What do you think of bums who come into our towns asking for handouts as though they have some right to expect us to underwrite their existence? I don't mean the poor disheveled souls with street names like "Skeeter" and "Gimpy" standing at busy intersections with handwritten cardboard signs saying: "Anything will help. God Bless." No, I'm talking about the real bums, with names like Wal-Mart, Intel, Tyson, Home Depot, Boeing, Dell, Toyota, and Borders. There are two things that these outfits have in common: They are highly profitable, multibillion-dollar corporations... and they all go town-to-town, state-to-state, with their hands out, bumming subsidies from us taxpayers. It's not spare change, eitherthe pinstriped bums suck up a whopping $50 billion a year in giveaways doled out by our governors, mayors, and other officials. 
Rather than tattered cardboard signs, the corporate pitch comes in the form of power-point presentations, using the gobbledygook of "job creation" and "economic growth." When GreatBigGlobalGiantCorp sweeps into town to meet with wide-eyed local politicos, the pitch goes something like this: "We just might build a new facility right here in Greater Bugtussle, creating beaucoup new jobs and scoring big political points for you, Mr. Mayor. All we'd need to seal this sweet deal is for the city and state to give us a few (ahem) 'incentives' to locate herelike, say, a truckload of cash, 40 acres of land, some new buildings and roads, free water and electricity, and an exemption from property taxes. Oh, and by the way, the governor and the mayor up in Recessionville, Ohio, already are promising us all this plus they say they'll personally wash our cars for us once a week if we locate there. But we like the climate and cheap workforce here, so what say y'all come up with a package that makes our hearts go pitty-pat?" Incredibly, not only does this corporate come-on work, but publicity-seeking politicians all across the country are crawling over each other to be the one who throws the most public money at these hustlers. The giveaway game literally has become a gamea competition between politicians trying to "win" a corporate facility. For example, when Tyson Foods gleefully snapped up the $10 million offered by Texas Governor Rick Perry to locate a plant here rather than in Oklahoma, Perry, who like his predecessor W is a former college cheerleader and dimmer than a burned-out flashlight, gloated about "beating Oklahoma," as though our team had outscored theirs on the gridiron. Corporations, of course, have become real pros at pitting one state's politicians against another's, and they are the only real winners in this rigged game.
The Intel Shell
If you want to see a massive monument to this scam, come to downtown Austin, Texas. In 1999, the politicos and business establishment of my city were giggling with joy and high-fiving each other at a press conference called to announce that they had "won" a glorious new corporate bauble for us. ... [ read more ]
Help us out by throwing some cash in the bucket:
Their names probably won't mean mean anything to you, but these people ought to have some modicum of personal recognition: Jason Anderson, Aaron Dale "Bubba" Burkeen, Donald Clark, Stephen Curtis, Gordon Jones, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger, Blair Manuel, Dewey Revette, Shane Roshto, and Adam Weise. These are the 11 workers who were killed when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank into the Gulf of Mexico on April 20.
