We all know that money talks and bullshit walks.  Nowhere is that more true than in our current political machine.

The 2012 presidential election cost by itself about two and a half BILLION dollars.  The entire 2012 election cycle including presidential and senatorial/congressional elections ran over six billion.  Imagine, a billion dollars just to sit in the most powerful chair on the planet.  Well, it was until Obama started leading from behind and pissing away our place as global leader.  A billion dollars to sit in the chair of the fifth or sixth most powerful position on the planet.

Is it any wonder that only the most craven and egocentric among us bother to run for office?  I could not imagine announcing my candidacy only to have to grovel to untold thousands of persons known and unknown asking them to fund the mere chance of me taking an elected office.  This is how political corruption is born.  People rarely just give you money.  They want something in return.  That something, in politics, is usually access.  Access leads to grease or steerage, or favoritism.  The person donating wants something tangible in return and they will ask for it when they need it.

And the money squirts to both sides of the aisle.  Businesses will pay a little now for a greater payoff later.  Think I’m kidding?  Think I do not know what I’m talking about?  Let’s look at a few examples.  (You can see the rest of them by going to the link included.)

Verizon Communications
Profits: $19.8 billion Effective tax rate: -3.8%

Top recipients, 2011-2012
President Barack Obama: $51,493  Nothing needs to be said.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.): $24,450  He is on the committee for Taxation and IRS Oversight.  Convenient.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): $23,700 Senate Minority Leader.  On the Senate Committee for Appropriations.
Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio): $22,500 Speaker of the House.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.): $15,000

General Electric
Profits: $19.6 billion Effective tax rate: -18.9%
Top recipients, 2011-2012
Mitt Romney: $53,750  Think business leader Romney would have reeled GE in?  Think again.
President Barack Obama (D): $30,493.  Again, nothing to be said.
Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.): $23,900.  Pompous ass.  Left Mass., and now running again in NH.
Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.): $21,860  Been in Congress for 30 years—knows who to talk to and who to pay off.
Rep. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.): $19,750  Fifth largest donor for someone on the Committee for Joint Economic Development.  Remember GE’s moving jobs overseas?

Boeing
Profits: $14.8 billion Effective tax rate: -5.5%
Top recipients, 2011-2012
Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.): $31,750 20-year Congressman.  Committee on Armed Forces.  Boeing is a big military contractor.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.): $25,000 15-year Congressman.  Committee on Armed Forces. 3 major Boeing facilities in Washington state
Former Sen. George Allen (R-Va.): $23,500  Who wants back in to politics?  Now you know why.
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.): $23,125  Committee of Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas): $20,986  Nobody is innocent.

Verizon took issues stating that they pay a lot in taxes and investments.  The last word is key—investments.  They get tax breaks on their investments.  Why not upgrade your system from 3G to 4G if the government is going to subsidize it?

Another article details 26 large companies that pay no taxes.  They include:   (picture did not import in.  Go to the third link to see it.)

PICTURE SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE.

Notice that many of them—SIXTEEN of them are energy companies.  Pepco is an energy distribution company, as is NiSource.  Apache is a natural gas and oil exploration company.  Look at your gas & electric or utilities bill.  I personally pay almost $3000 a year to Xcel and IREA combined.  Aurora has about 300,000 residents.  If we use a modest half figure (150,000) as customers it comes to $439 million annually between these two companies.  And they need a tax break sufficient to make their effective tax rate go into negative numbers?

My tax rate last year was about 11%.  If I incorporate myself as an energy firm and start giving select politicians money, can I stop paying taxes?  Or should I go into politics?

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/08/2012-election-will-be-costliest-yet.html

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/04/top-tax-dodging-companies-politicians

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/25/corporation-tax-rate_n_4855763.html

Cliven Bundy, a cattle rancher in Nevada has been able to poke the eye of the giant and get away with it—for now.

See, Bundy raises cattle and for years has had his cattle grazing on “federal land”.  About 85% of Nevada is federally owned so it is a stretch to even call it a state as such.  Bundy and his past relatives have been grazing the same land (his cattle, silly) since the 1880s so he sees it largely as a continuing of a long past agreement.  The gubmint sees it differently.  Since 1993 Bundy stopped paying them and now they say he owes over a million dollars in past fees.  Bundy says the fees charged would run him out of business and speculates that is the gubmint’s intent all along.

The gubmint also forwards that the land Bundy’s cattle graze on is also home to an endangered desert tortoise and that the cattle “routinely” kill them.  As if the cattle see the tortoise and like an 8 year-old seeing a spider on the sidewalk move heaven and earth to splat them.  Other sources say the Bureau of Land Management also are guilty of killing the tortoise in their practice of “land management”.  The gubmint wants Bundy’s cattle off “their” land.

Enter state Senator Harry Reid.  Yes, Harry is a politician.  This makes him just a step above a child molester  and otherwise a piece of shit and a liar.  Harry has been linked along with his son Rory to a Chinese firm that were going to construct a wind farm of sorts on the BLM land that Bundy’s cattle graze upon.  Some background here…

Harry has already been linked to suspect and shady land deals where he bought “shit land” for very little and shortly after the land was sold at outrageous profits for some construction effort.  I’m talking hundreds of thousands of dollars.  (Sort of reminds one of the Hillary cattle futures windfall of profits.)  Harry’s son  just happens to be a lawyer representing the Chinese firm that would build this green energy farm, probably for pennies on the dollar for the land and also being subsidized by YOU the taxpayer.  They profit, you pay.

The gubmint’s response?   They send in over 200 armed agents to surround the property and to confiscate the cattle “illegally” on federal land.  One rumor had the gubmint euthanizing the cows.  Another had them selling them presumably to pay the amount back owed since 1993.  The Bundy’s went public.  Members of local and national militias arrived—armed—to help protect and defend the Bundy’s private land.  Cowboys came to help.  Members of the Oath Keepers also arrived.

One official was quoted to say that he hoped the armed invaders “had their funeral plans made.”  Imagine that!  The gubmint threatening the lives of people who had yet to pose any physical threat of bodily harm.  The threat did not have the desired effect.

Today, the gubmint blinked and backed down.  See, everything is political to them (the left).  Everything.  Somebody higher than Harry and Son ran the numbers and saw that this was no longer politically feasible.  Bundy’s cattle are reportedly going to be returned and they will be allowed to graze on the disputed lands.  This probably means the boundaries of the wind farm will just be moved elsewhere.  A friend of mine thinks the DHS will get its turn and make Bundy disappear.  Hopefully Bundy has HIS affairs in order as far as land possession is concerned.  The gubmint can’t kill the entire family, can they?

This is a lesson to us all though.  Go public and have a grass roots theme.  With enough support, the gubmint will back off.  They don’t want the cause of personal responsibility and freedom to grow roots and grow support.  They want dependency.  It is your call.

Last week, Brendan Eich, CEO of Mozilla (for about a week) resigned after pressure from gay rights groups.  See, back in 2008, Brendan made a political donation of $1000 in support of California’s Proposition 8, a “marriage is between a man and a woman” thing.  A quick look at the calendar… yup, it is 2014.

So, something he did on his own time, using his own money, of his own volition SIX YEARS ago, comes back to haunt him in his public life and means of income.

I believe that marriage as defined by the state is a privilege (not a right–sort of like driving) that is between one man and one woman.  Back in 2008 so did Brendan Eich.  So did B. Hussein Obama for that matter.  One pundit on TV (probably MSNBC based on how vapid it is) compared people who are against gay marriage to holocaust deniers and that it is RIGHT for them to be cast out of their jobs.  So, if I believe that gays should not be married, then I also do not believe Hitler was in charge of the purging of six million Jews during WW2?  Seriously?

It is a non sequitor.  Why is no one calling this guy the idiot he is?

As far as anyone has come forward, Brendan Eich did not discriminate against gays at the workplace.  He didn’t tell fag jokes or promote straights over equally qualified gays.  He merely exercised his political voice in a monetary way six years ago.  Clearly, one is not allowed to do that.  The thought police are here and they have procognition powers.  Bill Maher must have some kind of Kryptonite against these thought police though.

“I believe there is a gay mafia.  If you go up against them, you get whacked.”  –Bill Maher

As in IOU, the taxpayer.

Remember late last year the scare that rippled through the media about how milk prices may soar if the Farm Bill does not get passed?  Probably not.  But I do.  The sky was falling, they were so serious.  See, the government already props up the price of milk (at our expense) but if there was no deal on the Farm Bill, the price the government would pay was going to increase dramatically making them the prime target for dairy sales.  This would reduce the amount available at stores and would thus, result in a rise in prices.  Dairy farmers win and consumers lose.

That’s the end result when it comes to the Farm Bill even when they do come to an agreement.

The Farm Bill is a five-year agreement.  The government calls it something else each time, and the title drifts further from sounding like anything related to farming each time.  In 2008, the President Bush vetoed the law (the Food, Conservation and Energy Act) since he thought there was too much expansion in the food stamp part of the bill (47% more than the bill from 2003).  Yes, the farm bill is where most of the money to be spent on food stamps is appropriated.  Congress overrode his veto.

In 2012/13 the bill was called Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act.  No provision of the law that I’ve found had anything to do with creating jobs.  Then it was called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).  So now its name is totally connected to food stamps and has no titular connection to farming whatsoever.  (How about that?  A little truth in advertising!)  What helped it pass was the $800 million reduction (over ten years—the standard for all government spending/saving calculations—in food stamps.  Even then, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters he did not expect the cut of about 1 percent of the food stamp budget to have a significant impact on recipients.

The current tab?  Nearly $100 billion per year of which 80% or more is for food stamps.  Of the rest, only about 10% of farmers receive over 75% of the subsidies. Some of these “farmers” were in fact Congressmen, lobbyists, and other government officials and celebrities.   Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi receive farm subsidies.

Other provisions of the law masked recipients of subsidies.  There was a 194-word entry specifically to keep people who received subsidy anonymous.   Obviously that never lasts.  The list is easily found but here is a small piece of it.  Zip code 20003 (near Washington D.C. you know right smack in the middle of the farming belt of the country) had 75 recipients of farm bill money totally over $841K from 1995 to 2012.  One person, William T Hawks received the lion’s share of this $841K.  He got $240K starting in 2003 for cotton subsidies.  Who is William T Hawks?  Why, he is the former Undersecretary for Agriculture.  US Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) receives a farm subsidy at his Arlington, VA condominium.  Joining the list of DC insiders pocketing farm subsidy money was Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack.  Jimmy Carter, yes, THAT Jimmy Carter also receives subsidies for his peanut farm is Georgia.  Oh, Louis Farrakhan also receives farm bill subsidies.  Billionaire Ted Turner also receives subsidies.

Here are two paragraphs lifted straight from some of the research I did:

The agricultural services industry contributed nearly $42 million in campaign contributions at the federal and state level according to Influence Explorer and spent more than $62 million on federal lobbying. Top recipients include Obama, with $474,000 and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., chairwoman of the Senate Agricultural Committee, with $169,550.

In Chicago alone, a city without a single farm, 930 individuals and entities have received $6.1 million since 2008.  In the nation’s capitol, documents show 2,801 entities in the Washington DC area received over $18.4 million in payments from the Farm subsidy program. In New York City, 248 entities received subsidy payments. In all, the report shows just 10,806 recipients of the highest farm subsidies – $250,000 or more – with each receiving an average payment of $417,316.

“Farmers” are also paid to not farm.

The USDA estimates there are 700,968 currently active contracts in the program, while the number of farms is roughly 390,000 covering 27.02 million acres. The USDA predicts the Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 payments will be $2.034 billion. The payments vary by degree of land sensitivity and can range from $50 per acre all the way up to $134, with the average being $61 per acre.

In 2010, the annual total amount of acres covered in the program was $31.3 million. This figure amounted to $1.667 billion in annual direct payments, or about $53 per acre. According to The Wall Street Journal, contracts for the program usually last between 10 and 15 years in order to “conserve soil.”

The bill passed and was signed into law two months ago.  And it is good for 5 years.  I guess a different president would be able to nullify the bill, unless of course, he or a family member, friend, campaign bundler, or a staff worker is receiving a subsidy.  But remember this the next time it comes around for extension or renewal.  All that bullshit they sling about the cost of milk going up, or the beef shortages that will happen…it is all a load of crap.  They extend this because it is a payday for them.  Another one.  And you foot the bill.

Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_farm_bill

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/02/07/farm-bill-allows-congress-to-keep-crop-subsidies-secret/