Our Horribly Broken Election Process, Part 1 - An Example

We have never been big fans of any American politician in this blog. We find them either cowardly, stupid, or greedy and often criminals. The list of their transgressions in each of these categories probably numbers in the hundreds when you go back through our previous posts.

Probably their worst trait of all is that they rig the system to make themselves rich, comfortable, and often above the law. They give themselves high pay and great benefits. They are in session in Congress for less than half the year. They are given multi-week vacations that they try to call “recesses.” They find ways to do insider trading on stocks and companies based on non-public information relative to potential and real legislation. And they spend so much time doing this stuff for themselves that they never get around to resolving the major issues facing the American public.

The Tampa Bay times recently did a nice job researching and reporting on a very devious way that American politicians misuse and corrupt our political processes for their own good:

• When an American politician runs for office, he or she establishes a campaign staff and funding process to collect campaign funds to be spent trying to get that politician elected to office.
• Once the election is over, the campaign has to pay off any remaining debts incurred by the campaign using that donated money.
• But what often happens that even after the debts are paid off, there is still campaign cash leftover.
• Now in an honest and ethical political process, the politician should either have to give back, say on a prorated basis, any leftover donated funds that were no longer needed, or possibly donate those leftover funds to a worthy and recognized charity.
• But we do not have either an honest and ethical political process or honest and ethical politicians since it appears they have written the game rules that allows them to keep using unused campaign money for their own good long after they are no longer in office, or in some case, after they have died.
• That is the bottom line finding of the Tampa Bay Times report that was replete with many examples of this greed.
• Although former Florida Congressman Mark Foley was drummed out of Congress over ten years ago for sending explicit sex text messages to teenage boys, in 2017 he used money from his old Congressional campaign fund to fund four dinners for himself in Palm Beach including a luncheon that cost his campaign fund $450.
• Former Senator Jim Bunning paid his daughter $94,800 from his campaign fund in the fours years after he left office, stopping only when there were no longer any funds left to give to her.
• Over the past year and a half, political consultant Dylan Beesley paid his consulting firm $100,000 from the campaign fund of Hawaiian Congressman Mark Takai for “consulting services” even though Congressman Takai has been dead for those past months.
• Former Ohio Congressman Steve LaTourette has been out of Congress for over three years but he still treated himself to $4,555 worth of Ohio State football tickets using his leftover campaign funds.
• In the six years since former Texas Congressman Jim Turner left office, he has paid his wife over $30,000 to handle his paperwork in addition to paying his father’s hardware company $9,600 to rent office space from his father with leftover campaign money.
• Former South Carolina Congressman Robin Tallon left Congress in 1993, took his leftover $400,000 campaign slush fund and invested it so well that he grew it to $1 million; he then paid himself more than $31,000, paid his son $20,000 who was listed as his campaign manager even though Tallon was not running for office, he bought a $4,000 computer in 2007 (14 years after leaving Congress, a $2,300 computer in 2014, and a $900 iPad in 2017, all with money from that initial leftover $400,000 campaign fund.
• But Tallon’s shenanigans get better since between 2007 and 2011 he paid $8,200 to an organization identified as only CCSC, which coincidentally looks very familiar to the housing development where he owns a 4,400 square foot home, Country Club of South Carolina, or CCSC.
• According to the report, almost 40 former Congress people kept aides or campaign staff on payroll long after the person left office with a dozen of those 40 paying a politician's family members to stay on staff.
• In fact, Bunning paid his daughter over $2,100 a month until the slush fund ran dry.
• The former treasurer of New York Congressman Thomas Manton was still being paid two years after Manton died, not just two years after he left office.
• Former Georgia Congressman Saxby Chambliss left office in January, 2015 but used leftover campaign funds to treat himself to five nights at the five star Williamsburg Inn six months later at a cost of $1,979.
• The article reports, using actual FEC data, that about 100 former members of Congress have allowed their former campaign treasure chest to spend over $20 million after they left office over the past 23 years or so.
• Other dubious expenses uncovered by the research included money spent on airline tickets, club memberships, cell phones, computers and other expenses.

Nasty, greedy stuff. And unnecessary since the Times report also singled out two good guys among this sea of selfish and greedy politicians. It cited former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman and former Georgia Congressman Charlie Norwood both donated over 90% of their leftover campaign money to charity and shut down their campaign offices and operations within six months after leaving office. So it can be done. It just isn’t done.

The Times article did interview election experts and former FEC personnel. They were in general agreement that many for these expense fall outside of the law. But since the FEC is basically a toothless overlord, no one ever gets accused or prosecuted for abusing this leftover cash.

Again, just a symptom of a broken election process that allows useless, greedy, selfish people to not only get elected to office but profit handsomely from getting elected, both during their terms and long afterwards. And as we mentioned above all of this happens while no major issue facing the country EVER gets resolved.

We will follow up this discussion within a few days with a plan to rid the election process of embarrassments and affronts like this. The Founding Fathers never envisioned running for office as a self enrichment activity and that is the objective we should all be working on, getting people elected that want to fix what is broken rather than enrich their personal lives at the expense of taxpayers and the country.

In the meantime, we suggest you go to the following link where we previously discussed this topic relative to Evan Bayh, a former Indiana Senator who left office with $10 million left his campaign treasure chest:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/06/june-2014-political-class-insanity-part_8.html

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

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Part 1: Why Gay Marriage and The Confederate Flag Are Meaningless issues Relative To the Lobbyist Behind the Curtain

Later this week we will post our monthly series of political class insanity posts. Every month we gather and discussed the latest insanity, ineptness, wasteful spending, and corruption of the American political class. Unfortunately for us, over the years we have been doing this feature, every month we have needed more and more time just to cover one month’s worth of insanity.

Before we do that for July’s insanity, let’s look at some bigger picture, longer term issues that dwarf the wasteful spending, idiotic programs and laws, stupid quotes, and overall inept performance of the American class. Yes, it is important to point out how wasteful spending goes on in Washington, how government and political class programs never efficiently or effectively implement their goals, how stupid our politicians often sound when they open their mouths.

But the longer term two topics we will discuss in the next two days dwarf these issues. In fact, the top two social and political issues being hotly debated this these days are also nits relative to the two overarching issues we will be discussing today and tomorrow. It really does not matter what you think about gay marriage and the Supreme Court’s recent decision on it. It really does not matter what you think about the Confederate flag and what it stands for. 

Talking about them in the context of the bigger issues is a total waste of time since both issues pale in comparison to the two bigger issues. The gay and lesbian community consists of less than 5% of the nation’s population. Confederate flag supporters are probably comparable in numbers, small minorities in the country. 

But unless we address the major issue of political corruption in Washington (today’s topic) and the unrelenting build up of the national debt (tomorrow’s issue), then who can get married and who can fly a flag of their choice will become totally, totally irrelevant in our near future since these two bigger issues affect EVERY American, not just a small minority of them.

Today’s post is based on the writings of liberal former Senator and Presidential candidate Gary Hart. He is the author of 21 books and the following quotes come from his recent book, “The Republic Of Conscience.” While I have pulled out only a subset of quotes from his book that was discussed in a recent Time magazine article, I encourage everyone to go to that online Time article at:

http://time.com/3937860/gary-hart-america-corruption/

Mr. Hart eloquently and precisely points out how our democratic processes have been thoroughly corrupted by the American political class and the media, lobbyists, and organized political entities that feast on those processes and American tax dollars and freedoms. We have discussed this corruption of the democratic processes before,both in this blog and our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.”

However, I think that you read the following quotes from his book, you will see that he is probably a little more eloquent than this blog in pleading the case that money and the infestation it is installed in our democracy has fundamentally changed America and that change has not been for the best. While it has enriched politicians and those that abuse the political process, it has left the rest of America poorer and less free in the process.

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1. Four qualities have distinguished republican government from ancient Athens forward: the sovereignty of the people; a sense of the common good; government dedicated to the commonwealth; and resistance to corruption. Measured against the standards established for republics from ancient times, the American Republic is massively corrupt.
2. In the governing of a republic, corruption was self-interest placed above the interest of all—the public interest.
3. There has never been a time, however, when the government of the United States was so perversely and systematically dedicated to special interests, earmarks, side deals, log-rolling, vote-trading, and sweetheart deals of one kind or another.
4. What brought us to this? A sinister system combining staggering campaign costs, political contributions, political action committees, special interest payments for access, and, most of all, the rise of the lobbying class.
5. Worst of all, the army of lobbyists that started relatively small in the mid-twentieth century has now grown to big battalions of law firms and lobbying firms of the right, left, and an amalgam of both.
6. There is little wonder that Americans of the right and many in the middle are apoplectic at their government and absolutely, and rightly, convinced that the game of government is rigged in favor of the elite and the powerful. Occupiers see even more wealth rising to the top at the expense of the poor and the middle class. And Tea Partiers believe their tax dollars are going to well-organized welfare parasites and government bureaucrats.
7. Recent months have seen, in effect, the legalization of Watergate. Who would have thought, forty years after the greatest political scandal and presidential abuse of power in U.S. history, that the Supreme Court of the United States would rule the practices that financed that scandal were now legal?
8. And, of course, the ultimate victims of the corruption of the democratic process are not defeated candidates and parties but America’s citizens. 
9. The advent of legalized corruption launched by the Supreme Court empowers the superrich to fund their own presidential and congressional campaigns as pet projects, to foster pet policies, and to represent pet political enclaves. You have a billion, or even several hundred million, then purchase a candidate from the endless reserve bench of minor politicians and make him or her a star, a mouthpiece for any cause or purpose however questionable, and that candidate will mouth your script in endless political debates and through as many television spots as you are willing to pay for. All legal now.
10. To compound the political felony, much, if not most, campaign financing is now carried out in secret, so that everyday citizens have a decreasing ability to determine to whom their elected officials are beholden and to whom they must now give special access.
11. To add to the profound misdirection of American politics by the Supreme Court, we now have what might be called convergence in the garden of government influence.
12. The context is the lobbying maze in Washington and the convergence of dozens of noxious weeds in the garden of government into a handful of giant predator thornbushes now devouring that garden. Of this handful, the largest by far is WPP (originally called Wire and Plastic Products; is there a metaphor here?), which has its headquarters in London and more than 150,000 employees in 2,500 offices spread around 107 countries. It, together with one or two conglomerating competitors, represents a fourth branch of government, vacuuming up former senators and House members and their spouses and families, key committee staff, former senior administration officials of both parties and several administrations, and ambassadors, diplomats, and retired senior military officers.
13. Think of the banks that can be bailed out, the range of elaborate weapons systems that can be sold to the government, the protection from congressional scrutiny that can be paid for, the economic policies that can be manipulated.
14. The lobbying business is no longer about votes up or down on particular measures that may emerge in Congress or policies made in the White House. It is about setting agendas, deciding what should and should not be brought up for hearings and legislation.
15. America’s founders knew one thing: The republics of history all died when narrow interests overwhelmed the common good and the interests of the commonwealth.
16. What would our founders make of this nightmare of corruption? We only know, in Thomas Jefferson’s case, for example, that his distrust of central government had to do with the well-founded and prescient suspicion that its largesse would go to powerful and influential interests, especially financiers, who knew how to manipulate both the government and the financial markets. 
17. All they knew was how to respond to their industry lobbyists’ requests for very large contributions to compliant members of congressional finance committees and to do so quickly and often. And they did get their money’s worth.
18. Americans cannot hold ourselves up to the world as the beacon of democracy so long as we permit, as long as we acquiesce in, corruption so far beyond the standards of the true republic that our government cannot be proclaimed an ideal for other aspiring nations.
19. On a more personal level, how can public service be promoted as an ideal to young people when this sewer corrupts our Republic? 
20. But it is impossible to claim to love one’s country and not be outraged at how corrupt it has become. For former senators and representatives to trade a title given them by the voters of their respective states and districts for cash is beyond shameful. It is outrageous.
21. It is an error of serious proportion to dismiss corruption in twenty-first-century American democracy on the grounds that this has all been going on from the beginning, that boys will be boys, that politicians are always on the take. Past incidents of the violation of public ethics provide no argument for accepting the systemic and cancerous commercialization of modern American politics.
22. And, as scholars of ancient Greek and Roman political texts, they knew in their minds and in their hearts that a republic with leaders who lacked virtue would not long survive.
23. ...is to invite the eventual erosion of the ideal of the American Republic, to reduce this great nation and its heritage to the worst kind of mundane governance, to prostitute a noble experiment on the altar of expediency and greed, and to leave coming generations to ponder what went wrong.
24. “Just because it is legal doesn’t make it right” should be carved above every congressional doorway, every cabinet department, and even the White House itself. 
25. The fact that many former presidents and prime ministers of European democracies have enriched themselves in questionable ways after leaving office does not justify similar behavior on the part of American politicians. We hold ourselves to a higher standard.
26. We are in danger of becoming a different kind of nation, one our founders would not recognize and would deplore.
27. Because of the erosion of the integrity of our governing system, and the principles and ideals underlying it, the fiscal deficit increases. The government spending so many conservatives claim to abhor includes not only the social safety net of Roosevelt and Johnson, but also the war-making excursions of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. It is all government spending. And it includes favorite pork-barrel projects of every member of both houses of Congress of both political parties...
28. We were not created to be like other nations. We were created as an alternative to monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, and corrupt political systems. The more we follow the easy path, the one paved for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful, the more we stray from our originally intended purpose and the more we lose our unique purpose for existence.
29. The question is: By adhering to its highest principles and ideals, will America continue to have the moral authority to lead all people of goodwill? The answer remains to be seen. And that answer will have much to do with whether we have the courage to drive the money changers from the temple of democracy and recapture government of the people, for the people, and by the people.
30. Bad politics drives out good politics. Legalized corruption drives men and women of stature, honor, and dignity out of the halls of government. Self-respecting individuals cannot long tolerate a system of election and reelection so dependent on cultivating the favor of those known to expect access in return. Such a system is corrosive to the soul.
31. Campaigning is a major industry now that consumes hundreds of millions of dollars and, in national campaigns, billions of dollars. Almost all of it goes to the media, the same media whose commentators regularly deplore the costs of campaigns.
32. It [lobbying] is a great hydra-headed monster, one that is rapidly devouring American democracy.
33. The significant issue is the effect of this relatively recent conversion of a democratic process to a major industry that devours money. 
34. We are not the same country we started out to be. We cannot conduct our political process the way we are doing in the twenty-first century and claim to adhere to our earliest principles. We must decide who we are. And if that decision is to restore our highest ideals, then major changes must be made in the way we elect our presidents and our members of Congress.

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In light of his comments, insights, and the massive corruption he correctly identifies, worrying about who marries who and who can fly a certain flag pale in comparison. Because in the end, if all we are left with in our democracy is a new type of marriage license and a piece of cloth on a flagpole, at the expense of our economic and political freedom, then who really cares? They are nothing more than small consolation prizes.

As Woodrow Wilson once said: "The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy." Never has this quote from a hundred years ago been so right as it is today.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w