Think about that. On average each of the largest 100 companies in the world receives $200 million from the US taxpayer, each year. Some more than others of course.

 

This is not capitalism. This is crony capitalism and it is dangerous to our economy and our society. If small government people are going to talk about how free markets are preferable to the incestuous system we have now they need to go after corporate welfare.

 

Each member of the House and Senate should be held accountable on a day-to-day basis. Who voted for what? And not only on whether a lawmaker voted to make a bill law, but also if a member voted to move something into (or out of) committee. What were the committee votes? What maneuvering happened?

 

If we want a less crony capitalist government it’s going to take some monitoring (and perhaps at least equally as important, reporting). We have the technology.

 

(From The National Review)

 

So who are the major corporate-welfare queens? The biggest grant recipients were

General Electric ($380 million), followed by General Motors ($370 million), Boeing ($264 million), Archer Daniels Midland ($174 million), and United Technologies ($160 million).

 

Double- and triple-dipper Archer Daniels Midland got just under $1 billion for USDA farm-program loans, and this doesn’t include ethanol subsidies. Another $10 billion was doled out through federal insurance, often in the form of surety bonds. The No. 1 federal insurance program was the Export-Import Bank, with Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase both receiving more than $3 billion in such aid and Citigroup and Bank of America receiving more than $1.5 billion in taxpayer backstop insurance. (Remember, this doesn’t include TARP money.) Deere, American Express, and even Walmart reeled in federal insurance as well. Amazingly, all but one of the Fortune 100 stood in the federal soup line to take at least some form of corporate-welfare benefit. In other words, as Open the Books founder Adam Andrzejewski puts it: "Mitt Romney had it wrong. When it comes to the Fortune 100, it’s 99 percent, not 47 percent, on some form of the government’s gravy train."