To all Republicrats: If you look at the insane amount of spending out there, have you considered that this may in part be a result of this? Everyone who talks about reforming government corruption begins and ends at campaign finance reform. It may be worth it to think of how much payola would be corrupting the system if the government wasn’t hemorrhaging cash like it was suffering from financial Ebola. The price of campaigning has skyrocketed because there is a definitive value on a Congressional vote, and there is no consequence for representatives to reward their cronies. These people are already ethical bottom-feeders, and any naive reliance on campaign finance reform ignores the fact that buying a vote on the hill is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. For anyone outside the Congress, that’s enough money to find a way to skirt the law.
Perhaps, I dunno, we might enforce existing influence-peddling laws and prosecute these pay-to-play congressmen? Just a crazy thought.
3 Comments
michelle · May 29, 2009 at 8:37 am
The report only talks about John Murtha (D) but I KNOW there’s a lot more congressmen, on both sides, porking up the debt with earmarks. In all your copious spare time, I’d like to see you do a more in-depth report on exactly who are adding what earmarks.
Steve Buchheit · May 29, 2009 at 2:25 pm
There is an organization that tracks earmarks (can’t quite pull it out of the brain at the moment), and I don’t think Murtha is the biggest offender there. The main problem is proving causality legally. It’s easy to make the “they got this, they did this” comparison, but proving the pay-to-play is a lot harder.
However, an earmark, like Print-on-Demand technology in publishing, isn’t the real problem. And showing these examples are just an attack by a party out of power, but with a concurrent installed base within the bureaucracy to have money and projects funneled to more of their constituents. Representing a village that has already received one earmark, and hopefully will receive another one this year (knock on wood), I’ll fight to keep that option available. (1st earmark helped us pay for a water improvement system that improved our ability to serve our industry, lure more, reduce insurance premiums, and as a side effect provide enough water pressure to our new school by providing $325,000 of federal money into a $1.25 million project; 2nd earmark will help us get around an ODOT roadblock to putting up a new stop light at the intersection of a state highway and the road feeding our school on one side and the industrial base on the other, it’s been a long fight and we now have an appeal before the governor, but with the Federal earmark we a) get some money to help install it and b) get around the ODOT supervisor that’s over ruling the 3 engineers reports and our own safety forces estimate that we need that light – he’s over ruling it because he knows his department should be paying for it even though we’ve secured most of the money to install it ourselves).
Steve Buchheit · May 29, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Forgot to make the comparison, it isn’t the POD tech that is the problem in publishing, it’s the unscrupulous who use it as a part of their scamming to fleece writers that are desperate to get published. POD can have its excellent uses.
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