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Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Corporate parasites: how taxpayers subsidize profits (with Rana Foroohar and David Dayen)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.81.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2020

⏱️ 57 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Every company you can think of has benefitted from a public investment. Whether it’s direct handouts through the tax code, government research efforts, or employee reliance on programs like EITC or TANF, taxpayers are subsidizing wildly profitable companies. David Dayen, the executive editor of The American Prospect, and Financial Times associate editor Rana Foroohar join Nick and Zach to explain how we let corporate parasites get so out of control—and what we can do about it. News clips credit: CNBC, KING 5, NPR, Democracy Now! Rana Foroohar is Global Business Columnist and an Associate Editor at the Financial Times. She is also CNN’s global economic analyst. She is the author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business and Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles and All of Us. Twitter: @RanaForoohar / @FT / @CNN David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His is the author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. Twitter: @ddayen / @theprospect Further reading: Confronting the parasite economy: https://prospect.org/labor/confronting-parasite-economy/ Makers and Takers: https://www.ranaforoohar.com/makersandtakers How to Cure Corporate America’s Selfishness: https://newrepublic.com/article/150695/cure-corporate-americas-selfishness Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com/ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0

What we love to refer to is the parasite economy.

0:05.6

We have allowed concentrated corporate power to maintain such control over society.

0:12.6

And to be fair, a lot of them are doing things that are perfectly legal.

0:16.2

For sure.

0:17.2

There's a few people winning and almost everybody else is losing.

0:19.8

I gotta think we're gonna have some major social unrest.

0:22.1

You're basically going to be

0:23.0

sharpening up the guillotines. From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics with

0:38.3

Nick Hanauer, a conversation about how capitalism actually works.

0:43.0

Amazon has

0:45.0

Amazon has conducted a very public horse race

0:51.0

between cities and states to choose a site for its new

0:53.2

headquarters HQ2. In pitching themselves to Amazon local governments

0:57.4

dusted off a familiar playbook, generous incentives promising billions in

1:01.1

tax breaks to a company valued at $1 trillion.

1:04.0

A third of jobs in this community are Boeing jobs.

1:08.0

A shutdown of 737 production, the backbone of Renton's economy, would have painful consequences beyond the factory.

1:16.0

The company warned it might have to halt manufacturing of the Max Jet if it cannot get government

1:21.4

approval for it to fly again.

1:23.0

There is a war going on along the border between Kansas and Missouri.

1:27.0

And this war is over something very important.

1:30.0

It's a war over jobs.

...

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