It's Your Money...or It Was

"It's your money" was the title of one recurring news segment on a Pittsburgh station, or maybe even on the network, it doesn't much matter, there was a little fashion for them then: mini-exposes of how the government was wasting tax money, "your money," get it?

I had two problems with these segments: first, the waste and corruption they were claiming was the government's was most often shared with private sector criminals, and sometimes was entirely due to scams by private companies. Like the "Medicare fraud" which turned out to be private companies and individual criminals defrauding Medicare. And my second objection is that the money stolen from people by private corporations, through fraud, waste and most advertising, is just as much "your money"--the consumer's money--as is their taxes. For it's consumers that pay, often two and three times, for corporate corruption (first in payment for products and services they don't get or aren't as advertised; second to pay for investigation and prosecution, third in price hikes when the corporation is caught, etc. Plus the money for lobbyists to bribe government to do what enriches them and defrauds and impoverishes you--well, guess where that money comes from? From every gallon of gas, kilowatt of power, health insurance payment, six pack of Wal-Mart underwear you buy. )

But now--where are those "It's Your Money" reports when we need them? Because now we really do have government owned and operated corruption costing us billions, and paying off with castastrophe.

Frank Rich summarized some of this in his Sunday column. He quotes a congressional report that found that some $30 billion of taxpayer dollars has been squandered on various boondoggles paying favored corporations in Iraq for work they didn 't accomplish. Last week there was another report that upwards of $1 billion of Homeland Security funds were squandered; a few months ago, a report that upwards of a billon of Katrina relief funds were wasted. UPDATE: Oops, it's $2 billion.

Here's Rich:

Washington's promises to rebuild Iraq were worth no more than its promises to rebuild New Orleans. The government that has stranded a multitude of Americans in flimsy "housing" on the gulf, where they remain prey for any new natural attacks the hurricane season will bring, is of a philosophical and operational piece with the government that has let down the Iraqi people. Even after we've thrown away some $2 billion of a budgeted $4 billion on improving electricity, many Iraqis have only a few hours of power a day, less than they did under Saddam.

Of course, it's not all the fault of Bush appointees and their government spending policies. They have the help of former Bush appointees in squandering your money:

The Department of Homeland Security, in keeping with the Bush administration's original opposition to it, isn't really a government agency at all so much as an empty shell, a networking boot camp for future private contractors dreaming of big paydays. Thanks to an investigation by The Times's Eric Lipton, we know that some two-thirds of the top department executives, including Tom Ridge and his principal deputies, have cashed in on their often brief service by becoming executives, consultants or lobbyists for companies that have received billions of dollars in government contracts. Even John Ashcroft, the first former attorney general in American history known to immediately register as a lobbyist, is selling his Homeland Security connections to interested bidders. "

There are some specifics on Ashcroft's activities here.

This isn't just a matter of loose spending with loose change. The Homeland Security money that isn't being spent on securing ports, preparing first responders, etc. keeps our country and our people vulnerable to terrorist attack and natural disaster. The Katrina money squandered leaves millions of people suffering and vulnerable. The Iraq money does the same. Plus there s so much of it piling up as debt, that the efforts we need to make to deal with other real problems such as the Climate Crisis, health care, etc. may not be there. We are pouring our future down the drain of Bush-Cheney incompetence and corruption.