NO ONE IS IN FAVOR OF GOVERNMENT WASTE, UNLESS THE GOVERNMENT IS WASTING IT ON THEM

The title of this post is a “Feightnerism”. He came up with it when he worked for the Farmers Home Administration as a bankruptcy law clerk. He worked there one summer as a law student. He watched the government waste millions on farm loans. Of course the government was also in the business of supporting farmers through government largesse. Farmers farmed the government first, the soil second.

Later, the Author became a healthcare lawyer and watched the farce of medical providers “condemn” the medical financing program that made them millionaires. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Medicare and Medicaid millionaires play golf in the sunbelt with the gains from government programs they looted.

So it is with no surprise that the Author watches the bailout debacles and the feigned indignation of the current political environment. Government, in America, has always been a money pit that is gamed and looted by powerful business interests. The returns that American industries receive on campaign contributions far exceed the returns earned on actually doing business.

AIG BONUSES FOLLOW AN AMERICAN TRADITION, SAYS CNN COMMENTARY.

A commentary on CNN.com by Julian Zelizer discusses the common US government modus operandi when bribing businesses to take actions that are required for the public good, or public necessity.

Traditionally, American politicians in times of crisis have resisted aggressive interventions by government into business which would tamper with managerial prerogatives and profits.

The political value of this strategy has been clear: It helps elected officials in the White House and Congress sell federal programs in a country stubbornly resistant to many kinds of government interventions in the private sector (though often happy with the interventions after they receive the benefits). It also dampens corporate opposition to government programs in moments when such programs are urgently needed.

Even war does not bring out patriotic sacrifice in the “Captains of American Industry. Zelizer goes onto quote Former Secretary of War Henry Stimson:

As FDR's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, noted in his diary in 1940, "If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have to make business make money out of the process or business won't work." The outcome of this arrangement was that business retained enormous power over the production process and executives made money.

In the 1940s, a small group of the nation's biggest corporations received the lion's share of military contracts. Wartime agencies were staffed by "dollar-a-year men" who were business executives temporarily working for the government in exchange for a small wage. According to The New Republic, however, altruism was not their primary motivation: "Concern for the war is secondary to self-interest and the jealous protection of their competitive positions."

WHERE IS MY CHECK?

The Author did not find much honor in working with industries that lived off the government largesse. Partly because it was paid from the tax revenue of hard-working Americans, partly because it was a rigged game. The industries usually wrote the rules from which they earned their money.

Zelizer offers this advice:

During the next round of negotiations, the administration and Congress might rethink their earlier approach, indeed the approach we have taken to economic intervention since the progressive era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The federal government might place tighter regulations on the institutions receiving assistance (as it has with other recipients of government assistance, such as the poor) so that public support for the much needed interventions in this crisis doesn't suffer more political blows.

And there is the hypocrisy. Poor recipients are abject moral failures that must be ground down to obeisance while industry (and the wealthy individuals) loot with boundless zeal, steal with abandon, and pontificate with impunity.

IT ISN'T ALL ABOUT THE ANTS AND GRASSHOPPERS IN THE DESERT OF THE REAL!