Anomaly Explorer: Look for it from OpenSecrets

May 8th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Economy | Ethics | Liberal Links | Politics - (0 Comments)

Notes from the 2013 Transparency Camp convention sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation indicate that some time during the next two weeks, OpenSecrets will be introducing an “Anomaly Detector.” That’s a neutral term, but the title of the presentation in which this tool was introduced shows its potential power: “Uncovering Corruption“. The tool will look for outliers in receipt of campaign contributions, as well as sponsors of unusual legislation. From camp notes:

Anomaly Explorer (https://www.opensecrets.org/resources/learn/anomalies.php) can allow visibility into instances where:

  • Lawmakers sponsoring legislation that was lobbied by only one company or other organization, and whose employees or PAC also donated to the sponsoring lawmakers.
  • Lawmakers receiving twice as much in contributions from their top donors as their next highest donors.
  • Lawmakers receiving twice as much in contributions from their top donor industries as their next highest donor industries.
  • Lawmakers receiving more than 50 percent of their itemized contributions from out of state.

The tool isn’t available to the public yet, but it should be quite useful when it appears. There are indications that OpenSecrets staffers have used the tool once already, to identify members of Congress who rely on out-of-state money to win elections.

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Is It Fair To Call Mike Enzi’s Lobbyist-Filled Caribbean Vacation Corrupt?

May 2nd, 2013 | Posted by Rowan in Ethics | Politics | Questions | Republicans - (2 Comments)

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines corruption as: 1) impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle, 2) inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (as bribery), 3) decay or decomposition, or 4) a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct. As Merriam-Webster’s coverage of this word shows, there are a number of subtle layers to our understanding of what makes somebody, or some thing, corrupt.

wyoming republicanHow, then, should we interpret Senator Mike Enzi’s activities this week? During a time when Senator Enzi is supposed to be communicating with voters back in Wyoming, the state that he represents, he is instead attending a four-day meeting with lobbyists at a luxury resort in Key West, Florida, where he will accept money on behalf of his avowedly pro-corporate political action committee, and in exchange provide the lobbyists who pay with special access to him.

On the one hand, we can see that Senator Enzi has established a network of corporate agents who are willing to provide him with money in exchange for the opportunity to influence Enzi’s legislative work as a federal government official.

On the other hand, we can see that what Senator Enzi is doing appears not to violate any laws.

What’s a fair way, then, to describe Senator Mike Enzi and his Caribbean vacation? Should we refer to them as an example of political corruption, or is that too strong? Should we just call the money-for-influence exchange “ethically questionable”? Should we merely note the facts and not offer any judgment? Should we ignore the whole thing as just one example of business-as-usual?

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Lies and Half Truths From Obama About Oil And Gas

April 24th, 2013 | Posted by The Green Man in Barack Obama | Environment | Ethics - (0 Comments)

During the election of 2012, Barack Obama made big promises about transparency. He told his followers that he would voluntarily disclose all the sources of funding for his 2013 inaugural party.

He lied.

energy corruptionBarack Obama made a voluntary disclosure of the money he took to pay for his inauguration – but that disclosure wasn’t complete. A new FEC report shows that Obama hid some of the payments he received – including one million dollars from Chevron, a huge dirty oil corporation.

Obama’s disclosure never told the public about that money.

That wasn’t the only dirty oil money Barack Obama accepted in secret. Exxon handed Obama $250,000 – and Obama didn’t tell his followers about that, either.

Both Chevron and Exxon are pushing for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, despite the fact that the pipeline would violate environmental regulations and require a special waiver from the ordinary rules to go ahead. The pipeline would take thick, half-processed oil from the tar sands of Alberta, and send it snaking across the American midwest all the way down to Texas. All along its enormous length, communities would be subject to the risk of spills like the recent one in Arkansas, in which an Exxon pipeline burst and fouled the entire town of Mayflower.

Not too long after Barack Obama received large amounts of money for his inauguration parties from Chevron and Exxon, Obama’s State Department released a draft assessment claiming that the Keystone XL pipeline would have no environmental impact… because if the Keystone pipeline was blocked, other pipelines would be built. This assertion was logically comparable to a claim that an atomic bomb dropped on Tehran wouldn’t really kill anybody, because if that bomb weren’t dropped, another nuclear weapon would eventually destroy Tehran anyway.

This week, the Environmental Protection Agency rebelled against the White House and State Department, issuing a report exposing the severely flawed economic analysis of the State Department assessment. The EPA noted that, if the Keystone XL pipeline is constructed, the resulting consumption of oil from the Alberta tar sands would release 18.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. The EPA report also reminds the Obama White House that “there is uncertainty about when, if ever, additional pipelines will be built”.

Accurate economic and environmental assessments seem to have less influence on the approval of special waivers for the Keystone XL pipeline, however, than large gifts of money to Barack Obama. Obama may not be running for re-election, and his big inauguration parties may be over, but he’s still taking lots of money from corporate powers. Recently, Barack Obama began accepting gifts of cash for his presidential library. If the Obama Administration approves special waivers for the Keystone XL pipeline, we can expect to see plump, oily payments for the Obama library from fossil fuels companies like Exxon and Chevron.

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Draft Hillary Clinton Movement Starts With Corrupt Money Machines

April 12th, 2013 | Posted by jclifford in Democrats | Election 2016 | Ethics - (0 Comments)

A week ago, without committing myself to one side or another, I asked readers whether they would support a campaign by Hillary Clinton for President in 2016.

This morning, I want to highlight one reason Democrats might want to hold back their enthusiasm from Hillary Clinton for a while: The Draft Hillary movement is getting itself started with corrupt machines of campaign finance.

Ready For Hillary is working to position itself as the dominant player in the movement – as a web site, but also as a Super PAC fundraising organization, capable of taking unlimited amounts of money from undocumented sources. The Ready For Hillary shadow money machine boasts two extremely close allies of the Clintons, Harold Ickes and James Carville, so it’s difficult for Hillary Clinton to say that she has no influence over the group’s unethical campaign finance ambitions. Still, she has not even attempted to distance herself from Ready for Hillary – a sign that if she were to campaign for President, she would eagerly participate in the dirty world of campaign-affiliated independent expenditures.

more of the sameReady for Hillary founder Allida Black says that she intends to disclose all the sources of the Super PAC’s funds, but such promises of transparency typically aren’t matched by what political organizations actually do – as voters duped by Americans Elect and Unity08 can painfully remember. Even if Ready for Hillary does disclose the sources of its money, it has not sought to distance itself from the other significantly corrupting aspect of Super PAC operations – the ability to collect unlimited amounts of money from wealthy individuals and organizations.

Two other pro-Clinton Super PACs have also formed: HillaryFTW and HillaryClintonSuperPAC. It’s possible that all this fundraising to promote the idea of a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016 won’t go anywhere. Perhaps it’s just a way for Democratic Party insiders to try to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons, who have much influence in Washington D.C., though for the first time since 1992, neither one of them holds a high position in the federal government. Such a possibility doesn’t reflect well upon Hillary Clinton, though, suggesting that she has built, with her husband, a culture of Democratic Party sycophantism in which flattery and money are valued over competence and good ideas.

So far, the movement to promote Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate seems to be led by political elites, not by the any grassroots enthusiasm. The comfort of these elites with the dirtiest methods of campaigning suggests that those who would influence Hillary Clinton, as a candidate and as President, would rather maintain the flawed status quo in Washington D.C., than attempt to change it.

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Max Baucus Took Big Money From Oil And Energy Before Voting Against Climate Action

March 27th, 2013 | Posted by The Green Man in Democrats | Environment | Ethics | Legislation - (0 Comments)

Last week, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse introduced a legislative amendment to confront the growing problem of climate change by shifting the price already being paid for carbon dioxide pollution. Right now, individual citizens, governmental agencies and small businesses are dealing with increasing financial burdens that come from the extreme weather events made more common and more intense by climate change. The Whitehouse amendment would have placed that financial burden where it begins: With the polluting corporations that are releasing the carbon dioxide pollution that causes climate change in the first place.

Alas, the Whitehouse amendment did not pass a vote in the Senate. Every Republican voted against it, but the problem isn’t just with the Republicans. 13 Democratic U.S. Senators joined the GOP to vote against this climate action legislation.

max baucus oil moneyAmong them was Max Baucus, U.S. Senator from Montana, a state where, because of global warming, all the glaciers in Glacier National Park are melting away. Senator Baucus ought to know how serious climate change has become, so why did Senator Baucus vote against Senator Whitehouse’s legislation to create a restraint on carbon dioxide pollution?

For an answer, look to the where Max Baucus gets the money to maintain his political machine. Senator Baucus has taken over $375,000.00 from the oil and gas industry, which currently gets away with not paying the price for the damage it creates through massive carbon dioxide pollution. Senator Baucus has also taken almost $600,000.00 from energy utility corporations, which make bigger profits by avoiding their financial responsibility for climate change.

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A Vatican Of Bad Fish

February 22nd, 2013 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Ethics | Religion - (3 Comments)

Ten days ago, I wondered what could be the real explanation for Joseph Ratzinger deciding to become the first Catholic Pope in over 600 years to resign rather than die in office. Given that his predecessor had made a conspicuous point of staying in office, publicly visible, throughout a gruesome decline into death, Ratzinger’s claim that he was abandoning the position of papal infallibility simply because he was feeling tired didn’t ring true at all.

Now, the real story behind the end of the reign of the man who went by the pen name of Pope Benedict XVI. Vatican insiders are now dividing into camps, fighting for control of the Catholic Church, control over who gets to be the next pope. It is in this light that revelations about the actual circumstances of Ratzinger’s decision to resign are starting to leak out of the Vatican.

A report that came out yesterday revealed that Ratzinger’s official story about resigning due to the gradual effects of aging were a smokescreen. Italian newspapers are now reporting that Ratzinger chose to quit the papacy hours, if not minutes, after he was confronted by a group of elderly cardinals who had documented, in a 300-page leather-bound report, a network of extreme financial corruption within Ratzinger’s administration of the Vatican. The report also detailed how, at the same time that the Roman Catholic Church was bankrolling political campaigns in the United States to try to prevent the legalization of same-sex marriage, significant numbers of the top priests in Rome had organized a system for providing each other with partners for brief homosexual affairs.

The report named names, providing, as La Repubblica put it, “an exact map of the mischief and the bad fish”.

cardinal corruption

Who might the biggest of the bad fish be? It’s significant that some sources within the Vatican suggest that the fighting currently taking place between factions of cardinals is centered over how to elect “a pope immune to blackmail”, implying that the current pope, and some of the people considered likely successors, are not immune to blackmail.

Every human being, Catholic and non-Catholic, has weaknesses. Not every human being, however, belongs to an organization that claims to have an exclusive link to the creator of the universe and a moral code that is indisputable. Making such outrageous claims of moral superiority makes the Catholic Church the legitimate target of extra attention when the truth about its moral failings is exposed.

The theology and liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t seem to have been effective in purging the weakness of financial greed from its top leaders. Revelations of that systematic weakness make it difficult for members of the Catholic laity to tithe quite so generously in the future.

What’s worse for the rest of us is that we all, Catholic and non-Catholic, have been forced to endure the ungracious restriction of sexual self-determination maintained in American law at the insistence of a free-spending Catholic church led by people who seem to have believed that the suppression of homosexuality should only apply to others than themselves. It’s the top priests in Rome who seem to have been the worst “cafeteria Catholics”, doing whatever the hell they wanted while sternly lecturing the rest of the world.

If anything positive is likely to come of the meltdown of credibility in the Vatican, it is that Americans will finally allow their own values of equality, liberty, acceptance of diversity, and government free of religious interference to lead the United States toward a legal system less influenced by medieval prejudice.

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A New Attempt To Convert Churches Into Money Laundering Operations

January 6th, 2013 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Legislation | Religion | Republicans - (1 Comments)

A year and a month ago, Republican Congressman Walter Jones joined forces with Democrat Emanuel Cleaver to introduce a bill that would have allowed churches to take huge, tax-deductible donations and use the money to create campaigns to support politicians trying to gain election to public office. The churches would have been converted into gigantic money laundering operations, taking money from who knows where and using it to buy legislative influence for themselves and their clients, doing it all with support of a special haven from federal taxes.

church corruptionUnder current law, churches and other non-profit organizations are free to engage in partisan politicking to help candidates gain political office… just so long as they don’t simultaneously claim exemption from paying federal income taxes. If they want the financial support of the American people in the form of tax exemption, churches, and all other non-profit organizations have to refrain from supporting political candidates.

The legislation from Emanuel Cleaver and Walter Jones would have ended that requirement, and allowed the conversion of churches into giant money-making political campaign operations.

Of course, that was back in the 112th Congress. Jones and Cleaver failed to move their legislation forward, and a few days ago, the 112th Congress came to a close, erasing the bill from active consideration.

Undaunted, Walter Jones came back this week with a new version of the legislation, numbered H.R. 127. This time, however, Jones has a new sidekick to cosponsor the bill: Richard Hudson, a new Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina.

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National Association of Realtors Brags About Paying Off Tom Reed

October 27th, 2012 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Election 2012 | Ethics | Republicans - (1 Comments)

This morning, like most Americans, I got a new load of congressional campaign advertisements in the mail. Among them was an advertisement supporting Tom Reed, paid for by the National Association of Realtors.

national association of realtorsThe National Association of Realtors isn’t located in our congressional district, here in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. No, their headquarters is located about a thousand miles away from where we live. They’re over on the ritzy, high-priced section of Michigan Avenue in Chicago that has been nicknamed The Miracle Mile. Still, from its comfy high rise offices, the National Association of Realtors feels free to stick its nose into our business over here, and tell us how we should vote.

As if that wasn’t arrogant enough, the content of the advertisement uses imagery of explicit corruption. There’s a photograph of Tom Reed, paper clipped to a check register, and a fake check that’s made out to “Congressman Tom Reed”. The image creates the appearance that the National Association of Realtors has paid off Tom Reed, and is proud to let the voters know about it.

Has Tom Reed actually been bribed by the National Association of Realtors? Who can say, with all the secret money flowing through “independent expenditures” of the sort that paid for the advertisement I got in the mail today. Even the FEC isn’t able to investigate the slippery financial relationships supporting congressional campaigns.

The mailing from the National Association of Realtors, however appears to be bragging about the weight that its financial contributions have had in the offices of Congressman Tom Reed. That in itself is a shameful representation of the corrupt connections that have been created by the free flow of industry money – and it doesn’t make me at all more likely to vote for Tom Reed on Election Day.

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