The Corporate Begging Bowl — by George Monbiot

They bleat about the free market, then insist that we subsidise them.

By George Monbiot
Published in the Guardian
13th December 2005

Never underestimate the self-pity of the ruling classes. Since Labour took office in 1997, the Confederation of British Industry has been engaged in one long whinge. It doesn’t matter that our taxes are among the lowest and our regulations among the weakest in the developed world. It doesn’t matter that the rich are richer than they have ever been. The CBI is the monster with a thousand stomachs, that will never be satisfied. [...]

There is nothing unusual about these handouts for private companies. In his book Peverse Subsidies, published in 2001, Professor Norman Myers estimates that when you add the direct payments US corporations receive to the wider costs they oblige society to carry, you come up with a figure of $2.6 trillion, or roughly five times as much as the profits they make(8). As well as the $362 billion the OECD countries were paying for farming when his book was published (or rather, as we have seen, for activities masquerading as farming) they were shelling out some $71 billion on fossil fuels and nuclear power and a staggering $1.1 trillion on road transport. Worldwide, governments pay companies $25bn a year to destroy the earth’s fisheries, and $14bn to wreck our forests. [...]

Click here for the full article at www.Monbiot.com.