone else. Just got dealt a different hand than the rest.
To them, its not even about money as much as it is a game. a adrenaline style hobby of consolidating resources and wealth and power just because that's what you do.

I would imagine 90% of the population would be doing the same thing if they were given the same opportunity.

I just wish these crazy large corporations or uber rich people would take that money and better humanity with it.

Koch brothers spent 400 million on campaign contributions in 2012, with very little payback. Imagine if instead they spent that money on building a rocket that could travel back and forth to mars and earth like a shuttle...but nope...better to amass power than further humanity.

reply to post by deadcalm


For those of us who use to be the middle working class before 1980, this is not news. We have been watching the money, benefits, and tax breaks slowly being chipped away from us. Now all it takes to lose everything is one illness or one missed paycheck.

Other than our troop's sacrifices, the Iraq and Afghan wars have been all about private contractors. They don't put the trillions of taxpayer's money back into the economy, it goes to some tax haven. They get it all.

I accept that it is not going to change in my life. The powerful are too powerful.

I have encouraged my kids to think about a Scandinavia country once they get their college degrees. I don't see the US being anything other than a big corporation from now on. I am sure it is that way everywhere. But Canada and Scandinavia seem to spend their money wisely and fairly.

Once again, corporate oligarchy at work.

That's the truth of the matter. Our government is a corporate oligarchy. Every branch of government is all up in this.

But keep believing the Koch brothers, and Citizen's United and FOX News.

Visitor2012
What the does any of this have to do with multi-trillion dollar corporate welfare?

Same thing a jab has to do with an uppercut.

reply to post by neo96


People say the cost of living will go up if the minimum wage workers get a raise. How come the cost of living doesn't go up when CEO's get raises er bigger bonuses? Those bonuses by the way? Middle class tax dollars.

Small businesses already tend to pay higher than minimum wage, small businesses will do better if more people are spending money and in greater amount, small businesses tend to want to keep their employees and most wouldn't have a problem raising their wages once their profits increase.

Nations with high minimum wage also tended to get through the global recession largely unscaled. We have a consumer driven economy, in other words people need to be making enough to not only live but to consume.

The bailout money in 2008 went mostly to China. When they found out that the Mortgage Backed Securities they had bought were fraudulent (not only because of the whole MERS scandal which meant the sales weren't properly registered within their local county governments but because millions of mortgages were put into tranches and then sold not once but dozens of times over to different investors), they up and told Hank Paulsen and his beady-eyed minion George W. Bush that if they weren't paid back immediately, they were going to 'send their people to the U.S. and take their property'. That threat was what caused HP and 'ol Beady Eyes to go to Congress and tell them that if they didn't cough up a massive amount of money, no questions asked, immediately, that there would be 'martial law in the streets' by the end of the week, which as was reported, kinda 'took the oxygen out of the room.'

Congress voted no the first time, the stock market did it's stock market rollercoaster thing and scared everyone, and then Congress acquiesced. It took YEARS before someone in Congress asked Bernanke 'where the money went' and he answered with a rather vague (but accompanied by quivering upper lip) 'oh I dunno, overseas...'

But to get to your original point, OP, the money is either being used to ONE: Prop up Wall Street and by fiat (heh) the global economy which actually crashed and burned decisively back in 2008, or TWO: It's the continuation of a predetermined, unchecked, wholesale ransacking of the American consumer, who are the only effin' lemmings on the planet both able to finance their own demise, and willing to tolerate it without much more than a whimper. Hey, but they got their flags, and their 'votes', and their sports teams and reality teevee and so far, their guns, so you know...

Your guess is as good as mine which it is. Could be both.

Really wanna fix the USA or just corporate greed ? USA raise minimum wage to buy a house easy and tell those fortune 100s they are no longer part of or protected by USA/DHS military. Pretty sure there once suppliers can pick up the slack.

Not everything made comes from china and a lot off crap you don't need anyway.

Why do foreigners with massive assets buy up America is because USA made it hard on their citizens to get by and its worth a lot for now. Lots of open space and massive farming.

God bless

reply to post by deadcalm


I'm replying to your original post without having read the entire thread. and Bravo! to you! Thank you for bringing a thread to ATS that directs attention to the corporate welfare that truly drains a lot more money than the welfare given to our poor and needy. Are they drug testing the employees of these corporations? Are they re-evaluating their status every quarter by cancelling their welfare? Are they requiring documents that are impossible to provide while at the same time literally handing over full benefits to illegal aliens? And the gripe goes on and on.

Look up the assets and where USA spend 60% or more is spent on judicial crap in this country. That is a direct target of keeping the regulars down not drug lords. USA targets minions not the rich. Why a 1 million march hasn't been organized on Washington Ill never figure out It is so danm obvious they only want the fortune 100 in charge and want minimum wage to remain low so you cant afford a house and a car easily for most. Almost half houses in city's now owned by foreigners not citizens now.

This country was started by Anglos ,want to keep it that way ? Because that huge circle of population from the west is taking advantage of us and we gave it to them with manufacturing power. Well the fortune 100 did. They are still moving east and have been last 50 years . Seriously I don't even like how they cook , would never marry from there. I like family from heritage, just say it get real.


There are more not driving, then are driving now in USA. Has anyone realized that? Population is in the citys not rurals.





We should have blockcaded the pacific not opened it.
Trade should be east to west like a toilet swirls and meet in the middle instead of attacked w manufactures from both sides.

reply to post by deadcalm


I've only read the opening post, so this may have been discussed...

In the U.S. the food stamp program has to be included in any tally of corporate welfare. Food stamp recipients never get or handle the money, it goes directly to grocery and product corporations. Chains stores, and the big whales like WalMart, gobble up the food stamp money, which goes to pay and profit ADM, the soda companies, and other food producing for-profit corporations. I'm all in favor of food stamps and feeding those who need them, but let's remember that not only is in welfare for those in need but it's bottom-line welfare for the true recipients of the food stamp funding.

Bring back tariffs and the "corporate death penalty". Need to think about our own people here in the States. Mind you I am not against any other nation taking care of themselves also. I wish them all the best and will help them if I can. But I need to focus on my country, my neighborhood and my family and what benefits them!

Here is a great article by Thom Hartman.

Alte rnet

Up until the 1890s, a corporation couldn’t last more than 40 years in any state – which prevented them from being used as a tool to accumulate massive and multigenerational wealth. A corporation had to behave in the public interest, and when they weren’t, thousands of them every year were given the corporate death penalty, their assets dissolved and their stockholders losing everything (but nothing more than) they had invested.

Companies are now free to demand not just huge welfare payments, tax breaks, and subsidies, but can actually play one state off against another in a competition for which state this most willing to transfer the most dollars from the taxpaying individual people to the corporations and their billionaire CEOs. Similarly, corporations routinely use “Right To Work For Less” laws empowered by the Taft-Hartley Act to pit workers in high-wage states against workers in low-wage states, producing a national race to the bottom.

Boeing, for example, is participating in both of these practices right now, having just taken billions from Washington State and now playing their workers against desperate workers in old Confederate states. Senator Bernie Sanders has recommended that when States participate in letting corporations play states off against each other, both states should lose federal highway funds.

That, or any other remedy, is pretty unlikely as America continues to race from being one of the world’s wealthiest nations pre-Reagan, to a post-Reagan dystopia; the first modern, fully developed, industrialized nation to actually de-industrialize and move in the direction from First World status toward Third World status as a result of 32 years of Reaganomics.

Finally, a particularly pernicious form of this new business model has emerged, in part out of the radical restructuring of welfare systems in the 1990s led by Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton.

Because welfare reform in the 1990s tide the ability to receive welfare to having to work, low-wage employers discovered that as long as they kept their employees’ pay below the poverty level, you and I, through our tax dollars, would pick up the rest of their employees cost-of-living through food stamps, Medicare, etc. The result is higher taxes for us, and billions in additional money for the CEOs and stockholders of America’s largest companies.

reply to post by deadcalm


Yeah! Stick it to them mate. There are more than a few hypocrites in this site.

The federal reserve is the biggest problem of them all. They are handing out 85 billion in corporate welfare a month.

reply to post by VoidHawk


What did Ron Paul say, "food stamps for the poor are minor compared to 'food stamps' for the rich".

reply to post by Aleister


Make sure you dont forget:

That money is frequently also deposited into major banks. Things like food stamps are not just sent to you as a check. You get a Quest Card (where applicable) and THAT money is held in accounts in JP Morgan Chase bank accounts. Until, as you said, it is spent at some other major corporation.

Meaning, that large banks like JP Morgan Chase actually profit more the more people get on government assistance.

As was being mentioned though, this a problem beyond simply corporate welfare and "social welfare." Its a cloward-piven-esque strategy that is completely designed to destroy the middle class.

This is an issue that can not be solved through the system itself, however, we have all of the tools at our disposal (as consumers) to change it around. Protests, writing your representative, etc. arent going to do a single thing.

Its that double edged sword of technology. So long used to divide and conquer.. it can also be used to unite, enable, and strengthen.

I mean, this problem also involves fiat money. It has so many aspects to it that its difficult to approach in the way we have approached such problems before. Especially because it is *designed* to do exactly what it is doing.

I suspect that one solution is a product that offers everything that major corporate powers offer (including energy generation), but as a product by the people and for the people. Lead the way, basically, even in areas of a pay system that directly gives those who contribute the most to actually bringing real things into life. Encourage independence, self sufficiency, and create systems to enable individuals rather than control them by some arbitrary technology release road map that goes for the highest bottom line.

Because the problem is never the tool itself. Its all in how we use it. Everyone is to blame for being complicit, including myself.