Excellent article. ACCE, combined with the local activities of Americans For Prosperity poses the biggest threat from the Koch-funded agenda to date, IMHO. How do we track all of the local politicians who will sell their votes for the corporatocracy?
At the same time, I look forward to its battle over the sanitation services and such which are often in corrupted hands of organized crime already. ALEC vs "Tony Soprano".
Our nation is long overdue for some tax and subsidy law reform; which is the real take away from this article. As you can see from other reader's comments, it'd logical for any corporation to leverage the subsidies and tax breaks available to them. They would be amiss in their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders not to do so.
Even so, I think we can all agree that subsidies are intended to provide disenfranchised industries a leg up so that they can somehow serve a public need that the free market otherwise could not. Obviously, any company proving itself to be many times more profitable than the subsidies it receives does not need those subsidies to encourage participation in the market.
I suggest we are overdue to restructure half-century-old subsidies to discourage unsustainable practices and encourage sustainable ones.
Why would we give the Kochs subsidies ....for what reason? They've got so much money that our subsidies are peanuts compared to the profits they are making for all the oil they're extracting all over the U.S. and Canada. The number 1 recipient of oil profits via the Keystone Pipeline are the Kochs! The Kochs are making so much money they are buying our government and our country and pushing their agenda for the way we should live our lives to all the products they produce.
GIVE THE TAX SUBSIDY MONEY BACK....you don't need it! IF we had that money, maybe we could afford to fix erroding roads that used to be good roads! Maybe we could also afford healthcare for all! All you're doing with the money is making our country a disaster and pushing your religion on everyone!
Unrestricted, unregulated growth of corporate power has not only illegitimately usurped the Constitutional rights of a person, as well as misappropriated many of the Constitutional responsibilities of government, corporate rule has also long been abridging, infringing upon, denying, prohibiting, and otherwise violating the unalienable human and civil rights of a person. Freedom of speech and assembly, for example is an unalienable, inherent human right, even though the First Amendment only explicitly prohibits Congress from abridging that right. It doesn't explicitly prohibit the President, and it doesn't explicitly prohibit the courts from abridging freedom of speech and assembly, and it doesn't explicitly name and prohibit corporations from doing so, either. But that doesn't mean that we the people don't have those rights. Constitutional rights are a particular selection of unalienable human rights. Even though the Constitution does not (and can not) explicitly and fully describe and protect ALL unalienable, inherent human rights, and in some cases does not explicitly prohibit artificial private legal entities from violating certain Constitutional rights, that does not in any way mean that those unalienable, inherent human rights do not exist. The 10th Amendment explicitly states that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the People". Despite the 10th Amendment, unjustifiable judicial mis-interpretation of the Constitution has increasing placed corporations in a vastly superior position to human beings, and allowed corporate power to notoriously violate the unalienable human rights of people with impunity. Corporations do not legitimately have the Constitutional rights of a person. And corporations do not have any right to violate our unalienable human rights, either.
Pages