Cap’n Morgan Plunders $2.7 Billion US Tax Dollars
Diageo, Federal Spending, TARP, Virgin Islands, Your Tax Dollars at Work
Poor little Susie Madrak, at leftie Crooks and Liars, is shocked to learn that our noble democrat legislators helped Captain Morgan open the US Treasury’s vault, aided the renowned bucananeer (who sails out of London town) to load his dinghy right up to the gunwales with $2.7 billion of US taxpayers’ gold dubloons, and then waved happily as the pirate rowed away.
I’m getting so tired of these stories. I mean, what’s the point? Americans are perfectly happy to stay home and watch TV while our elected officials rob us blind and we struggle along without needed health care:
June 26 (Bloomberg) — In June 2008, U.S. Virgin Islands Governor John deJongh Jr. agreed to give London-based Diageo Plc billions of dollars in tax incentives to move its production of Captain Morgan rum from one U.S. island — Puerto Rico — to another, namely St. Croix.
DeJongh says he had no idea his deal would help make the world’s largest liquor distiller the most unlikely beneficiary of the emergency Troubled Asset Relief Program approved by Congress just four months later.
Today, as two 56-foot-high (17-meter-high) tanks for holding fermenting molasses will soon rise from the ground on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, the extent to which dozens of nonbank companies benefited from last October’s emergency financial rescue plan is just beginning to come to light.
The hurried legislation adopted by a Congress voting under the threat of sudden global economic collapse led to hidden tax breaks for firms in dozens of industries. They included builders of Nascar auto-racing tracks, restaurant chains such as Burger King Holdings Inc., movie and television producers — and London’s Diageo.
“It’s kind of like the magician’s sleight of hand,†says former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman William Thomas, a California Republican who ran the committee from 2001 to 2007 and oversaw all tax legislation. “They snuck these things in a bill that was focused on other things.â€
Wasn’t there an old music hall song about this sort of thing?
It’s the same the whole world over
Governments are all the same
It’s the poor who pays the taxes
It’s the rich what gets the TARP funds
Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame?