Government can't pick winners, it just makes us losers

No matter what they call it, it is still just plain classic economic Fascism. m/r

The Corporate Welfare Trap Has Snared Republicans and Democrats Alike

by BURT Folsom  on OCTOBER 19, 2012

On the subject of corporate welfare (giving federal subsidies to businesses), Republicans have historically been as bad as Democrats. Both parties have sometimes rushed to the federal trough to dole out cash to favored friends.

For example, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a program of government bailouts, was set up by President Hoover in 1932 to bail out corporations to help stop the Great Depression. It didn’t work. Thousands of large U.S. companies wanted capital, but only a fraction of them could get it. Thus, leading Republicans of the 1930s, including former Vice-President Charles Dawes, Maryland Senator Phillips Gouldsborough, and Secretary of Commerce Roy Chapin, were at the front of the line to get government subsidies for their banks. When FDR became president, the Democrats took their turn at slinging taxpayer dollars at key political friends. Jesse Jones, FDR’s head of the RFC, even gave loans to FDR’s relatives and tried to give a subsidy to Walter Trohan, a major news reporter at the Chicago Tribune.

After World War II, with the Great Depression ended, President Truman kept the RFC around because he could use it to reward friends, but the process of granting corporate subsidies also led to internal corruption. For example, under Truman, John J. Hagerty headed the RFC in Boston. He endorsed a loan to the Waltham Watch Company and then resigned from the RFC to take a job with the Waltham Watch Company– for three times his RFC salary.

Interestingly, the town of Waltham is back in the news today with more corporate subsidies. ...

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