Truth and Traditions

Government of our money, by Wall Street, for Fat Cats:

Pension savings, now estimated at nearly $3 trillion, could be invested in companies to finance productive growth, in bonds to fix bridges and build schools, in education loans and environmental protection. Instead, they have become rich fodder for Wall Street money managers. In the past three decades, partly because of this pension wealth, the financial services sector has increased its overall profits from 16 percent of total corporate profits to more than 40 percent.

via Protecting Retirement Funds From Wall Street Speculation | The Nation.

Does this make you feel safer? How about worried and angry?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention. . . .

“Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse,” Mr. German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau’s surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an inspector general’s findings in 2007 that the F.B.I. had frequently misused “national security letters,” which allow agents to obtain information like phone records without a court order.

via F.B.I. Giving Agents New Powers in Revised Manual – NYTimes.com.

Government for the rich, by the rich, over the People’s backs.

What lies behind this trans-Atlantic policy paralysis? I’m increasingly convinced that it’s a response to interest-group pressure. Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense.

via Rule by Rentiers – NYTimes.com.

A 1998 study by Greenpeace entitled “Fueling Global Warming: Federal Tax Subsidies to Oil in the U.S.” found that there were between $5 billion and $35 billion in annual subsidies to oil companies in the U.S. depending on how one makes the calculation and hence whether or not one includes such things as U.S. grants to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and other less visible oil-related subsidies.

Big Oil does NOT get $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies. It gets BILLIONS MORE!.

If you want to transform the economy, you have to cut Wall Street down to its proper size. One way to do that is to tax the short-term speculative activities that dominate and distort financial markets.

via Cut Wall Street Down to Size With a Financial Speculation Tax | The Nation.

Why am I not surprised? The way the military makes a public estimate about the costs of the latest corporate welfare project is to take the private estimate and divide by ten. And the private estimate is always too low.

US military operations in Libya are on course to cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than the Pentagon estimated, according to figures obtained by the Financial Times.

Robert Gates, the outgoing secretary of defence, said last month that the Pentagon expected to spend “somewhere in the ball park of $750m” in the 2011 fiscal year as part of efforts to protect the Libyan people.

But according to a Pentagon memo which includes a detailed update on the progress and pace of operations, by mid-May US operations in Libya had cost $664m, a figure confirmed by the Department of Defence.

via FT.com / Middle East & North Africa – Pentagon sees Libya military costs soar.

ThinkProgress, using data on various social spending projects from the National Priorities Project — which does these calculations for the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars — has estimated ten other possible policies we could’ve paid for at the same $2.5 trillion price of the Bush tax cuts.

It’s a sobering 10-item list, e.g.

– Provide 31.5 Million Head Start Slots For Children Every Year For Ten Years

– Provide VA Care For 30.7 Million Military Veterans Every Year For Ten Years

via The $2.5 Trillion Tragedy: What America Has Given Up For 10 Years Of Bush Tax Cuts | Common Dreams.