Crony capitalism
To the editor:
Don’t tell me that the Lee County Commission wants to create new middle class employment here. It seems to me like they are only interested in upgrading their own jobs and advancing their personal pensions, profits and power.
The Lee County Commission has become so totally arrogant that after they had a meeting with representatives from Algenol on Nov. 3, their spokesman, Commissioner Larry Kiker, had the audacity to tell the media that because oil prices had dropped world-wide, the $10 million funding money for Algenol by the Lee County Commission was in jeopardy because their overseas investments lost money. Therefore they had to lay off 45 employees in Fort Myers. I must be living on a different planet for everyone I know is ecstatic when prices decline at the pump.
In Lee County the multi-national corporations get the sweetheart deals and the taxpayers are treated like rubes at the Lee County Fair and given the shaft. In this country it is set up so the politicians move the assets from the taxpayers and give them to the multi-national corporations. That’s right, they pick and choose which big financial bullies get the mammon and how much. Our local commission has doled out blood money to 30 corporations paid for by the Lee County taxpayers and did not submit any of those payolas to the citizens for a vote.
Since the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission that corporations are persons (the deciding vote was cast by Chief Justice John G. Roberts who was appointed by Bush ’43) the Super PACS that morphed out of that decision are even more destructive to our Forefather’s Constitution than the smoke filled rooms used to be.
Ignorance is no excuse. If they had debtors prison like they had several centuries ago, most of the present day politicians would end up incarcerated there until they paid back their ill-gotten gains which they received from the taxpayers.
Where is the “tar and feathers” when you need it?
Jon Larsen Shudlick
Fort Myers