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Wednesday, May 08, 2019

Taxpayers fund research for world's richest, most powerful companies

Fortune 100 companies are among the most aggressive at lobbying Washington — and collect nearly $100 billion a year in federal contracts and grants, according to a watchdog report that suggests taxpayers are feeding the bottom line.

Most of the $399 billion collected from 2014 to 2017 went to buy goods or services, especially the complex and expensive weaponry upon which a modern military relies, OpenTheBoooks found.

But the watchdog’s report did find billions in grant money, too.

IBM components in New York and California, for instance, got more than $103 million for “using high-resolution scanning tunneling microscopy to explore the use of atomic spins on surfaces as quantum bits.”

The report profiles 10 giants in particular — AT&T, Boeing, Caterpillar, Federal Express, Ford, General Dynamics, GE, IBM, Lockheed Martin, McKeeson — which spent more than $220 million on lobbyists from 2014 to 2017, and raked in almost $295 billion in federal money.

More here

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What share does our Congress get. Is that how Waters, Pelsoi, Obama, Clinton's got rich

Anonymous said...

Democrat voters don't understand this or their all for it.

Anonymous said...

????? Seems to me 853 you guys don't quite understand how the system works, or you are just drunken off the anti-"anything Fox News Tells Me to Be Against" narrative.

Tell me,

-how exactly do you think the US became a world leader in R&D?
-would you rather have the government pay for standing up a massive body of scientists full time at higher cost, or unleash the power of the private sector?
- Are you aware of how much more expensive it would be for gov to build and maintain state of the art science facilities to perform this work?
- would you rather have our military running into the war zone with slings, our doctors treating you with leeches, and no satellites in the air?