View previous stories
	Biggest corruption scandal in Washington for decades by The Washington Post / The Independent .. USA   04 January 2006   "The $4 Billion Industry that is America"s Guilty Secret", by Rupert Cornwell. (The Independent)   Lobbying is Washington"s grubby secret. Some say lobbying is part of the democratic process. Others claim it is legalised bribery, even corruption. But love it or loathe it, it is the way Washington works.   Usually you hear little about the quiet meetings, the lavish lunches and junkets that lubricate American politics. But every once in a while something comes along to open the system to what it hates most: daylight. The case of Jack Abramoff, influence-peddler extraordinaire, is one of those somethings.   Once Mr Abramoff claimed to have done nothing illegal, that his only sin was to have been too good at his job. But now his career is in ruins, a jail term of nine years or more beckons - an incarceration that would be even longer but for the plea bargain he reached yesterday with federal prosecutors.   For Mr Abramoff only contrition is left: "Words will not ever be able to express my sorrow and my profound regret for my actions and mistakes," he said in court yesterday. As for the two dozen members of Congress and their aides reputedly under investigation, they can only tremble.   If Mr Abramoff spills the beans, they may soon be contemplating a similar fate. This is potentially the biggest Congressional scandal of the modern era. It is largely (though not exclusively) Republican, and may mark the beginning of the end of the party"s 11-year dominance of Capitol Hill.   Lobbying per se is nothing new. The right to "petition the government for a redress of grievances" is enshrined in the first amendment of the Constitution. Back in 1913, Woodrow Wilson said Washington was "swarming with lobbyists ... you can"t throw a brick in any direction without hitting one".   But the 28th president cannot have imagined how access-peddling would blossom into a $4 billion industry. There are 14,000 registered lobbyists, and as many again who are not registered. Between 1998 and 2004, foreign companies spent ($620 million) bending ears in Washington.   Lobbying thrives in the US for two reasons. In the US the executive and legislative branches are separate. The former is headed by the President, the latter consists of Congress, which writes laws and appropriates money for government spending. Although George Bush"s Republicans have majorities in both House and Senate, he has no direct control of the bills they consider. That power rests with dozens of powerful committee chairmen and ranking members, all with their fiefdoms, whose yea or nay is decisive.   The other key ingredient is money, the colossal sums needed to fight election campaigns. In Britain, the curbs on such spending are strict. In America, by contrast, the sky"s the limit. Total spending for the 2004 elections, presidential and congressional, reached $4 billion.   The summit of extravagance was the 2004 Senate race in South Dakota, one of the least populous and less affluent US states. The two candidates spent a combined $40m. In an average state, the cost of defending a Senate seat is $20m. This means an incumbent has to raise $9,000 every day of his six-year term. At which point, enter the lobbyists.   The trade-off is simple. Corporate and other donors provide cash in a bid to secure the legislation they want. The intermediaries between the two sides are lobbyists. And the more people a lobbyist knows on Capitol Hill, the more effective he or she is.   Unsurprisingly, ever increasing numbers of them are former legislators. The Washington-based pressure group Centre for Public Integrity, says almost 250 former Congressmen and senior government officials are now active lobbyists.   Jack Abramoff and his ilk are key figures in Washington"s power networks. And no network was mightier than the one embracing Mr Abramoff, the former House majority leader Tom DeLay and Grover Norquist, president of the arch-conservative Americans for Tax Reform, one of the most powerful special interests groups in Washington.   January 4, 2006 (Washington Post)   At least 20 members of the US Congress may face criminal charges after powerful Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges and agreed to co-operate with a corruption investigation.   In what could be the biggest corruption scandal in Washington for decades, Abramoff has agreed to name politicians he allegedly bribed, in exchange for leniency.   The bribes are said to have included campaign contributions, free meals at his upmarket restaurants and lavish overseas trips, including golf tours to St Andrews in Scotland, in exchange for favours for his clients.   Among those under threat from his plea bargain is former Republican leader of the House of Representatives Tom DeLay, who is already facing money-laundering charges. DeLay once described Abramoff as "one of my closest friends". Three other senior Republicans, representatives Bob Ney and John Doolittle and senator Conrad Burns, are already facing serious misconduct allegations and there will be many more to come.   Abramoff, 47, who was the most powerful and influential lobbyist in Washington until he was indicted on more than a dozen charges of fraud and other offences six months ago, had organised political contributions to 220 members of Congress totalling almost $US2 million ($A2.7 million) between 2001 and 2004. Some 201 of those members are still in Congress and most are Republicans.   Since Abramoff was indicted, many of these members of Congress have been trying desperately to find ways of returning the donations to him.   During his brief court appearance in Washington on Tuesday, Abramoff, told Judge Ellen Huvelle that he had engaged in a conspiracy that involved the corruption of public officials including members of Congress and congressional staff.   "Words will not ever be able to express my sorrow and my profound regret for all my actions and mistakes," he said. Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion and agreed to pay back $US25 million, which represents only a fraction of the money that he defrauded from Indian tribes seeking casino licences.   Under the plea agreement, prosecutors will recommend a sentence of about 10 years for him, depending on how much "singing" he does. He was facing 30 years" jail and is still to appear in court in Miami on separate fraud charges.   Abramoff dealt with both political parties, but he is a longtime Republican Party activist and his closest ties — and biggest campaign donations — involved Republican members of Congress.   He hired the spouses of members of Congress and congressional staff as "consultants" and in return received unmatched access on Capitol Hill for his clients. He was known to organise the best junkets in Washington, and only the best food and wine were served free to grateful members of Congress and their staff at his restaurants.   The Abramoff scandal, which could run for months, is a major blow to the White House, coming just weeks before Mr Bush"s State of the Union speech on January 31 and with the Administration desperate to build some momentum after a year of ongoing political setbacks.   With mid-term congressional elections set for November, the affair threatens to end the careers of a significant number of politicians — either as a result of court decisions or voters tossing them out of office.   Jack Abramoff represented the most flamboyant and extreme example of a brand of influence trading that flourished after the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives 11 years ago. Now, some Republican strategists fear the fallout from his case could affect the party"s efforts to keep control in the November mid-term elections.   Abramoff was among the lobbyists most closely associated with the K. Street Project, initiated by his friend, former House majority leader Tom DeLay, of Texas. It was an aggressive program designed to force corporations and trade associations to hire more Republican-connected lobbyists in what at times became an almost seamless relationship between Capitol Hill politicians and firms that sought to influence them.   Abramoff has now become a symbol of a system out of control. His agreement to plead guilty to three criminal counts and co-operate with prosecutors threatens to ensnare congressmen and their aides.   At a minimum, the developments put both sides of the politician-lobbyist relationship on notice that some of the wilder customs of recent years — lubricated with money, entertainment and access — carry higher risks. In the post-Abramoff era, what once was accepted as business as usual may be seen as questionable or worse.   "In the short run, members of Congress will get allergic to lobbyists," said former representative Vin Weber, now a lobbyist. "They"ll be nervous about taking calls and holding meetings, to say nothing of lavish trips to Scotland. For a period of time now, members of Congress will be concerned about even legitimate contact with the lobbying world."   The initial impact of a scandal could be changes in the way politicians and lobbyists interact. In the longer term, Congress will be pressured to revisit and toughen rules on gifts and travel that politicians and their staff may accept. Some former congressmen said even bigger changes may be needed to restore public confidence in the political system.   Jan 4, 2005   The Republican "moral revolution" revealed as cesspit of corruption, by Robert Scheer . (Yahoo)   Top Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff is set to testify, and his long list of former buddies in Congress and the Bush Administration are quaking in anticipation of possible indictments stemming from the consummate Beltway hustler"s crass reign as the king of K Street.   "Casino Jack," a former head of the College Republicans and a "Pioneer" grade fundraiser for the Bush 2000 campaign, pleaded guilty to three felony counts of conspiracy, mail fraud and tax evasion in D.C. yesterday and is set to appear in Florida today to plead guilty to fraud and conspiracy on separate charges. Abramoff and other defendants also must repay over $25 million to defrauded clients and $1.7 million to the IRS.   But most important for the nation is that Abramoff is now detailing the massive web of corruption he spun inside the Beltway which has already snared a top Bush official, procurement chief David H. Safavian, on charges of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation, and reportedly threatens dozens of other D.C. players.   "When this is all over, this will be bigger than any [government scandal] in the last 50 years, both in the amount of people involved and the breadth to it," Stan Brand, a former U.S. House counsel who specializes in representing public officials accused of wrongdoing, told Bloomberg News. "It will include high-ranking members of Congress and executive branch officials."   Some of the Wild West feel of this Beltway corruption was captured in Saturday"s Washington Post expose, "The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail." It documents in chilling detail how, among other scams, Abramoff funneled a portion of the millions he had been skimming from Indian casino operators with a cool million from two Russian energy moguls through a shell organization called the U.S. Family Network—and from there into the coffers of politicians in a position to help his clients.   Ironically touting its commitment to "moral fitness" for the nation, the front group with the multi-million dollar budget had a single staff member housed in the backroom of a capital townhouse it owned and rented out to other organizations linked to Abramoff and Tom DeLay--the latter"s staffers called it, ominously, DeLay"s "safe house." This is apparently why DeLay felt the need to tout the U.S. Family Network in a 1999 fundraising letter as "a powerful nationwide organization dedicated to restoring our government to citizen control."   It was run by Edwin A. Buckham, DeLay"s former chief of staff, whose lobbying firm, the Alexander Strategy Group, carried Delay"s wife Christine on its payroll. But the moral "fitness" of such cronyism pales in comparison to the scandal of how Abramoff drummed up support for his varied clients under the cover of conservative morality.   For example, in order to block the ambitions of a rival tribe to the Choctaw Indians who had paid Abramoff millions, the U.S. Family Network sent a mailing to Alabama residents warning shrilly that, "The American family is under attack from all sides: crime, drugs, pornography, and one of the least talked about but equally as destructive – gambling. We need your help today to prevent the Poarch Creek Indians from building casinos in Alabama." The letter conveniently failed to mention, however, that the U.S. Family Network had received at least $250,000 from the gambling proceeds of the Choctaws.   In another scam detailed in the Post story (which could be quickly optioned by Hollywood for a thriller), players in the mafia-dominated Russian energy industry slid a cool $1 million payment through a now-defunct London law firm into the U.S. Family Network"s account – which was, de facto, a slush fund for the Abramoff-DeLay network.   Citing the Rev. Christopher Geeslin, who served as a titular leader of the U.S. Family Network, the Post reported that Buckham told the reverend the payment was intended to secure Delay"s support on legislation forcing the International Monetary Fund to bail out the faltering Russian economy without demanding the country raise taxes on its energy and other profitable industries. Right on cue, DeLay found his way onto Fox News Sunday to take up the Russian"s viewpoint: "They are trying to force Russia to raise taxes at a time when they ought to be cutting taxes in order to get a loan from the IMF," he said. "That"s just outrageous." The IMF backed down.   This is just an initial peek into the sordid world being revealed by Abramoff and two of his key cronies now spilling the beans to federal investigators. But in the bigger picture, what we are witnessing is the death throes of the Republican "revolution" which once promised to restore morality to Washington but instead sank far deeper into corruption.   Click on the link below to read " Let''s Save Our Democracy by Getting Money Out of Politics", by Bill Moyers published by the Washington Spectator on April 6, 2006. Visit the related web page
	Blood and money by John Pilger New Statesman United Kingdom   The real cost of Trident may be £76bn. Now it is more urgent than ever to raise our voices against Tony Blair''s mutant liberalism   On 17 October, President Bush signed a bill that legalised torture and kidnapping and in effect repealed the Bill of Rights and habeas corpus. The CIA can now legally abduct people and "render" them to secret prisons in countries where they are likely to be tortured. Evidence extracted under torture is now permissible in "military commissions"; people can be sentenced to death based on testimony beaten out of witnesses. You are now guilty until confirmed guilty. And you are a "terrorist" if you commit what George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, called "thoughtcrimes". Bush has revived the prerogatives of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs: the power of unrestricted lawlessness. "America can be proud," said Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the bill''s promoters, who stood with other congressmen, clapping as Bush signed away the American constitution and the essence of American democracy.   The historic significance of this was barely acknowledged in Britain, the source of these abandoned ancient rights, no doubt because the same barbarians'' law is taking hold here. The great crime of Iraq is a moral tsunami that has left new Labour''s vassals floundering and shouting their hopeless inversions of the truth as they await rescue by Washington. "At a deeper ideological level," wrote the American historian Alfred McCoy, "[what is happening] is a contest of power versus justice . . . Viewed historically, it is a fight over fundamental principles reaching back nearly 400 years." Not long ago, I interviewed Dianna Ortiz, an American nun tortured in 1989 by a Guatemalan death squad whose leader she identified as a fellow American. This was the time of Ronald Reagan, who was as murderous in central America as Bush is in the Middle East. "You can''t claim to be a democracy if you practise or condone torture," she said. "It is the ultimate test."   The United States promised a democracy when the Civil Rights Act became law in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year finally ended slavery. For the next decade, the civil-rights movement joined the great popular movement to end the slaughter in Vietnam, and Congress legislated to restrain the CIA''s secretive parallel power. It was a fleeting intermission. Under Reagan, the mythology of American democracy and "pride" was restored, perversely, when his corrupt executive ignited a lawless war in impoverished central America, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, which the United Nations called genocide. The United States became the only country ever to have been condemned by the International Court of Justice for terrorism (against Nicaragua). "Let''s drop the bullshit," a former senior CIA officer told me recently. "What matters is our national security interests, OK?"   "National security" is a euphemism for the forbidden word, imperialism, whose despotic power has accelerated under George W Bush. Secret presidential "signing decrees" that can overturn the rare opposition of an otherwise supine Congress are now normal practice, along with a Gulag of secret prisons, described approvingly by Bush as "the CIA programme". The United States today is an extension of the totalitarianism it has long sought to impose abroad. That unpalatable truth is unspoken, of course; in spite of his current "difficulties" over Iraq, corporate propaganda remains on Bush''s side. The search for an "exit strategy" may make "embarrassing" headlines, but the deliberate, systematic looting of billions of dollars of Iraq''s resources has been quietly achieved, with an estimated $20bn "missing". The same silence applies to the class and race war at home, as the Bush gang kicks away the ladder that once led to the American middle class. Last January, 25,000 people applied for 325 jobs at a Wal-Mart in Chicago.   Constitutional rights are formidable American myths. The American press is often put forward as constitutionally having the freest speech on earth; and it does, theoretically. Yet during every period of internal repression, the press and broadcast journalism have played a compliant, "Pravda" role, backing imperial wars, indulging the lies of the "red baiter" Joe McCarthy, promoting phoney debates about phoney threats (Cuba, Nicaragua, the nuclear arms race) and the supercult of "anti-communism". Bush''s lies about Iraq and Afghanistan were merely amplified and promoted. Seymour Hersh and a handful of others stand out as honourable exceptions.   In 1991, at the end of the one-sided slaughter known as the Gulf war, the celebrated American TV anchorman Dan Rather told his national audience, "There''s one thing we can all agree on. It''s the heroism of the 148 Americans who gave their lives so that freedom could live." In fact, a quarter of them had been killed by other Americans. Most of the British casualties were caused by the same "friendly fire". Moreover, official citations describing how Americans had died heroically in hand-to-hand combat were fake. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died during and in the aftermath of that "war" remain unmentionable - like hundreds of thousands who died as a result of the decade-long embargo; like the 655,000 Iraqi "excess deaths" since the invasion of 2003.   The war on democracy has been successfully exported. In Britain, and in other western countries, such as Australia, journalism and scholarship have been systematically appropriated as the new order''s management class, and democratic ideas have been emptied and refilled beyond all recognition. Unlike the 1930s, there is a silence of writers, with Harold Pinter almost the lone voice raised in Britain. The promoters of an extreme form of capitalism known as neo liberalism, the supercult responsible for the greatest inequalities in history, are described as "reformers" and "revolutionaries". The noble words "freedom" and "liberty" now refer to the divine right of this extremism to "prevail", the jargon for dominate and control. This vocabulary, which contaminates the news and the pronouncements of the state and its bureaucracy, is from the same lexicon as Arbeit macht frei - "Work makes you free" - the words over the gates at Auschwitz.   Fake democracy   For the British under Blair, the influence of this fake democracy has been catastrophic. Even if the convergence of the Labour Party and the Tories was historically inevitable, it was Tony Blair, the most extreme British political figure in living memory, who returned Britain to a full-time violent, imperial role, converting a fictional notion, "the clash of civilisations", into a possibility. Blair has destroyed the power of parliament and politicised those sections of the civil service and the security and intelligence services that saw themselves as impartial. He is Britain''s president, lacking only the accompanying strains of "Hail to the Chief". Last installed by little more than a fifth of the eligible population, he is the most undemocratically elected leader in British history. Poll after poll tells us he is also the most reviled.   Under President Blair, parliament has become like Congress under Bush: an ineffectual, craven talking shop that has debated Iraq only twice in two and a half years. With one important exception, regressive measure after measure has been waved through: from the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, with their mandatory sentences and house arrests ("control orders"). A "bill to abolish parliament", as the innocuous-sounding Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill 2006 might be known, removed parliamentary scrutiny of government legislation, giving ministers arbitrary powers and Downing Street the absolute power of decree. There was no public debate. How ironic that the bill stalled in the House of Lords, which, together with the judiciary, is now the loyal opposition.   In 2003, Blair worked the secretive royal prerogative - Orders in Council - to order an unprovoked, illegal attack on a defenceless country, Iraq. The following year, he used the same archaic powers to prevent the Chagos Islanders from returning to their homeland in the Indian Ocean, from which they were secretly expelled so that the Americans could build a huge military base there. Last May, the high court described the treatment of these British citizens as "repugnant, illegal and irrational".   On 16 October 2005, Bush claimed that al-Qaeda was seeking to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia". This deeply cynical, calculated exaggeration - reminiscent of Washington''s warning of "mushroom clouds" following 11 September 2001 - was repeated by Blair fresh from the embrace of Rupert Murdoch, the likely source of his future enrichment. This is the message of liberal warmongers who have sought to be Tonier-than-thou and who salvage their spent reputations by using big, specious words such as "Islamo fascism". They suppress the truth that al-Qaeda is minuscule compared with the state terrorism that kills and maims industrially, and whose cost distorts all our lives. British state terrorism in Iraq has cost more than £7bn. The real cost of Trident is said to be £76bn. The premises of the best of British life that survived Margaret Thatcher have no place in this accounting. The National Health Service and what was once the best postal service in the world are denied subsidies uncorrupted by a rigged "free market". Whether it is the accretions of the freeloading Blairs or the sale of 72 Eurofighters to the medieval regime in Saudi Arabia, complete with "commissions", or the government''s refusal to ban highly profitable cluster bombs, whose victims are mostly children - blood and money are the essence of Blairism and its mutant liberalism.   In their 1996 new Labour manual, The Blair Revolution: can new Labour deliver?, Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle highlighted Britain''s "strengths" under a Blair regime. These were multinational corporations and "aerospace" (the arms industry) and the "pre-eminence of the City of London". Blood and money. Of course, as in any colonial era, blood spilled is invisible; one''s faraway victims are Untermenschen - that is to say, they are less than human and have no presence in our lives. On 11 June, the BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce announced that prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were committing suicide. She asked, "How damaging is it to the Bush administration?" At the recent Labour party conference, a cringe-making presidential occasion, Blair, wrote Jon Snow, demonstrated "oratorical mastery and matey finesse". Indeed, he was "a leader for his time, in a time when Britain needed exactly such leadership".   Public morality   Those who have peeled back the façades of the Blair and Bush gangs ought not to be des pondent. The inspiring demonstration on 15 February 2003 may not have stopped an invasion, but the same universal power of public morality has, I believe, stalled attacks on Iran and North Korea, probably with "tactical" nuclear weapons. This moral force is undoubtedly stirring again all over the world, including the United States, and is feared by those who would contrive an "endless war". However, if I have learned nothing else from witnessing numerous bloody contrivances, it is never to underestimate the stamina of rampant, rapacious empire and the dishonesty of its "humanitarian interventions". Millions of us, who are the majority, need to raise our voices again, more urgently now than ever.
	View more stories