CONGRESSIONAL LOBBYING
SCANDAL HITS WHITE HOUSE

From the AP via Yahoo, courtesy of the Daily Kos:

E-mails reveal Abramoff requests, contacts

Wanted: Face time with President Bush or top adviser Karl Rove. Suggested donation: $100,000. The middleman: lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Blunt e-mails that connect money and access in Washington show that prominent Republican activist Grover Norquist facilitated some administration contacts for Abramoff's clients while the lobbyist simultaneously solicited those clients for large donations to Norquist's tax-exempt group.

Those who were solicited or landed administration introductions included foreign figures and American Indian tribes, according to e-mails gathered by Senate investigators and federal prosecutors or obtained independently by The Associated Press.

And

The e-mails show Abramoff delivered on his original promise to get tribal money for the event that included the Bush visit, sending one check from the Mississippi Choctaw tribe in October and one in November from the Saginaw Chippewa of Michigan. Kartch said Abramoff didn't deliver on PAC contributions.

Norquist and Abramoff were longtime associates who went back decades to their days in the Young Republicans movement. Norquist founded ATR to advocate lower taxes and less government. He built it into a major force in the Republican Party as the GOP seized control of Congress and the White House.

Abramoff became one of Washington's rainmaker lobbyists before allegations that he defrauded Indian tribes led to his downfall and a prison sentence. He is cooperating with prosecutors.

Click here for the rest.

So, I guess a partisan Republican could argue that this doesn't really have anything to do with Bush, that these expensive meetings took place in the context of Norquist's PAC, rather than the standard bribery-for-legislation procedure that's recently lit a fire under numerous right-wing Congressional butts. But you've got to admit, it all sounds pretty fishy, almost as though the PAC context was about giving the President and his staff the "plausible deniability" needed for the appearance of uninvolvement. I mean, it's not as though the President didn't have a motive: a lot of Norquist's work is about making campaign contributions to Republicans who will further his anti-tax crusade. By using a PAC as a front, this essentially amounts to money-laundering on a grand scale, and, whether he likes it or not, Bush and his staffers are knee-deep in it.

But then, Bush claims to not even know Abramoff. Sure, just like he doesn't know Kenny-Boy Lay.

But wait, there's more. Wicked lobbying isn't all about Abramoff, you know.

From Newsweek courtesy of AlterNet:

White House: Washington's Frequent (Freebie) Fliers

As Congress debatees a crackdown on members' and their staffs' accepting travel paid for by outside interests, newly filed records show Capitol Hill lawmakers aren't Washington's only frequent fliers. According to filings with the Office of Government Ethics, White House staffers have accepted nearly $135,000 in free trips since November 2004. Among those picking up the tab: some of the president's top business supporters, including the National Association of Manufacturers, and dozens of conservative and religious groups, among them the Southern Baptist Convention, Focus on the Family and the Federalist Society.

Click here for the rest.

In order to understand the gravity of this, you have to bear in mind that "White House staffers" aren't simply a bunch of clerks and secretaries. No, these are people who oversee regulatory agencies, people who make decisions that affect billions of dollars and millions of lives. These are people with power, just like Congressmen. Taking freebies from corporations and special interest groups is pretty hard to see as anything other than what it is, bribery.

You know, this kind of corruption is going to continue until some very simple steps are taken: ban all lobbying; ban all campaign contributions and replace them with public financing; ban all gifts and contributions of any sort. If government officials need the (strongly biased) information continually fed them by lobbyists, too fucking bad. They've got vast resources; they can do the research themselves. There's just no need for lobbying, and the practice has a heavily corruptive influence. Really, the end goal here should be to get as much money out of politics as possible. Democracy should be about the will of the voters, and it is quite obvious now that money tends to subvert that.

Why do you think I end every post with a bunch of dollar signs?

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