Corporations can buy unfair favors from government…because government has unfair favors to sell.
Big Government is the problem.
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Category: insider corruption
Yesterday, we discovered that the biggest term limits opponent in Arkansas — former state senator Jon Woods — also allegedly led an elaborate legislative fraud scheme, whereby he and a state representative traded tax dollars for cash bribes.
For now, Woods is an unindicted co-conspirator. But last week, the representative involved pled guilty to a felony carrying a possible 20-year prison term and directly implicated Sen. Woods.
Woods’s alleged criminality involves the GIF program — General Improvement Funds. Legislators can personally direct GIF dollars to pet projects and favored cronies, taking political credit. The process is similar to congressional earmarks. And just as corrupting.
In an article entitled, “How a 1997 Power Grab is costing Arkansas taxpayers millions on pet projects,” the grassroots group Conduit for Action explains that the GIF rules changed just before our new millennium, when term limits first cleaned out the state House (1998). The old batch of legislators gave themselves unchecked control over this vote-buying slush fund.
And that is when even bigger corruption surfaced. “A Federal grand jury shook the Arkansas political establishment today with a long list of political corruption indictments that reaches to the apex of the state Legislature,” the New York Times reported in 1999.
Back then, Sen. Nick Wilson was Arkansas’s loudest term limits critic … until his three-decade-long career ended with a guilty plea to 133 counts of racketeering and other public corruption.
Interesting that top legislative enemies of term limits, both past and present, wear the Scarlet Letter “C” for corruption. Coincidence?
Term limits are no friend to corruption. And vice-versa.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Former Arkansas State Rep. Micah Neal pled guilty last week to a felony charge of conspiring “with an Arkansas state senator to use their official positions to appropriate government money to certain nonprofits in exchange for bribes.”
Neal, who embraced graft his first month in office, received $38,000 in “legislating-around” money between 2013, when he entered the House, and 2015.
Court documents mention a number of seasoned conspirators, though not by name. There’s mysterious Senator A, who took Rep. Neal under his crooked wing.
Their scheme, reported Arkansas Business, “direct[ed] $600,000 in state GIF funds to the Northwest Arkansas Economic Development District, which then distributed it to two nonprofit entities.” Those two outfits — Entities A and B — then kicked back dough to Rep. Neal and Senator A through bagmen.*
Arkansas Business sorted out “the alphabet soup of unindicted people and entities.” It turns out Senator A, the ringleader, is someone we’ve encountered before: former State Senator Jon Woods.
Remember Issue 3, the dishonestly-worded 2014 constitutional amendment that weakened term limits (while telling voters it “established term limits”), imposed a gift ban so “tough” that now all legislators can get free meals from lobbyists anytime, and created an “Independent Citizens Commission” (a majority appointed by legislators) that gave legislators a 148 percent pay raise?
That was Woods’s.
His indictment appears imminent.
Meanwhile, Neal’s attorney extends to us his client’s wish that “this case does not overshadow all the good he did while serving as [a] representative.”
What good? The term limits scam.
Neal’s corruption doesn’t overshadow all he did as a legislator — it illuminates it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Three additional conspirators were engaged in delivering the bribe money to Rep. Neal and Sen. Woods. In court papers, these bagmen were referred to as Person A (a lobbyist for Entity A), Person B (“the president of Entity B and a friend of Senator A”) and Person C (“a friend of Senator A and Person B”).
Sure, I’ve complained about the over-the-top anti-Trump bias of much of the mainstream media (which may actually have improved Trump’s public standing). But, today, I enthusiastically celebrate that supercilious slant.
Why? Because it means much of the media amazingly finds itself on the right side, panning the recent deal to save 1,000 jobs at the Carrier Corporation.
Saving jobs is good per se. We want jobs to stay here in America. But, at what price?
Thus far, the deal remains secret, but according to Politico, “The agreement reportedly includes $7 million in state tax breaks over ten years offered by the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, a quasi-public entity that doesn’t require legislative approval for its deals.”
“Quasi-public entities” always make me queasy.
“Can American companies now merely threaten to go to Mexico,” asks Chris Rossini in the Ron Paul Liberty Letter, “in order to get a sweetheart deal for themselves?”
This special arrangement’s costs are not merely monetary: Special deals for some companies at the expense of others undermine the whole concept of equality under the law.
File under: crony capitalism.
Even the socialists at The Nation say the agreement “epitomizes corporate socialism at the expense of American taxpayers.”
“I certainly think that, if President Obama had done something like this, conservatives would have been freaking out,” argues Reason’s Peter Suderman.
Many are. Well, maybe not exactly “freaking out” — but vocally opposing the idea of the not-quite-yet-president picking winners and losers in the marketplace.
Crony capitalism didn’t make America great. Our revolution’s justification prompts the antithesis.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
When Hillary Clinton assured her insider sponsors (as we learned through WikiLeaks) that there would be a crucial difference between what she tells the people and what her actual policies would be, she was not merely admitting to a private and a public face.
The President is legally, and by honor, bound to serve the American people, not Goldman-Sachs. What she was confessing to was more than the mere appearance of a conflict of interests.
She boasted a plan of betrayal.
In that light, President-elect Donald Trump’s international business deals seem … what? His first diplomatic meeting — with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — included his daughter and partner-in-business Ivanka.
It seems to at least wander into conflict-of-interest territory, if not stake claim and hoist up a flag proclaiming Trumpistan America!
So I was very pleased, yesterday, when the President-elect vowed to step out from the running of his global business and branding empire.
Earlier, he had brushed off conflict-of-interest concerns, saying he could run his empire and … ours.
Apparently, his new White House appointees have convinced him that this business dealing while President was a huge problem. “I feel it is visually important,” he explained Wednesday morning, “as president, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses.”
Thanks, Steve Bannon?
Or, maybe, Mitt Romney, with whom he dined* the night before?
I hope Mr. Trump follows through with this, as well as distance himself from business partner Ivanka as unofficial policy advisor.
Americans did not reject Corrupt Hillary only to wind up with a Corrupt Trump set.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Once upon a time, the Democratic Party was fondly referred to as “The Democracy.”
But that was a long time before the Clintons took control of the party’s heart and soul. It’s certainly been an insider’s game since.
Case in point? The deliberate scuttling of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz lost her chairperson-ship of the Democratic National Committee because of her (WikiLeaked email) collaboration with the Clintons over the dirty tricks that made sure Bernie got nowhere near the top levers of power.
And now we have Donna Brazile, covertly doing all she can to ensure the election to the Presidency of arguably the most corrupt politician of our time.
This political operative left CNN’s talking head ranks under a cloud — she had leaked to Clinton campaign communication director Jennifer Palmieri details about a question to be asked at a CNN-hosted presidential debate. Though CNN is not for nothing popularly known as the Clinton News Network, even CNN muckety-mucks felt betrayed.
But when interviewed by the indefatigable Megyn Kelly of Fox News, Brazile defended herself from the charges — “as a Christian woman” who understood “persecution”; she also compared her interviewer to a thief, and blamed Russian hackers.
Now, as a result of another WikiLeaks email exposure, Brazile has been caught again. The network has severed ties with her, and she’s defending herself with lines like “I try to learn as much as I can, share as much as I can.”
Unquestionably.
Having proven her loyalties, it looks like Ms. Brazile’s on track for a job in the new administration.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration based on original (cc) photo by Tim Pierce on Flickr