For your reading pleasure, the libertarians over at Cato Institute have produced a very useful Policy Analysis document on Ending Corporate Welfare As We Know It.

Here’s a tidbit on how the government wisely uses your tax dollars: through sugar price support programs, the United States spends $1.4 billion ($1,400,000,000) of your money to make sugar cost more. About 40% of the giveaway benefits the largest 1% of sugar farms, with the 33 largest sugar cane plantations each receiving more than $1,000,000 each, all so that you can pay more at the grocery store (the total cost to the consumer in higher sugar prices is estimated to be several billion dollars every year).

Next time a Republican complains to you about welfare recipients, it would be good to point out the biggest and most unproductive welfare leeches in the United States are monster corporations in industry and agribusiness. By comparison, TANF, WIC, and other traditional poverty-based welfare programs consume a tiny percentage of the federal budget and have relatively high success rates in supporting people through temporary dire circumstances. But for some reason I don’t see Tommy Thompson developing a welfare-to-work program for General Motors or the big sugar cane plantations, even though they stay on billion-dollar doles year after year after year.

A group of women in the rural village Turkey of Sirt have garnered international media attention through enacting a real-life Lysistrata: they are striking from sex with their husbands to demand improvements to the city’s antiquated water system [Salon]. Since the boys were not the ones who have to hike miles out to the fountain, don’t have to wait in endless lines to collect water from the trickling fountain, don’t have to haul it home, and don’t have to be responsible for most of the household washing, the boys had not been doing much of anything to get the system fixed. Since the strike began, they have suddenly decided it might be a good idea to petition the municipal government for it to be fixed and have even offered to work on it themselves if the government will get them the parts.

Eye-roller for the day: Our women are right to protest, but we’re the ones who are suffering, grumbled Ibrahim Sari to the Milliyet newspaper. Poor boys!

Yet another reason to hate DynCorp’s guts: the United States-based multinational mercenary contractor has now been working to cover up its officers role in international sex trafficking. DynCorp holds a contract to provide UN police forces for Bosnia-Hercegovina. When DynCorp hired Kathryn Bolkovac to combat sexual abuse and sex trafficking of women from Eastern Europe to NATO and UN outposts in Bosnia, legalized brothels in Western Europe, etc., she began finding evidence that DynCorp officers were involved in this sexual slave trade. When she brought this evidence to the attention of DynCorp and the UN, DynCorp fired her. And, surprise surprise, it turns out that there was a prior suit filed by an air mechanic who says he was fired after he uncovered evidence of DynCorp’s officers being involved in trafficking in women and gun-running.

The thing about mercenary corporations like DynCorp is that they are pretty much totally unaccountable to anybody, since they are not directly affiliated with any national government. This is why the Feds love sending them in to situations like Colombia, because even though the troops are American and paid for by US tax money and almost always discharged US armed forces troops, when horrendous human rights violations come up or they are killed in firefights the government can still say that no American servicepeople are getting involved in Colombia’s Civil War. This is the same outsourcing strategy that companies like Nike use to artificially distance themselves from the brutal practices of the sweatshop bosses they contract with.

And this is holding true in the sex trafficking case as well: despite clear participation of US and British troops in the sexual enslavement and slave trade in women’s bodies, DynCorp is moving to cover up, and nobody from DynCorp has ever been prosecuted for these crimes. Even though the suit is exposing DynCorp, you can be sure that the governments of the US and UK, or the UN administration in Bosnia, will catch no serious flak for it. But this kind of government involvement is now the rule rather than the exception: organized traffickers and pimps in the Russian mafia and other criminal organizations have either bought off the government or become the government in many of the primary sources for trafficking such as the Ukraine, Russia, and Southeast Asia. Official complicity with traffickers is nothing new; this UN case is merely exposing it at new levels.

Thanks to the latest issue of Sierra magazine I have discovered a really rad campus program called Dump and Run, where local campus groups establish a program to collect all the perfectly usable items that students throw into the dumpster at the end of the year when they move out of apartments or dorm rooms – furniture, canned food, clothing, etc. They then sell them in a big garage sale as a fundraiser for the local groups running the program. The national Dump and Run nonprofit lends the organizations its nonprofit status and helps in setting up the campus program. The pilot program at University of Richmond has been really successful, reducing the solid waste being hauled away at the end of the year by 50% within two years. Here at Auburn we’re hoping to set up a collaboration between Auburn Women’s Organization and Environmental Awareness Organization for running the program. Woo hoo! </p

The best part of all: the organization was actually created based on its’ founder’s experiences dumpster diving at Syracuse University and University of Richmond!

As leery as I am of the idea that hooking everyone to the Internet is all we need to solve all the economic problems, I do think that this program in Baltimore’s Section VIII housing [NY Times] to provide free computers and high-speed Internet access along with computer literacy training is a nice step in the right direction, and ought to be expanded. One quibble: why doesn’t the housing authority let the residents actually own the computers they give away? Of course, this is a problem that expands to the rental economy of the Section VIII system as a whole. What people in poverty really need is affordable housing that will be their own, not a shelter provided by the government that gives them a cheaper way into the system of rental exploitation.