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corporate welfare
We Must Rise Up to Stop This Corporate Coup—and Fast
Break with your routine, Americans. It’s your country they are seizing!
Feb 08, 2025
Rise up people and fast. Tyrant Trump and his Musk-driven gangsters are launching a fascistic coup d’état. Much of everything you like about federal/civil service for your health, safety, and economic well-being and protections is being targeted.
To feed Trump’s insatiable vengeance over being prosecuted, being defeated in the 2020 election, or now just being challenged, this megalomaniacal, self-described dictator is harming the lives of tens of millions of Americans in need and millions of Americans who are assisting them.
In his demented lawless arrogance, convicted felon Trump is nullifying the freedoms and protections of the American Revolution (King Donald is today’s King George III), and rejecting the Declaration of Independence (which listed the rights and abuses against the British Tyrant that Trump is shredding and entrenching). He is defiantly violating the U.S. Constitution, its controls over dictatorial government, and its powers exclusively given to Congress. The Constitution demands that we live under the rule of law, not the rule of one man.
While Trump enjoys Mar-a-Lago and his golfing, Madman Musk, a South African, is literally living in the Executive Office Building next to the White House, with his heel-clicking Musketeers, seven days a week (they brought in sleeping cots) guarded by a large private security detail.
Consider, people, that the world’s richest man, with billions of dollars of federal contracts, is unleashing his henchmen to wreck the daily work of public servants committed to providing critical services that have long and bi-partisan support. Assistance to children, emergency workers, the sick and elderly, public school students, and people ripped off by business crooks. He is firing the federal cops on the corporate crime beat – whether at the FBI, the EPA, or the key Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which Trump/Musk are gutting.
Some headlines: “Laws? What Laws? Trump’s Brazen Grab for Executive Power” by the great reporter Charlie Savage (New York Times, February 6, 2025). Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.
When the forces of law and order reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk.
Or “Searching for Motive to Musk Team’s Focus on ‘Checkbook’ of U.S.” by Alan Rappeport, February 6, 2025, New York Times.
Or “White House Billionaires Take on the World’s Poorest Kids” by the super-reporter Nicholas Kristof (February 6, 2025. New York Times) shutting down The Agency for International Development’s distribution of AIDS medicines, and crucially stopping U.S. health agencies from countering rising, deadly pandemics in Africa that could come here quickly without U.S. defensive actions abroad. Already the devastating effects on children missing healthcare and food are erupting.
Kristof concludes that all this (and the dollar amounts are very small compared to their benefits) may seem like a game for Trump/Musk, but “… it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.” It is also criminal!
When the forces of law and order reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk. He is not a properly appointed federal official. He has no authority to send his wrecking crews into one agency after another, demanding private information about Americans, pushing people out, and shutting down operations.
Musk, whose next target is the federal auto safety agency that has been enforcing the safety laws against Tesla and has not surrendered its regulation of self-driving cars (Musk’s next big project). Musk refuses to disclose his sweetheart contracts with the federal agencies nor has he disclosed his tax returns. Demand them.
What is very clear in the first 20 days of Trump’s lawless madness is that he is moving fast for a police state along with deepening the corporate state with and for Big Business. His prime victims are not the vast military budget at the Department of Defense, nor the big budgets of the Spy Agencies or of Musk’s lucrative fiefdom – NASA, the Space Agency. No, like the bullies they are, Trump/Musk are smashing people’s programs. They hate Medicaid (provided to over 80 million Americans) or the food programs for millions of children. Crazed Trump is pushing to shut down many clean wind power projects and cut credits to homeowners installing solar panels while booming the omnicidal oil, gas, and coal industries. He wants many more giant exporting natural gas facilities near U.S. ports which could accidentally blow up entire cities.
Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.
Musk’s poisoned Tusks have even reached Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Vietnam where mine-clearing efforts have been cut off. These are the U.S.’s Vietnam War era unexploded ordinances and bomblets that have killed tens of thousands of innocent residents, mostly children, in the past fifty years.
The Washington Post headline on February 6th, “Musk Team Taking Over Public Operations” understates the carnage. They are brazenly shutting down agencies, taking down thousands of government websites helpful to all Americans, and telling conscientious civil servants to obey or be driven out.
The Republicans in Congress, to their future shame and guilt, are surrendering their constitutional powers in the very branch of government our Founders assigned to check any rising monarchy in the White House.
The Democrats in the minority are just starting to protest, some in front of shuttered federal buildings. But they have not yet initiated unofficial public hearings in Congress to give voice to the surging anger of Americans (now flooding their switchboards) whose narrow majority of Trump voters are sensing betrayal big time. Demand unofficialhearings now! Federal judges are starting to uphold the violated laws.
The media, itself threatened by Trump’s attacks, censorship, and who knows what is next from this venomous liar (see the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler’s January 26, 2025 piece “The White House’s wildly inaccurate claims about USAID spending” or “Trump’s gusher of misleading economic statistics at Davos”) will cover protests and testimony by people all over the country. The rallies and marches have begun and will only get larger as Trump and Musk sink lower with their tyrannical abuses.
The career military does not relish the reckless buffoon that Trump put over them as Secretary of Defense. American business cannot tolerate the chaos, the uncertainty, the tumult. Thirty-nine million small businesses are already feeling the oncoming Trump tsunami.
Break with your routine, Americans. It’s your country they are seizing with this burgeoning coup. Take it back fast, is what our original patriots of 1776 would be saying.
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Trump-Aligned Project 2025 Would Mean Higher Taxes for Workers, 'Corporate Welfare' for the Rich
"The ultra-wealthy would get hefty handout while families suffer. We can't let that happen," said Sen. Martin Heinrich, the chair of the Joint Economic Committee.
Aug 01, 2024
An economic analysis of the far-right Project 2025 agenda crafted by at least 140 former Trump administration officials shows that the plan would result in higher taxes on working-class Americans and "corporate welfare" for the rich and large businesses.
Conducted by the Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee (JEC), the new analysis notes that Project 2025's sprawling "Mandate for Leadership" would establish a "two-rate individual tax system of 15% and 30% that eliminates most deductions, credits, and exclusions."
Such a system, according to the JEC, "would force many middle-class families to pay thousands of dollars more in tax payments."
"Together, these changes to tax rates would mean that a family of four earning $90,000 per year would have paid roughly $2,300 more in taxes last year," the JEC found. "If the Child Tax Credit was also eliminated, this family would have paid roughly $6,300 more. Meanwhile, millionaires would pay a lower top tax rate."
The analysis also points to Project 2025's push for a "national sales tax," a highly regressive proposal endorsed by dozens of Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives.
A national sales tax would "force working families to pay more at the grocery store, gas pump, and any other place they buy
goods or services," JEC said Thursday, noting that past GOP proposals "would have hiked the cost of essentials like groceries and housing—usually exempt from state and local sales taxes—by 30%."
Meanwhile, Project 2025 calls for reducing the U.S. corporate tax rate from 21% to 18%. According toThe Washington Post, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's advisers have discussed slashing the tax rate to as low as 15%, and the president himself has told leading executives and his wealthy campaign donors that he intends to push for additional tax cuts if he wins another four years in the White House.
"It would force Americans to pay more at the grocery store, strip workers of overtime pay, and raise taxes on working families."
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), chair of the JEC, said in a statement that "Republicans' Project 2025 is bad for America," as "it would force Americans to pay more at the grocery store, strip workers of overtime pay, and raise taxes on working families."
"The ultra-wealthy would get hefty handout while families suffer," Heinrich added. "We can't let that happen."
The JEC analysis also highlights Project 2025's proposed assault on worker protections, noting that the far-right plan would make "fewer workers eligible for time-and-a-half overtime pay"; allow "children to work in hazardous occupations such as factories, meatpacking plants, and sawmills"; and gut National Labor Relations Board enforcement.
Other broad, potentially destructive reforms advocated by Project 2025—which is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation—are eliminating the Federal Reserve's mandate to pursue full employment and abolishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, long a target of corporate America and their Republican allies in Congress.
Recent polling data indicates that Project 2025 is unpopular with U.S. voters and becomes even more so once they are informed about the far-right initiative's proposals.
That could explain why Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025 in recent weeks, claiming he has "no idea who is behind it" despite the close involvement of a number of prominent figures who served in his administration, including former Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought.
An unnamed former senior adviser to Trump toldNew York magazine last month that "it's totally false he doesn't know what P25 is."
"Privately, he is of course talking to Heritage, and [Heritage president] Kevin Roberts has reportedly even met with Trump on P25," the ex-adviser said.
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Chip Firms Poised to Rake In Taxpayer Subsidies Spend Big on Stock Buybacks
Companies in line to receive CHIPS Act subsidies spent a combined $41 billion on share repurchases between 2019 and 2023, a new report shows.
Jul 11, 2024
An analysis published Thursday estimates that semiconductor firms positioned to receive billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies thanks to a 2022 U.S. law have spent big on investor-enriching stock buybacks in recent years, a finding that amplified calls for meaningful restrictions on companies benefiting from public money.
The new report released by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) shows that between 2019 and 2023, the first 11 corporations to reach preliminary CHIPS and Science Act agreements with the U.S. Department of Commerce collectively poured more than $41 billion into stock buybacks—a sum that would have been enough to finance a $27,541 raise for 300,000 employees annually for five years.
Intel, the company set to receive more CHIPS Act money than any other semiconductor firm, spent the most on buybacks: a staggering $30.2 billion between 2019 and 2023.
"We found no evidence that any of the companies with preliminary agreements have publicly committed to suspend their existing share repurchase plans—or to refrain from authorizing new plans—during the grant period," reads the report. "In fact, when members of Congress asked BAE Systems executives if the firm would commit to pausing stock buybacks or to not engage in future ones while receiving a taxpayer-funded CHIPS grant, they declined to answer."
The Biden White House, which worked hard to get the CHIPS Act across the finish line in 2022, has insisted that the law contains "strong guardrails" to prevent the misuse of taxpayer money, including on share repurchases.
But Sarah Anderson of IPS and Natalia Renta of the Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, the co-authors of the new report, noted Thursday that the statute only prohibits CHIPS Act subsidy recipients from spending the taxpayer money directly on buybacks.
"Since money is fungible, this is not a strong guardrail," the pair argued.
"Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act and President Biden signed it into law to bolster semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S.—not to waste public dollars on stock buybacks."
Critics of stock buybacks and sky-high executive compensation warned prior to the CHIPS Act's passage that the measure would amount to large-scale corporate welfare unless lawmakers placed serious constraints on how companies could spend the money.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tried unsuccessfully to attach an amendment to the measure that would have barred subsidy recipients from buying back their own stock, outsourcing jobs, or attempting to sabotage unionization efforts.
A little over a month after President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS Act into law, a group of Democratic legislators warned U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo that while the statute "specifically prohibits the use of CHIPS funds for stock buybacks and dividend payments, these restrictions do not explicitly prohibit award recipients from using CHIPS funds to free up their own funds, which they can then use for those purposes."
The new IPS report notes that four semiconductor firms that have reached CHIPS Act agreements with the Biden administration have "board-approved share repurchase plans that would allow an additional $14.3 billion in buyback spending," with Intel accounting for more than half of that total.
The analysis also found that annual CEO compensation between 2019 and 2023 averaged close to $14 million at firms in line for CHIPS Act funding, while median pay at the companies was $73,046.
"Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act and President Biden signed it into law to bolster semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S.—not to waste public dollars on stock buybacks that make rich executives richer and exacerbate economic and racial inequality," said Renta, senior policy counsel for corporate governance and power at the Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund.
"Commerce Secretary Raimondo must finalize CHIPS contracts with strong stock buyback restrictions to make sure public money serves the public good, as intended, not narrow, private interests," Renta added.
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