BP isn't just hiring out-of-work Florida Pandhandle folks for its cleanup effort--it's using semicamouflaged prison labor, and the scary fellas come with a subsidy of $2,500 per head.
You think you're done being mad at BP? You're over the fact that it's still getting piles of U.S. taxpayer subsidies, including subsidies on what it promised to pay for the cleanup? Jim Hightower, the Texas populist and scourge of misbehaving corporations, tells us that BP isn't just hiring out-of-work Florida Pandhandle folks--it's using semicamouflaged prison labor, and the scary fellas come with a subsidy of $2,500 per head:
In the early days of the cleanup, crews suddenly appeared wearing scarlet pants and white T-shirts with bold red letters spelling out, "Inmate Labor." Investigative reporter Abe Louise Young writes that the sight of prison laborers outraged the local community, so they were removed.
Not the inmates, the uniforms. Now they wear BP shirts, jeans and rubber boots with no prison markings, and they are moved to and from the job in unmarked white vans. No officials with BP or the feds could or would tell Young how many inmates are being used or what they're being paid. However, a local sheriff's official told Young, "They're not getting paid - it's part of their sentence."
But guess who is getting paid for this convict labor? BP. It's getting paid by you and me. Under a little-known tax provision passed during the Bush regime, corporations can get a "work opportunity tax credit" of $2,400 for every work release inmate they hire.
Then he totes up a bunch of other subsidies, including $10 billion from all of us because BP can deduct its costs of paying for the cleanup from its U.S. tax bill.
On second thought, it's not BP that deserves a new dose of outrage, it's Congress, which pounds on BP in hearings and in speeches, but sits on its hands rather than touch the tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks that the whole oil industry gets. Clean energy, meanwhile, is stuck on a roller-coaster of now you see it, now you don't federal investment.
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Posted by Judy Dugan, research director for Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.