Congressional Corruption Bonus Post

On November 1oth and 11th we discussed the list of the fifteen most corrupt politicians in Washington as nominated by CREW organization, Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics In Washington. I had thought that those two posts would cover us, at least for a little while, regarding news on Congressional corruption. How wrong I was. Rather than being finished with covering Congressional corruption. another instance of greed drops into your lap.

According to a news article that appeared on the Earthlink news list this evening, ex-Congressman William Jefferson was sentenced to thirteen years in jail for accepting bribes, the longest term ever imposed on a Congressman on bribery charges. He had been convicted last summer, being found guilty on eleven counts including bribery and racketeering, for taking almost a half million dollars in bribes and seeking more in exchange for facilitating business deals in Africa. In addition to the jail sentence, he has to return the bribe money which may have to be satisfied by seizing personal assets. Mr. Jefferson had represented New Orleans in Congress for almost 20 years.

You may recall that the Congressman had taken some of his loot and stashed it in his freezer, lending credibility to the old saying, "cold cash." The FBI found the frozen money when they raided his home after a businesswoman felt she had been cheated by Jefferson in a business deal and turned to the FBI.

The prosecutor wanted 30 years for the sentence but the judge opted for less, thirteen years, that put the sentence more in line with previous corrupted politicians' jail terms:

• Congressman Randy Cunningham of California received a sentence of eight years for taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors.
• Congressman Bob Ney of Ohio received two and a half years in jail for taking bribes from a lobbyist.
• Congressman James Traficant of Ohio received a seven year sentence for bribery and racketeering.

The prosecutor pointed out that Mr. Jefferson stood to get hundreds of millions of dollars if all of his eleven bribery schemes were fully successful.

Three observations come to mind:

• How well was the Congressman serving his constituents in New Orleans and the rest of the country if he was involved with almost a dozen bribery schemes? Guess many of the nation's problems (Iraq, Afghanistan, failing public schools, drug addiction plague, Social Security and Medicare going bankrupt, etc.) were just not important enough for him.
• I remember that when the arrest and the frozen money came to light, the Speaker of the House and others in Congress were upset and mad that the executive branch had dared to arrest a fellow member of the legislative branch of government. While their protestations died off quickly when they realized the depth of the crimes, it did leave a bad taste in many of our mouths. It was almost like the political class was offended that the Bush Justice Department dared to go after a criminal that just happened to be a politician (or is it a politician that happened to be a criminal.)
• His defense attorney at the sentencing hearing wanted the judge to consider the fact that Mr. Jefferson had lifted himself up from poverty to become a Congressman, as if that was good enough to just forget about the eleven counts of bribery and racketeering he was found guilty of. Fortunately, the judge felt that the sentence of thirteen years was justified by the amount of public corruption that had occurred.

What can you say? This sense of entitlement that the political class has developed in this country is just pathetic and repulsive. Their salaries put them in the top 5% of earners in this country. They get untold number of perks including free leased cars (House Of Representitives only), great offices, large staffs, national and international recognition, lucrative positions in private business can easily be obtained after serving their terms (Congressional, not prison), etc. but it never seems to be enough.

This is the type of behavior that "Love My Country, Loathe My Country" seeks to address and reverse. As with the previous corruption posts and examples, term limits looks to be a very important Step to implement since Mr. Jefferson, much like Murtha, Rangel and others, have been around the Washington scene for a very long time. Under Step 5, reducing fraud that is rampant in many government programs, one of the sub tasks is to audit the tax returns of everyone member of Congress and high ranking members of the executive branch in order to seek out suspicious behavior.

When Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House several years ago, she spoke of "lowering the swamp" relative to Congressional corruption and cleaning up Washington. I guess the pump is broken because it still looks like the swamp is at high tide.

Visit our website at www.loathemygovernment.com to order an autographed copy of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government -Fifty First Stpes To Restoring Our Freedom and Destroying The American Political Class" and to sign up for the cause. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes And Noble.

Congressional Corruption - Part 2

Yesterday we reviewed some of the corruption accusations against half of the top 15 most corrupt members of Congress as designated by the Citizens For Ethics and Responsibility In Washington CREW). Their website goes into great details of the possible ethics and laws that these fifteen elected officials may have violated. Today we will do the rest of the list. As with yesterday's post, tonight's post reminds all readers that most of the accusations against these Congress people are only that at this point in time and they should be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Nathan Deal, Georgia - Congressman Deal and a partner own a lucrative multi million business that through a no-bid contract provides services to the state of Georgia in the salvaged vehicles market. A local Georgia Commissioner took over responsibility for the state's operations in this area and found it to be too costly, deciding the best course of action was to do away with the no bid status and go to competitive bidding to reduce the costs to the state. Congressman Deal and his staff allegedly tried to coerce the Commissioner to reverse his stance, in face-to-face meetings, but when that was unsuccessful and the changes were passed by the state House of representatives, Congressman Deal's chief of staff used the Congressman's email to lobby against the change to competitive bidding, lobbying that was eventually successful. Congressman Deal is a nine term member of Congress.

John Ensign, Nevada - Senator Ensign's main problem is that he had an affair with a former member of his campaign staff, who happened to be married to his friend and a top aide to the Senator. Both husband and wife left their jobs with the Senator and his re-election organization. At this point, money started flying everywhere in payments to both the husband and wife, the Senator's parents got involved in making payments, payments were made to the husband and wife's children. etc. All very complicated. Bottom line is that the Senator and the payments may have been in violation of a number of laws and Congressional rules.

Jesse Jackson, Jr., Illinois - No surprise Illinois keeps popping up on his list and no surprise it is again related to ex-Governor Blagojevich. CREW reports that Congressman Jackson was trying to make deals to raise money for the Governor if the Governor would nominate Jackson for the vacant Senate seat of President Obama. The amount discussed was $1.5 million and this smoke triggered an Office Of Congressional Ethics (OCE) probe. The Department of Justice is also involved in the investigation to see if Illinois state law was violated if the Congressman offered anything of value to the Governor in exchange for the Senate seat. Mr. Jackson is an eight term Congressman.

Jerry Lewis, California - According to CREW, Mr. Lewis is also in trouble for dealing with those pesky lobbyists. As an important member of the Appropriations Committee, the Congressman allegedly approved millions of dollars in earmarks specifically for the clients of the lobbying firm of Copeland Lowery. In return, Mr. Lowery, his partners, and their families contributed almost a half million to the Congressman's election campaign committee. Although Copeland Lowery eventually renamed itself Innovative Federal Strategies (IFS), the Congressman continued to approve earmarks for an approximate total of over $270 million for the clients of IFs in 2008 and 2009.

In 2007, Environmental Systems Research Institute was awarded a Federal contract worth over $55 million and in 2008 it received contracts worth over $4 million. The founders of the company donated $7,200 to the Congressman's campaign for re-election in 2008. In 2009, the Congressman requested $12 million in earmarks for the company. Mr. Lewis is a sixteen term Congressman.

Mitch McConnell, Kentucky - The Senator is having corruption issues in three areas. First, his former chief legal counsel and then chief of staff, opened a lobbying firm in 2003. Coincidentally, many of the lobbyist's firms have received earmarks courtesy of Mr. McConnell. The Senator also influenced legislation to positively impact another client (UPS) of the lobbying firm. According to CREW, many of this firms have made contributions to the Senator's re-election committee.

Second, the Senator founded the non-profit McConnell Center For Political Leadership at the University of Louisville in 1991. Some of the biggest contributors to the Center were Ashland and UPS (see previous paragraph) and some of the donations to the Center were actually donated through the Senator's DC office. The big stink in this case was that the Senator and the Center fought to keep its donor list secret, a fight that they eventually lost for those donating on a going forward basis. Once the court fight was lost, donations dropped dramatically.

Finally, BAE systems, a British defense contractor, has either been investigated or is under investigation by the British, the Austrians and the US Justice Department for bribing various members of the Saudi Royal family. Nevertheless, the Senator requested three earmarks for BAE worth $17 million dollars. To no one's surprise, employees of BAE have donated thousands of dollars to the Senator's re-election campaign.

Laura Richardson, California - Ms. Richardson's problems stem not so much from lobbyists but from the management of her own personal finances. According to the CREW website, she has defaulted on loans at least eight times and has not made mortgage payments on property. She did not fully comply with House financial disclosure requirements and a home of hers in Sacramento was declared a public nuisance for having debris on the driveway, rotting fruit in her back yard, and unmowed grass. To be honest, this case seems very weak vs. the other politicians, seems Ms. Richardson' problems are more of a self destruction type than a self enrichment type.

Don Young, Alaska - Much like Mr. Rangel and Mr. Murtha, Mr. Young's corruption issues are way too long to go into detail in this post. The dossier for his potential infractions can be found on the CREW website. In summary, Mr. Young has issues in the following areas:

• The Justice Department is investigating whether Congressman Young earmarked $10 million for a road project in exchange for campaign contributions.
• Congressman Young earmarked over $400 million for two unneeded Alaskan bridges even though his daughter and son-in-law owned land close to the proposed bridges. The value of the land would likely rise if the bridges are built.
• The Congressman is the subject of a criminal probe into whether or not he accepted stuff illegally form the VECO corporation. VECO employees have contributed $89,500 to the Congressman's campaign committee.
• The Congressman has received campaign contributions from the construction firm, PBS&J, in the past. This firm has had several executives convicted for trying to get around campaign election laws including its president who pleaded guilty. This was the firm that had received a Federal grant to to a cost estimate of the proposed Alaskan bridges.
• The Congressman's ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff are being investigated by a grand jury and the Justice Department in Wisconsin is investigating a potential deal that occurred between the Congressman and convicted businessman Dennis Trotha. Mr. Trotha, his family and his business contributed to the Congressman's campaign committee while the Congressman inserted an amendment to a transportation bill that benefited Mr. Trotha's trucking company.

The Congressman has been in office for nineteen terms.

I feel like I need a shower. Pretty disgusting and wasteful behavior. Both today's and yesterday's post reinforce the need to institute several steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Yesterday we talked about the step that involves instituting term limits, especially in the case of the CREW Fifteen since the majority of the worst offenders had been in office for a very long time. Step 7 also applies here since that Step would restrict campaign donations to only individual Americans, no contributions from companies, PACs, unions, or lobbyists. The current system rewards campaign contributions (really bribes) from powerful entities that fly in the face of individual freedom and representative government. The FEC has also got to be strengthened as outlined in Step 8 to get the situation under control as soon as possible. Thus, if you think you live in a free country, get over it. Only the lobbyists and elected representatives get stuff for free, we get stuck with the bill in the form of wasted tax dollars and government inefficiency.

Visit our website at www.loathemygovernment.com to order an autographed copy of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government -Fifty First Stpes To Restoring Our Freedom and Destroying The American Political Class" and to sign up for the cause. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes And Noble.

One Man's Ethics Is Another Man's Campaign Contribution

Let's give health care reform a rest and talk about good old-fashioned Congressional greed. The following post reviews an article by Washington Post writer Carol Leonning with a dateline of October 30, 2009. Please remember when reading the following that none of the mentioned Congress people have been accused or found guilty of any ethics violations.

Ms. Leonning reports that seven Congressional members of a powerful Pentagon appropriations subcommittee are under investigation by two different Congressional ethics entities regarding the potentially shady relationships between themselves and a powerful lobbying business, PMA. The concern is that these subcommittee members helped steer taxpayer funds to PMA clients' companies in exchange for donations to their campaign funds. These Congressmen and Congresswoman were identified by a document obtained by the Post and include:

• Chairman John Murtha - Democrat from Pennsylvania
• Peter Visclosky - Democrat from Indiana
• James Moran - Democrat from Virginia
• Norm Dicks - Democrat from Washington
• Marcy Kaptur - Democrat from Ohio
• Bill Young - Republican from Florida
• Todd Tiahart - Republican from Kansas

The document also outlines an allegation that PMA threatened a California Republican Congressman who did not support funding for a PMA client. The threat involved moving jobs out of the the Congressman's district. According to the article, PMA had been under Federal investigation for a while and had been raided by the FBI over a year ago.

According to the document, the Office Of Congressional Ethics was looking into allegations that these subcommittee members were "accepting contributions or other items of value from PMA's PAC in exchange for an official act." These "acts" apparently involve having these seven Congress people steer more than $200 million in taxpayer funds into earmarks for PMA clients over the past two years. In exchange for this alleged steering, these seven members of Congress received $6.2 milion in campaign contributions. The article believes that PMA's influence over the panel has caused it to become one of the top ten lobbying firms in the country, generating $114 million in lobbying fees, according to the article which cites the Center For Responsive Politics.

Again, no one has been accused or proven guilty of misbehaving in this matter. However, some of these names are not new to those who read this blog and the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government":

• John Murtha has been in the news any number of times over the years, mostly for steering taxpayer funds into pork barrel projects in his home district. A previous post discussed how hundreds of millions of dollars had been used to build a local airport named after Mr. Murtha in the middle of nowhere in central Pennsylvania, an airport that handles just a handful of flights each day and only to and from DC.
• Marcy Kaptur is mentioned in the Appendix in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Last year as the economy and financial system were collapsing, the St. Petersburg Times reported that Ms. Kaptur was in a Congressional Budget committee meeting that was hearing testimony from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Ms. Kaptur did not know who Mr. Bernanke was, confusing him with Treasury Secretary Paulson. The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the Congresswoman did not know who the main government players in the federal government were relative to the economy.

Four things to ponder

1. Do you really want these kinds of people controlling the health care in this country? If one lobbying firm can theoretically influence seven Congress people this easily, imagine how many lobbying firms will influence trillions of dollars of health care spending.
2. This would never happen if Step 6 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" was implemented. Step 6 would restrict campaign donations to only those individual citizens who are affected by the election. No companies, no PACs, no unions, and no lobbying firms would be allowed to contribute anything to any election campaign fund.
3. Apparently the Post found the document when a low level Congressional employee accidentally left the investigation document on a file sharing network when working from home. The poor employee was fired for his or her oversight while members of Congress who may have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds continue to be paid their relatively plush salaries.
4. If these allegations are true, it is sad how cheaply Congress people can be bought. According to the document, lobbying expense is only 3.1% of the value of the earmark ($6.2 million in campaign donations divided by the $200 million in earmark value).

Up, Up And Away

Let's not talk about health care reform today and get back to one of my favorite topics, government waste of taxpayer money. Today I will review two government projects which literally let our tax dollars float away for no purpose. This post should be viewed in the same genre of a previous post where we discussed how Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania had channeled and wasted close to $200 million in building up the John Murtha county airport in his district. This is an airport that serves only three flights a day, most of which are less than half full, has an $8 million radar facility that has never been used and according to a recent news account, sometimes serves less people a day than there are TSA security workers in the airport.

Not to be outdone is the airport in Ely, Nevada. According to a Business Week article on August 17, 2009, Ely has a population of just over four thousand people and last year their airport received $1.8 million in Federal subsidies. Since only 414 people used the airport last year, the American taxpayer basically subsided each Ely flier to the tune of about $4,500. According to the article, it would have been cheaper to rent a private airplane for EACH of the people that used the Ely airport.

On Earthlink News today, Seth Borenstein of the AP had an article about NASA's plan to return to the moon. Unfortunately, it was not good news. A White House panel has released its review analysis of NASA plans and has determined that NASA cannot get back to the moon without a 16% ($3.0 billion) annual increase in its budget. So just five years after NASA and the Bush administration decided to return to the moon, its budget and plan are already obsolete. Thus, Obama has to decide whether to increase funding, something tough to to in a bad economy with the Federal deficit soaring, or shut down the moon operation. If he shuts it down, NASA would have wasted $7.7 billion it has already spent on a plan that comes up short. Either option will cost us more money.

These are just three examples of government leadership and management failure. These types of failures go on all over the Federal bureaucracy. That is why some of the most important steps (Steps 1,2,3,4,5 just for starters) in "Love My Country, Loathe my Government" involved curtailing government initiatives. No where in the past forty years has the political class been able to deliver anything on time or on budget. By restricting their activities and returning wasted tax dollars to us, they can get focused on a much smaller set of objectives and finally get something right.

The savings could go a long way to paying down the deficits and Obama's health care reform. Damn, that topic shows up everywhere!

435 Fiefdoms

In watching the classic Monty Python classic on TV the other day, "Monty Python And The Holy Grail", it occurred to me that we are currently living many aspects of that King Arthur movie in America today. Consider just a short list of examples of recent wasteful government spending/earmarks/pork programs:

• Pennsylvania Republican Congressman John Peterson got $500,000 of Federal taxpayer money allocated to his Congressional district to buy 21 train cabooses that were to be converted into a "caboose motel." (source: The Week Magazine, April 25, 2008)
• South Carolina Democratic Congressman James Clyburn got $3,000,000 of Federal taxpayer money allocated to his Congressional district for an organization called the First Tee whose website says that its mission is to "promote character development and life-enhancing values through the game of golf." (source: The Week Magazine, April 25, 2008)
• Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman John Murtha has been called the "King Of Pork," most notably for getting at least $150,000,000 of Federal taxpayer money allocated to his home district to build out the local area airport and put his name on it. CNN put the estimate at closer to $200,000,000 and according to numerous sources including www.spectator.org, $8,000,000 was spent on a state-of-the-art radar system several years ago that has NEVER been used. One reason it has never been used is that the airport serves about 20 passengers a day on average and handles very few flights. Murtha also got $800,000 allocated from the latest stimulus package to fix the second runway at the airport (why the need a second runway is beyond me and why it needs to be fixed to handle so few passengers and so few flights is way beyond me.) Oh, one more thing, the only flights in and out of the airport are to Washington DC. According to the www.spectator.org, the American taxpayer has subsidized every passenger's usage of the airport to the tune of $1,200 per person per flight.
• According to an AP story on August 26, 2009, a sleepy Montana border checkpoint, that sees about three travelers a day, will get $15,000,000 under Obama's stimulus plan even though it was ranked as marginal on a government border priority list. The town where the checkpoint is has a population of 71 and handled only $63,000 worth of freight traffic in the whole year. It also has an unemployment rate of only 4%, hardly in need of a stimulus. Why? Because the two Montana Democratic Senators persuaded the government to make it a priority even though the Lardeo, Texas checkpoint, which serves more than 55,000 people a day and about 4,200 trucks a day, and which was rated among the government's top priorities, will get no stimulus money.

These types of events repeat themselves thousands of times every year, misallocating hard earned taxpayer money inefficiently and and, in many cases, down right stupidly. Thus, the Monty Python analogy. We no longer live in the United States of America. We live in a loose federati0n of 435 Congressional districts/fiefdoms, each operated by a King Author-like figure (your respective member of Congress), whose seemingly sole purpose in life is too plunder the wealth of other fiefdoms' peasants and bring that plunder back to their own fiefdom to keep their peasants happy (and themselves in power).

Not only do these faux knights waste our money, they also waste a lot of time roaming the country side looking for their plunder. This is time that could be better spent fixing some real problems in this country, failing public schools, drug addiction problem, lack of a national energy strategy, Social Security heading for bankruptcy, etc. "Love My Country, Loathe My Government"'s Step 1 and Step 44 would directly reduce these earmarks and hopefully get the political class more focused on issues that really make a difference in Americans' lives. Words of an unknown author come to mind: "There are always too many Democratic Congressmen and too many Republican Congressmen and never enough United States Congressmen."