According to figures from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, for every dollar South Carolinians pay in federal taxes, they receive $1.35 back. In other words, in 2005 (the last year for which comparable data is available) every single person in the state received $2,196 that he or she never earned. (Thanks to Obama’s fiscal wastrelry, the handout is even greater today.)
Of course, this free money isn’t welfare in the demagogic sense, i.e. a sop to the greedy needy. Gov. Nikki Haley, the Tea Party’s reigning princess, managed to cut $29 million from the state’s welfare budget last year, trimming fatty $270 monthly checks to families with two children down to $216. This year the state is projecting a $913 million increase in revenue, but Haley declares there will be no retreat to the charitable ways of the past. The extra money, she said last week, “should either go to tax relief, debt relief or back to the taxpayer.”
That would be the taxpayers of New Jersey, presumably. For every dollar they send in to the federal government, 35 cents doesn’t come back. It goes to some shiftless state unwilling to pull its own weight.
— Mike Stroup
(Source: ikenbot, via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)
It operates round-the-clock. Under the imprimatur of the largest police department in the United States, 2,000 private spy cameras owned by Wall Street firms, together with approximately 1,000 more owned by the NYPD, are relaying live video feeds of people on the streets in lower Manhattan to the center. Once at the center, they can be integrated for analysis. At least 700 cameras scour the midtown area and also relay their live feeds into the downtown center where low-wage NYPD, MTA and Port Authority crime stoppers sit alongside high-wage personnel from Wall Street firms that are currently under at least 51 Federal and state corruption probes for mortgage securitization fraud and other matters.
…
According to one person who has toured the center, there are three rows of computer workstations, with approximately two-thirds operated by non-NYPD personnel. The Chief-Leader, the weekly civil service newspaper, identified some of the outside entities that share the space: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, the Federal Reserve, the New York Stock Exchange. Others say most of the major Wall Street firms have an on-site representative.
(via robot-heart-politics)
It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.
The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.
New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.
The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.
It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don’t understand what is happening. They are deaf, dumb and blind.
— Chris Hedges - Why Corporate Elites Should Be Petrified of Occupy Wall Street
(Source: socialuprooting, via sustainablefuture)
(via progressivefriends)
Reporting from Washington— In a grim portrait of a nation in economic turmoil, the government reported that the number of people living in poverty last year surged to 46.2 million — the most in at least half a century — as 1 million more Americans went without health insurance and household incomes fell sharply.
The poverty rate for all Americans rose in 2010 for the third consecutive year, matching the 15.1% figure in 1993 and pushing many more young adults to double up or return to their parents’ home to avoid joining the ranks of the poor.
America’s crumbling infrastructure is no small secret. One need look no further than ASCE’s 2009 report card; America’s infrastructure GPA averaged out to a dismal letter grade of D. Not a single category (including the bridges, roads, and rail many of us traverse each day) received a score higher than a C.
Kevin Drum suggests that Obama’s speech focus on one thing only: putting people back to work by letting them get their hands dirty. And as the provider of public goods, it is in the government’s best interest to serve as the underwriter of this critical investment.
Drum writes:
All of us have our fantasies about what we’d like President Obama to say in his big speech next week about jobs. Here’s mine: ask Congress to appropriate a trillion dollars to be spent on infrastructure upgrades over the next five years. That’s it. That’s the jobs plan. A trillion dollars to make us into a first-world country again. And as part of the enabling legislation, ask for emergency powers to temporarily streamline the regulatory red tape, interagency approval processes, environmental-impact statements, and labor rules that might otherwise keep the money from being put to work speedily.
