10/21/13, “Exclusive–Palin: Congress Has America Caught Up in ‘Endless Extortion Scheme‘,” Sarah Palin, Breitbart
“Budget showdown, government shutdown, debt ceiling debacle—the stakes are real but the establishment seems to feed off the chaos they create as a means to foment fear and outrage and translate it into campaign donations for themselves.
Look closely and you’ll see that something seismic is going on under the surface of the manufactured chaos in D.C.
Washington has morphed into an extortion racket, a place where members of the permanent political class threaten to inflict legislative and regulatory pain to extract campaign donations that they can then siphon into the pockets of themselves and their family members.
In a new book featured this Sunday on 60 Minutes titled Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets, Peter Schweizer explains how Washington politicians use a set of mafia-style legislative tactics to extort people and industries into donating to them out of fear of political and legal reprisals.
Schweizer interviewed former Chairman of Apache Corporation Ray Plank. Plank said campaign cash and lobbying contracts
now function as “protection money” to keep lawmakers and regulators from going after you.
.
“It’s what you expect from the mafia,” said Plank. “They basically come to you and say, ‘We are going to shove this bat up your ass and give you an enema. You better play ball.’ We saw a great deal of it. It’s an insidious blight.”
There are left-wing progressives on Wall Street and in the high-tech world who bankrolled President Obama’s campaign because they love his radical agenda. But as Schweizer points out, many gave because they know they have to; if they don’t, Obama will come after them.
That’s a lesson the Tea Party knows all too well. After the Tea Party’s historic 2010 midterm victory, Obama unleashed Attorney General Eric Holder to go after the oil and gas sector, which had given four times as much to Republicans as to Democrats. As Obama said in October 2010, “We are going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”
Of course, not everyone gets subjected to these Godfather-style shakedowns. Case in point:
Obama bundler and former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine of MF Global shame. After “losing” $1.6 billion of MF Global customer money, Corzine walked away without a scratch. In Extortion, Schweizer publishes a devastating quote from Lisa Timmerman, a 17-year MF Global employee who served as the firm’s assistant comptroller for five years, saying:
- “Corzine is a major Obama fundraiser [which] is keeping prosecutors from bringing criminal charges against him.”
And what about the GOP establishment? Why haven’t they been able to clean up the extortion racket in Washington? You have to ask yourself, has the party machine fought this corruption or does it participate in it? As a senior House Republican told Fox News on Thursday, it’s “highly unlikely” Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) will be challenged because few have the muscle to match his ability to “raise money.”
In fact, the ability to raise money is apparently key to all the power in Washington. Here’s how bad it’s gotten: the Democratic and Republican Parties actually have a secret price list—officially known as “party dues”—that tells members of Congress how much money they must extract from donors
in order to win a chairmanship or a top slot on a powerful Congressional committee.
Schweizer somehow obtained the top-secret lists and included the never-before-published documents in Extortion.
But fundraising isn’t the only thing D.C. employs to keep people in line. Over in the Senate, Democrats like Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) use thug tactics on Tea Party members and activists who stand in their way. In a devastating chapter on Harry Reid, Schweizer includes a quote from Reid’s former chief of staff Susan McCue, who in 2005 said Reid seizes on a person’s weaknesses to “disarm, to endear, to threaten, but most of all to instill fear.”
The fact that these strong-arm tactics take place in Washington doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve fought this type of corruption my entire political career. And those who disagreed with me politically used thug-like tactics to try to bankrupt my family with frivolous lawsuits in Alaska, and it hasn’t stopped to this day.
It’s time for Washington to stop threatening citizens and scaring up dollars through an endless extortion scheme of manufactured crises. It’s time for leaders to lead. That means doing right by voters without requiring them to pay protection money in advance.
You have to wonder whether Constitutional rule of law even exists when separate rules apply for powerful and well-connected men like Jon Corzine. And you have to wonder whether we really have government of the people, by the people, and for the people when the only way We the People can be heard is if we grease the palms of the ruling class.
Enough is enough. If the permanent political class won’t drain the swamp, we will. We should follow the advice in the title of Schweizer’s last book and “Throw Them All Out.” 2014 is just around the corner.” via Free Republic
============================
7/17/13, "House Conservatives Beware the New Whipping Strategy," Daniel Horowitz, RedState.com
"Over the past few years, the number of conservatives in the House has grown exponentially. Well, at least to the extent that you can’t count them on your fingers. Unfortunately, House conservatives are about to become a victim of their own successes if they fail to change course.
In a sane world, Republicans would have more leverage than the Democrats over the legislative process. They have full control over the House and a filibuster-strength minority in the Senate. Consequently, they have the ability to block bad legislation from passing the Senate, while jamming the Democrats with good bills from the House.
But such a process is predicated on a Republican leadership that actually stands for Republican values. The reality is the opposite. We have Mitch McConnell outsourcing his leadership to McCain and Graham so that a number of bad bills pass the Senate (McConnell makes sure to vote against the bills, of course). Then, instead of ignoring unpopular bills that pass the Senate, House leaders work indefatigably to see how they can pass Senate bills.
Here is how the cycle of capitulation plays out. House conservatives balk at leadership’s initial attempt to pass bad legislation. Leadership is defeated. Conservatives prematurely view this as a sign of strength. Then, McCarthy and the whipping team come to conservatives and “whip” up general principles from conservatives. They ask them what it would take to get them to a “yes vote.”
Conservatives mistakenly perceive this as a conciliatory gesture form leadership, when in reality, it is an attempt to get them to sign on to bad bills. Conservatives offer some general principles. Leadership commits to those general principles. Then they offer a new bill that employs a subterfuge in which those principles are addressed on paper in general terms, yet they are completely voided out by the specifics of the bill or the strategy behind the process. But because those principles are addressed in a superficial way, conservatives feel as if they had already given their word to vote for the bill. Repeat and rinse as needed.
During the 2011 debt ceiling fight, conservatives rallied behind Cut, Cap, and Balance as a precondition for raising the debt ceiling. Leadership had no intention of abiding by that condition. "...
============================
Comment: The original idea behind the Tea Party was to expose massive corruption in government.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment