Legal Corruption

Congressional Quarterly just finished its annual review of party-line voting by Congress. Last year follows the pattern of the past twenty, with members breaking with their party majority vote only 10-15 percent of the time, compared with almost 40 percent forty years ago. The permanent campaign has overtaken the need to compromise to make policy. Said political scientist Norm Ornstein to NPR, “I’ve been around Washington for 40 years … it’s nasty and brutish, as much or more as I’ve ever seen.”

Add together current federal debt plus the present value of unfunded future Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and other federal spending obligations. The tally? $62 trillion (that’s with a “T”), greater than America’s combined public and private assets. Since 2004, when the International Monetary Fund warned that our nation’s reckless fiscal policies threatened to destabilize the entire world economy, Congress has only made the problem worse. Our nation is all but bankrupt.

In its Fall, 2009 long term federal fiscal outlook, the Government Accountability Office found, that – if Congress continues its historic and present tax and spending preferences – to keep the nation’s debt problem from getting worse (i.e., holding current federal debt constant as a percentage of GDP) would require that either total government revenue increase by 47 percent or spending drop by 33 percent. This would mean doubling personal taxes or cutting entitlements in half — not politically pretty.   » More

The global financial meltdown is a sprawling and convoluted subject which, other than fireworks over Bernie Madoff and lavish Wall Street pay packages, has failed to crystallize public outrage over the capture and corruption of both political parties by finance industry money. Where luminaries lead by former Federal Reserve Board Chair Paul Volcker have warned that another financial cataclysm is already building, Congress has killed proposals for the systemic reforms needed. Inept regulators at Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board have allowed the “too big to fail” companies that recklessly vaporized trillions to become yet bigger, more dangerous, and more powerful.

Righteously frightened by the election of Republican Scott Brown in blue-state Massachusetts, President Obama has made a rhetorical show of his rediscovered populist moorings.

The acid test for the President: will heads roll, specifically Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s? Will the President be able to persuade Congress to look beyond the rivers of finance industry campaign cash?  » More

Thirty-nine states elect their judges. It is perfectly legal for litigants with specific matters before the courts or attorneys appearing recurrently before the courts to make campaign contributions to judges who will hear their cases, an obvious recipe for legal corruption.

Of the top-20 Pennsylvania recipients of casino industry campaign contributions over the period 2001-2008, two are state supreme court judges. The 11^th top recipient is former Supreme Court Justice Russell Nigro at $46,000 and the 18^th is sitting Supreme Court Justice Max Baer at $32,500.

Since 2004, when Pennsylvania legalized gambling casinos, that state’s supreme court has issued numerous rulings on gambling litigation, all favorable to casinos.  » More

California referendum questions are usually lengthy and densely legalistic, rarely read by voters. Voters rely instead on just the summaries appearing on the ballot as authored by the California Attorney General.

In summer, 2009 an anonymous mole witnessed the private interviews of three candidates for California Attorney General by the Police Officers Research Association of California, a public employee union lobby group. The candidates were each asked if asked if he/she would agree to slant the ballot version of any referendum question that would reduce the taxpayer hit from the state’s unaffordable public employee pension system, now unfunded to the tune of $100 billion. Wanting public employee support, all three candidates prostrated themselves in their promises to slant the ballot version of any such referendum question to ensure its defeat. California taxpayers won’t even know they’d be screwed. [1]

[1]Steven Greenhut, “Class War: how public servants became our masters,” Reason Magazine, February, 2010.