Jack Abramoff: How to fix political corruption

At LA Weekly, Paul Teetor interviews Jack Abramoff, who has recently released his memoirs, titled Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption From America's Most Notorious Lobbyist. I focused on these parts of the interview:

Politicians have to beg constantly for money, but you say that's not the primary problem. What is the primary problem? Power. The primary problem is them wanting to stay in power. It's not just campaign contributions; it's also people giving each other meals, taking them on trips. Anytime a gratuity is given to a public servant, that is a bribe. You say the best way to get control of a congressman's office is to offer a future job to the chief of staff. How does that work? I would say, "I would like to talk to you about working for me." The minute that conversation started, I had basically bribed them. From that point forward, I found, they were basically working for us. Is that part of your reform recommendations? Members and their chiefs of staff cannot become lobbyists? I would include every member of their staff.
These are the conclusions of a man who manipulated the system for decades. Although he attributes much of the corruption in Washington, D.C. to the lust for power, all methods of playing the system involve the exchange of money and other things of value. Politicians should be making their decisions solely on the merits of the legislation being considered. The solution is to pay our representatives well but take all other money and other things of value, direct and indirect, out of the equation. No junkets, no special book deals, no lecture money, no special consideration for jobs for relatives and friends. I would also pass a constitutional amendment to undo the damage of Citizen's United. I would offer meaningful public funding for political campaigns. Although I don't agree with everything Abramoff now says, I think he is right that corruption often starts with the little things and builds up. Therefore, I would agree to ban all of the little things too: no dinners, no small gifts and nothing at all of value. In the aggregate, these things constitute the only approach for freeing up the consciences of politicians so that they can make decisions based only on what is best for their constituents.

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Matt Taibbi delivers a Christmas message . . . from the financial sector

Matt Taibbi delivers a Christmas message from those who spend big money to make laws and other choices that benefit only themselves at the expense of the public good:

Most of us 99-percenters couldn't even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don't do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn't take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life's savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities. But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

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Documenting factory farm animal abuses as “terrorism”

Is documenting factory farm animal abuses a form of "terrorism"? Green is the New Red reports:

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force has kept files on activists who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms and recommended prosecuting them as terrorists, according to a new document uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act.
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/fbi-undercover-investigators-animal-enterprise-terrorism-act/5440/

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More details on the $16 trillion backdoor bank bailout

Today I received a mass emailing from Alan Grayson. I had previously heard about this backdoor bailout by reviewing an article by Bernie Sanders and see here. Nonetheless, I hadn't before seen the details of massive loans made by the Fed to banks and non-banks. These numbers are mind-boggling. Click on Grayson’s link to the Federal Reserve report (below) with the outrageously sterilized title: “FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM: Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance.” Then follow his road map in order to see the problems with your own eyes. I've printed Grayson's entire mass mailing below. Consider that the Fed created $16 TRILLION and distributed much of it to foreign banks. This amount is 20 times bigger than the publicly disclosed TARP, yet the American People were never given a chance to know about this or have their representatives vote on it. The banks tried to keep this backdoor bailout secret, but it took Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, neither Democrat nor a Republican (he is a democratic socialist), to raise hell in order to force the Federal Reserve to account for this backdoor bailout. And back then, it was believed that this backdoor bailout was "only" $2.2 trillion. One more thing: The total annual tax receipts of the United States are “only” $2 trillion. But, of course, based on the news media, you would think that the most important things going on concern Michael Jackson’s doctor and Herman Cain’s sex life. -- Dear Erich, I think it’s fair to say that Congressman Ron Paul and I are the parents of the GAO’s audit of the Federal Reserve. And I say that knowing full well that Dr. Paul has somewhat complicated views regarding gay marriage. Anyway, one of our love children is a massive 251-page GAO report technocratically entitled “Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance.” It is almost as weighty as that 13-lb. baby born in Germany last week, named Jihad. It also is the first independent audit of the Federal Reserve in the Fed’s 99-year history. Feel free to take a look at it yourself, it’s right here. It documents Wall Street bailouts by the Fed that dwarf the $700 billion TARP, and everything else you’ve heard about. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I’m dramatizing or amplifying what this GAO report says, so I’m just going to list some of my favorite parts, by page number. Page 131 – The total lending for the Fed’s “broad-based emergency programs” was $16,115,000,000,000. That’s right, more than $16 trillion. The four largest recipients, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, received more than a trillion dollars each. The 5th largest recipient was Barclays PLC. The 8th was the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, PLC. The 9th was Deutsche Bank AG. The 10th was UBS AG. These four institutions each got between a quarter of a trillion and a trillion dollars. None of them is an American bank. Pages 133 & 137 – Some of these “broad-based emergency program” loans were long-term, and some were short-term. But the “term-adjusted borrowing” was equivalent to a total of $1,139,000,000,000 more than one year. That’s more than $1 trillion out the door. Lending for these programs in fact peaked at more than $1 trillion. [More . . . .]

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