Political Corruption

The "Perry Tale" of Rick-The-Reformer

Jim Hightower — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

As the wise old adage says, those who live in glass houses, ought not throw stones. That's the moral of today's "Perry Tale," tracking the truth-impaired governor of Texas as he stumbles madly across country in the vain of hope of being the GOP presidential nominee.

Rick's latest Perry Tale is in the form of a campaign ad he's running. In it, he scolds members of Congress who leave office to become lobbyists. That's "a form of legal corruption," Perry piously intones. Well, he's right about that, but there's not even an iota of truth in the suggestion that he's the one to fix it. As governor, Perry's been the poster child of revolving door corruption between his own office and corporate lobbyists.

For example, guess who is now heading the super-PAC that's supporting Perry's White House bid? Mike Toomey, who went from being a state legislator to being a highly-paid tassel-toed corporate lobbyist in Texas. Then, Toomey-the-lobbyist spun back through that revolving door of corruption to become Governor Perry's very own chief of staff. Then – whoop, whoop, whoop – he spun out again to become an even higher-paid lobbyists, using his ties to Perry to get government favors for his corporate clients.

Indeed, several of Perry's top staffers have been "revolvers," coming to his office directly from the lobbying corps, or leaving the governor's office to go into corporate lobbying – or both. And while he's now pointing his finger of shame at Washington's revolving door, he's hush-hush about the fact that Texas has had more lawmakers-turned-lobbyists than any other state. Yet, in his 10 years as governor, he never made a peep of protest about their corruption.

No matter what Perry's campaign ads say, "Rick-The-Reformer" is to governmental ethics what Newt Gingrich is to marital fidelity.

It's all about Jack

Jim Hightower — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Look out – here comes Jack, trying to jack us around again.

Jack Abramoff, the über-corrupt K-Street lobbyist who turned his name into a synonym for sleazeball, is now out and about. Out of prison, that is, running all about the country in a narcissistic celebrity redemption campaign. Yes, Jack wants to turn his personal sleaziness into fame, cash, sympathy... even admiration. "The hope is I can use my natural infamy in a positive way," he recently told the New York Times.

Positive for whom? Why, for himself, of course. That's why this ex-con now has a publicist, literary agent, lawyer, producer, Facebook page, website, Twitter feed, and all the other accoutrements of the modern fame game. Abramoff has already published a book about – what else? – himself. He's been all over the TV-talk show circuit, talking about himself. And he's available (for a fee) to give motivational speeches based on the life experiences of – guess who? – Jack. Now, there's a feature film in the works, and he's pitching a reality TV show – both about himself. In fact, Self is Jack's middle name (though he'll still answer to Sleazeball).

Even with all the attention he's getting, there's a whininess in Abramoff's rebranding effort. He seems to think that he's some sort of victim. "All I want," he says, "is for people not to see me as this cartoon monster."

Come on, Jack, try that whine on those Indian tribes you duped into your lobbying operation just a few years ago. You pocketed millions of dollars in fees from them, did nothing to help them, then privately mocked them to your guffawing cohorts as "losers," "monkeys," and "troglodytes." He still owes them $40 million. That's pretty monstrous.

Abramoff couldn't clean the sleaze off him with a king-sized can of Comet and a wire brush, much less with a PR campaign.

Rewarding hubris, stupidity, hypocrisy, and cynicism

Jim Hightower — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Double-dippin' Joe is back in the news. Double-dip is not some soda jerk working in an ice cream shop, but that's not too far off. He's a State legislator working in Texas to jerk taxpayers around for his own financial gain.

For years, Rep. Joe Driver was just another obscure, do-little, Texas right-winger. He kept getting elected in his solidly-Republican district by ranting ceaselessly against the bugaboo of excessive government spending. But, late last year, Joe flared for a brief moment into national notoriety as a blue-ribbon example of legislative hubris-stupidity-hypocrisy-cynicism on a stick. He got caught double-billing for some $60,000 in travel expenses, getting reimbursed by both his campaign fund and Texas taxpayers. In defense, the 20-year legislative veteran (who, by the way, serves on the appropriations committee) entered a plea of stupidity: "If I knew it was wrong," he said, "I wouldn't have done it that way."

Imagine a common robber trying that defense – but, then, robbers have ethics, whereas lawmakers just have power.

Joe has now cut a deal with prosecutors: a $5,000 fine, repay what he stole, plead guilty to the felony, and get five years probation. That's it. No jail time. Plus, he gets to serve out the remaining year of his legislative term (yes, Texas law allows convicted felons to stay in office), and at the end of his probation his conviction gets wiped off the books.

Wait, there's more. Driver, who piously assails government spending on other people, gets to keep his state pension! So the taxpayers he ripped off will be sending $57,000 a year to Double-dippin' Joe for the rest of his life. You see, crime does pay – if you're one of the powerful elite.

And legislators like Driver wonder why common robbers are held in higher public esteem than they are.

Perry's piggybank

Jim Hightower — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

"Tell me with whom you walk," goes the old adage, "and I'll tell you who you are."

Maybe you're wondering just who the heck this Rick Perry-guy is, this loud-talking, slow-thinking Texas buckaroo who says he should be your president. His PR storyline is that he's just a straight-shooting, conservative politico out of Paint Rock, Texas. But it's been ages since Perry walked with the good folks of Paint Rock. Now in his 27th year in political office, this guy has consistently walked with Mr. Money and been the loyal servant of the corporate powers.

Let's take a peek at Perry's "piggybank" – not his personal money (though it is curious how he became a millionaire while doing nothing but government work). Rather, check out the Texas Enterprise Fund, a stash of some 400 million tax dollars that Governor Perry has essentially used as a political slush fund. TEF is supposed to be a cache of state cash for him to dole out as incentives for corporations to create jobs – but its job-creation performance is somewhere between pathetic and a scam.

The fund has, however, been a boon for Perry's re-election campaigns and for the coffers of his corporate benefactors. For example, 20 of the governor's top corporate donors that've put a total of $6.5 million into his electioneering pockets, have been rewarded with a stunning $116 million in TEF handouts. In a recent analysis, the watchdog group, Texans for Public Justice, found that Caterpillar gave $124,000 to Perry and got more than $9 million from TEF; Lockheed Martin put $232,000 in Perry's pay-to-play scheme and got $5 million back in state money; and GE put in $640,000 and got $4 million from the fund.

To see with whom else he walks, get the full report on Perry's Piggybank from www.tpj.org.

Perry's piggybank

Jim Hightower — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

"Tell me with whom you walk," goes the old adage, "and I'll tell you who you are."

Maybe you're wondering just who the heck this Rick Perry-guy is, this loud-talking, slow-thinking Texas buckaroo who says he should be your president. His PR storyline is that he's just a straight-shooting, conservative politico out of Paint Creek, Texas. But it's been ages since Perry walked with the good folks of Paint Rock. Now in his 27th year in political office, this guy has consistently walked with Mr. Money and been the loyal servant of the corporate powers.

To see with whom else he walks, get the full report on Perry's Piggybank from www.tpj.org.

The corporate purchase of governmental power

Jim Hightower — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Jamie Dimon of New York City made a donation to the New York Police Foundation this spring. "These officers," Mr. Dimon said at the time, "put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe."

Yes they do. But was this a nice gesture by a civic-minded citizen – or the purchase of special protection? When Jamie Dimon says keep "us" safe, I doubt he means us hoi polloi. Rather, I suspect he wants police officials to keep Wall Street bankers like him safe from us. Dimon is chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, the financial giant that helped crash our economy, took billions of banker bailout dollars from us, keeps paying outlandish executive bonuses, refuses to lend the capital our real economy needs to create jobs, is now gouging consumers with new fees, and is presently lobbying in Washington to kill regulations that would protect us from more banker greed.

The $4.6 million donation that Dimon delivered is the largest ever received by the police foundation. He even got a thank-you note from police chief Raymond Kelly, expressing "profound gratitude."

But Dimon's bank got its biggest thanks in mid-September, when the Occupy Wall Street movement launched its protest. According to a member of Occupy's legal team, the original plan was to base the protest's encampment in Chase Plaza, right in front of the big bank's Wall Street offices. However, no go. The NYPD was there in force ahead of the protestors, preemptively shutting down the plaza. Thus, the Occupy movement settled in at Zuccotti Park, well out of sight of the JPMorgan Chase honchos.

Ironically, this apparent purchase of police power is exactly the sort of corrupt coziness between corporate and governmental elites that has brought people into the streets. It just confirms the necessity for a democracy uprising in America.

A little less corporate political corruption

Jim Hightower — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Come on, Obama, do it! Stand up, stand tall, stand firm! Yes, you can!

The president is thinking about issuing an executive order that would mitigate some of the damage done to our democracy by the Supreme Court's dastardly Citizens United edict, which unleashes unlimited amounts of secret corporate cash to pervert America's elections. Obama's idea is simply to require that those corporations trying to get federal contracts disclose all of their campaign donations for the previous two years, including money they launder through such front groups as the national Chamber of Commerce.

This approach says to those giants sucking up billions of our tax dollars for endless war, privatization of public services, etcetera: You're still free to shove trainloads of your shareholders' money into congressional and presidential races, but – hey, just tell the public how much you're giving and to whom.

Neat. It would be a clean, direct, and effective reform – so, of course, the corporate powers and their apologists are squealing like stuck pigs. Steven Law, a Bush-Cheney operative who is now both a Wall Street Journal editorialist and the head of a secret corporate money fund, recently decried the very idea of public disclosure of contractor campaign contributions: "When I was in the executive branch," he sniffed, "mixing politics with procurement was called corruption."

Yes, Steve, and y'all were corruption experts! Perhaps you've forgotten that we remember Halliburton, the Cheney-run corporation that helped put Bush in office and then was handed tens of billions in contracts, becoming the poster child of corrupt, no-bid procurement.

Come on, Obama, don't back down from these corporate sleazes – sign that disclosure order! If they're going to steal our elections, at least make them admit it.

MICHIGAN LOCALS FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY

Jim Hightower — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

If Rick Snyder ever comes to help you, run away as fast and as far as you can.

Snyder is the right-wing, corporate-hugging governor of Michigan whose extremist anti-worker, anti-government agenda was handed to him by a Koch-funded front group named the Mackinac Center. Included in the package was a doozy of autocratic mischief-making called the Local Government Fiscal Accountability Act. The new law turns Synder into a perverse hybrid of a Soviet czar and a tinhorn banana republic potentate, and it has infuriated the public. Now trying to backpedal, the governor's new line is that, "It's about helping communities."

Helping? This law allows him to seize control of any city, county, school district, etc. that he decides is in fiscal trouble, authorizing him to appoint an "emergency manager," which may be a private corporation, to run the entity. This autocratic regent is empowered to cancel labor contracts, repeal the public budget, privatize government assets, dismiss elected officials, and even dissolve the local entity.

This is the kind of "help" that a fox brings to the hen house, so the governor is now being sued by his own astonished citizenry. Snyder's tyrannical law, they point out, violates the state's Constitution by usurping the right of local residents to elect their officials. As the director of a community legal group in Detroit puts it, the governor's designated emergency manager would control all, "including the right to enact or repeal local ordinances."

You might be thinking, "Thank goodness I don't live in Michigan." But if Snyder's anti-democratic coup succeeds there, you can bet that various Koch-backed right-wing front groups will bring the Michigan Model to your state. For information on the Michigan fight, contact Detroit's Sugar Law Center: www.sugarlaw.org.

A LITTLE LESS CORPORATE POLITICAL CORRUPTION

Jim Hightower — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Come on, Obama, do it! Stand up, stand tall, stand firm! Yes, you can!

Come on, Obama, don't back down from these corporate sleazes – sign that disclosure order! If they're going to steal our elections, at least make them admit it.

"THE SIXTIES MADE ME DO IT"

Jim Hightower — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:00:00 -0700

I try to avoid religious commentary, but – Good God! – what is it about confession that the Catholic hierarchy can't seem to grasp?

The grotesque epidemic of priestly pedophilia that has roiled the church has been under assessment in a five year, $2 million study commissioned by our country's Catholic bishops. At long last, the report is out – but not the truth. Instead, the panel concludes that this horror is not the fault of the church, nor even of the abusive priests. Rather – cue the heavenly music – the sixties made them do it.

Yes, it's the Woodstock defense! The diabolical theory of this study is that "social chaos" created by the tie-dyed sexual revolution of the 1960s so discombobulated otherwise chaste and honorable men that they used their religious authority to rape 10-year-olds and teenagers.

Dios mios, have mercy. That conclusion is as perverted as what the priests did and as inexcusable as the hierarchy's ongoing denials and cover-ups. Start with the obvious: Rape is not about sex, it's a gross abuse of power. Second, I was around in the 1960s, and while I couldn't seem to attract much free love for myself, I can testify that the sexual revolution of the time most definitely did not even contemplate – much less advocate – old men in dark robes molesting children who'd been placed in their care.

The church's report is as silly as the right-wing's current fiction that all would be well in America if only the sixties had never happened. Excuse me, but enormous progress was made in those years by women, civil rights champions, environmental advocates – and, yes, by American culture itself. The Pope should shelve the nonsense in this report and lead the world in a new liturgical chant: Pedophilia is not a social habit that one adopts; it's a sickness. Deal with it. Honestly.