Something’s got to be done to stop the looting.
There’s simply no justification for anyone taking advantage of a bad situation to loot and steal—especially when you’re hurting your own people, your own neighborhoods.
Some examples:
- Tax changes in the coronavirus stimulus bill allowed some of the nation’s richest to loot the U.S. treasury by avoiding nearly $82 billion in taxes for 2020.
- The Federal Reserve on March 23 announced it would begin direct purchases of corporate debt, a move described as an unprecedented rescue of corporate America which allowed companies like Boeing and Carnival Cruises to loot the system while avoiding requirements to retain employees during the shutdown.
- The $2.2 trillion stimulus bill allowed companies like Exxon/Mobil and other companies making record profits to loot from taxpayers via more generous latitude to deduct losses.
- Yet another provision of the relief bill allowed the wealthiest Americans and large companies to loot the economy through the federal government’s $174 billion giveaway in the form of tax breaks.
- Airline shareholders got in on the looting rampage via a $50 billion gift from the federal government to prop up the industry.
- Twenty of the nation’s largest hospital chains that were sitting on $100 million in cash still managed to participate in the looting when the federal stimulus bill awarded them $5 billion in federal grants.
- The Paycheck Protection Program was intended to help small companies during the coronavirus shutdown but dozens of large companies with financial or legal problems managed to get in on the looting when they got large payouts under the program.
- Several recipients of grants intended for small businesses were paying their executives $2 million or more in annual salary. Talk about looting!
- Companies that left the U.S. in order to lower their tax liabilities still hung around long enough to participate in the looting by qualifying for federal aid. (Source: JACOBIN.)
Remember those $1200 stimulus checks that went out to every adult American? Millions of those recipients were retirees or people who continued working in jobs deemed critical, meaning their stream of income was never interrupted. That should have negated any need for a relief check but the recipients nevertheless became looters when they received their unsolicited checks. (FULL DISCLOSURE: We received $2400 even though my retirement income continued uninterrupted and my wife continued working. So, I suppose by definition, we are looters, albeit involuntarily.)
Click HERE to see how Congress abetted corporate looters in crafting the stimulus bill.
Even First Son-in-Law JARED KUSHNER got in on the looting during the pandemic that was killing 100,000 Americans.
He wasn’t the only one with White House connections to get in on the looting, of course.
But sometimes the looters are so inept that they fail to take advantage of the situation.
A company called PANTHERA WORLDWIDE attempted to get in on the looting but after securing a $55 million contract to provide N95 masks as a third-party vendor but then couldn’t deliver and had its contract canceled.
Corporate looting certainly isn’t limited to the coronavirus pandemic. The looting has been going on for generations and we’ve somehow become so inured to it that we don’t even think about it anymore—and that’s exactly the way they want it.
How about THIS: General Electric, Texaco, Dow Chemical, PepsiCo, Boeing and ITT are among companies that paid nothing—zero, nada, zilch—in taxes from 1981 to 1984. Other companies took looting to a higher level when, instead of paying taxes, they got checks from the U.S. Treasury by “carrying back” their excess write-offs to previous years and by receiving rebates from taxes paid in previous years.
And remember Billy Tauzin, the former U.S. Representative from Louisiana’s 3rd District from 1980 to 2005? In 2004, just before he walked out the door, he guided a provision through congress that prohibited Medicare and Medicaid from being able to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs and, at the same time, banned the importation of identical, cheaper drugs from Canada and elsewhere. In other words, what the pharmaceutical companies said was the price—was the price. The bill was passed in a rare congressional session at 3 a.m. under considerable pressure from the pharmaceutical companies.
I’m on Medicare and my wife and I take medication to prevent acid reflux and indigestion. One day we checked our statement from our Medicare supplemental insurance provider and found that the prescription cost—get this—$500 for one month’s supply. Five hundred bucks and no negotiation. We no longer take that prescription because there’s an over-the-counter product called Omeprazole that does the same thing just as well—for less than $20. It’s not covered by Medicare but so what? At least I’m not looting in that instance.
Oh, and Billy Tauzin? What happened to him when he left Congress? Why, the very day after his term ended, he began work as the head (read: lobbyist) of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, better known by its acronym: PhRMA at an estimated salary of $2 million a year. I think that qualifies Billy Tauzin and Big Pharma as looters.
All this looting was going on even as we were being told there was just no money for student debt relief, for Medicare for All, for a Green New Deal. Sorry students and old folks, the CORPORATE LOOTERS got there first. And there wasn’t any way to stop them: they had wads of campaign cash, which is catnip to politicians. It literally makes them salivate.
So, you see, we wring our hands and worry about looters in the wake of the death of George Floyd, which we should. But much more costly looting has been going on for decades right under our noses and will continue unabated.
Trump was correct to threaten the use of vicious dogs. He just threatened to turn them loose on the wrong ones. It might be kind of funny to watch a surly, bad-ass chihuahua nipping at the ankles of a K Street lobbyist-looter.
Louisiana Voice 
Here is added information on the “looters of the Treasury.” Column from the NYT by Nicholas Kristof on May 23, 2020.
Good piece. Though there is no true comparison between the two, it is never a bad idea to point to corporate looting/welfare. I blame our government more than the corporations. It is hard for even the most altruistic business person to turn down the breaks afforded – just as it was for you and I and others with regard to the stimulus payments.
We once had much higher income tax brackets, including corporate income. However, deductions that allowed these businesses to grow reduced the net taxes paid dramatically, so there were clear incentives for expansion – with which came new jobs, of course, AND we had a much better corporate income tax revenue stream. Now, we have lower tax rates, but tax breaks that allow some corporations (most likely including those owned by our president, though we may never know) to pay no taxes at all.
There has to be a happy balance in there somewhere – but nobody seems interested in trying to strike it – and legislators who talk about it are branded “socialists.” Trickle down has never worked and never will, but Republicans want us to believe it someday will – and, no matter what you want to call it, it is at the heart of our tax policies.
After all that corporate welfare, I refuse to be considered a “looter” for using stimulus dollars for their intended purpose. Particularly since I did not receive anything for either of my children. My youngest is a 17 year old high school student, and the oldest was a dependent college student living at home who didn’t receive anything either. So, it’s fortunate that the retirement I worked for was unaffected. There are numerous around me that needed that money badly…
In previous posts I have mentioned the book Captured by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. I mention it again since it provides such a thorough understanding of the influence of corporations on our government. It is a powerful indictment of how money has tilted the balance of our democracy. Amazon describes it as:
“A U.S. senator, leading the fight against money in politics, chronicles the long shadow corporate power has cast over our democracy
In Captured, U.S. Senator and former federal prosecutor Sheldon Whitehouse offers an eye-opening take on what corporate influence looks like today from the Senate Floor, adding a first-hand perspective to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money.
Americans know something is wrong in their government. Senator Whitehouse combines history, legal scholarship, and personal experiences to provide the first hands-on, comprehensive explanation of what’s gone wrong, exposing multiple avenues through which our government has been infiltrated and disabled by corporate powers. Captured reveals an original oversight by the Founders, and shows how and why corporate power has exploited that vulnerability: to strike fear in elected representatives who don’t “get right” by threatening million-dollar “dark money” election attacks (a threat more effective and less expensive than the actual attack); to stack the judiciary—even the Supreme Court—in “business-friendly” ways; to “capture” the administrative agencies meant to regulate corporate behavior; to undermine the civil jury, the Constitution’s last bastion for ordinary citizens; and to create a corporate “alternate reality” on public health and safety issues like climate change.
Captured shows that in this centuries-long struggle between corporate power and individual liberty, we can and must take our American government back into our own hands.”
Look at what has just happened tonight and ask yourself, “Is this still America?”
Stephen, I asked that same question earlier tonight. Tom, like you and others, we got the $2400 and my retirement check did not skip a beat. So I probably didn’t deserve the stimulus money. But, I did spend it and put it back into the economy. For those of us who didn’t need that’s what we need to do.
Trump manages to do increasingly egregious things every single day. That image of him holding up the Bible in front of the church sign after people were tear-gassed and shot with rubber bullets to clear his way to create it should tell anybody who is sentient who and what he is. But, you know what, his supporters apparently applauded it, as they have everything else he has done and giving them free rein is destroying our society. Vote, people, vote. They will.