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October 31, 2003
Buying business
The Center for Public Integrity has release a report indicating that many Iraq-related contacts have gone to companies which donated money to the Bush campaign.
Companies awarded $8 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have been major campaign donors to President Bush, and their executives have had important political and military connections, according to a study released Thursday.None of this is really surprising. I'm sure that, regardless of which party was in power, there would be a fair amount of cronyism in the process. Even by comparison, though, this case looks especially egrigious.The study of more than 70 U.S. companies and individual contractors turned up more than $500,000 in donations to the president's 2000 campaign, more than they gave collectively to any other politician over the past dozen years.
[...]The Center concluded that most of the 10 largest contracts went to companies that employed former high-ranking government officials, or executives with close ties to members of Congress and even the agencies awarding their contracts.
Major contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan were awarded by the Bush administration without competitive bids, because agencies said competition would have taken too much time to meet urgent needs in both countries.
[Update - added 6:26am 10/31 - A full copy of the CPI report can be found here.]
As with so many other things done by this administration, it just point out the utter hypocricy of the conservatives. When Democrats engage in cronyism, it's a major scandal that must be fully investigated and the politicans who have helped their buddy profit from their connections must be shamed into resignation or otherwise removed from office. I don't really have a problem with that. If politicians are selling influence, access, business or whatever, it's wrong and it should be looked into. Yet when it happens in a Republican administration - even when it's as blatant as this - the cries for integrity fall silent.
This isn't the first time that the current regime has been given a pass on charges of buying influence. Earlier this year, documents were discovered at Westar Industries main office (during the discovery for a fraud case against the company's chief officials) indicating that Westar was seeking a "seat at the table" with Congressional representatives and were wanting to have some legislation modified to include an exemption for their company.
The Westar documents said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay; Senate Banking Committee chairman Richard Shelby; and Reps. Joe Barton, of Texas, and Billy Tauzin, of Louisiana, had requested the contributions from Westar. A DeLay fund-raising organization collected $25,000 of Westar's contributions.In the end, the legislation ended up not being passed.[...] An e-mail by a Westar executive, which surfaced in an internal company probe, says that Tauzin and Barton had requested donations for a particular congressman "in lieu of contributions made to their own campaigns." The e-mail added that Shelby had made "a substantial request of us for supporting" the campaign of Shelby's former chief of staff and that DeLay's agreement "is necessary before the House conferees can push the language we have in place."
Democratic Rep. Ed Markey and House Democratic conferees tried to kill the Westar exemption, but they lost on a straight party-line vote with DeLay, Barton and Tauzin favoring the provision.The story never got much play and eventually faded away, yet had the parties involved been reversed, I have no doubt the story would have had legs.[...] The Westar exemption was dropped by Senate and House conferees after the company came under a grand jury investigation that has led to the indictment of its former CEO, David Wittig, on charges unrelated to any campaign donations.
We probably won't ever get rid of corruption in politics, but I'd like to see both sides start opposing it amongst their own.
Posted by thorswitch at October 31, 2003 01:02 AM
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