Ethics panel clears 7 on earmarks - washingtonpost.com

Ethics panel clears 7 on earmarks - washingtonpost.com

By Paul Kane and Carol D. Leonnig

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 27, 2010

The House ethics committee ruled Friday that seven lawmakers who steered hundreds of millions of dollars in largely no-bid contracts to clients of a lobbying firm had not violated any rules or laws by also collecting large campaign donations from those contractors.

In a 305-page report, the ethics committee declared that lawmakers are free to raise campaign money from the very companies they are benefiting so long as the deciding factors in granting those "earmarks" are "criteria independent" of the contributions. The report served as a blunt rejection of ethics watchdogs and a different group of congressional investigators, who have contended that in some instances the connection between donations and earmarks was so close that it had to be inappropriate.

"Simply because a member sponsors an earmark for an entity that also happens to be a campaign contributor does not, on these two facts alone, support a claim that a member's actions are being influenced by campaign contributions," the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct said in a unanimous statement.

Ethics watchdogs issued sharp denunciations, citing portions of the report that showed that the private companies thought their donations helped them win earmarks. The lawmakers -- Reps. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), Peter J. Visclosky (D-Ind.) and C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) -- claimed vindication.

...

... In fiscal 2008 alone, the seven lawmakers sponsored $112 million worth of earmarks for clients of the PMA Group while accepting more than $350,000 in contributions from the firm's lobbyists and its clients, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group.

The final word on this practice may come from the Justice Department. The PMA Group folded a year ago after an FBI raid on its Arlington offices, part of an investigation into whether its founder and staff directed illegal campaign contributions to lawmakers who helped clients obtain earmarks. Last spring, a federal grand jury issued subpoenas to Visclosky, a former aide and his political committees.

Congress subpoenas thousands of allegedly damaging Toyota documents | Raw Story

Congress subpoenas thousands of allegedly damaging Toyota documents | Raw Story

The head of embattled Toyota has bowed to calls to testify in US Congress as lawmakers demand a whistleblower lawyer hand over potentially damning internal company documents on alleged safety defects.

A key congressional committee has subpoenaed former Toyota lawyer Dimitrios Biller, who has accused the world's biggest car maker of hiding and destroying evidence of safety problems and of "a culture of hypocrisy and deception".

Toyota is recalling more than eight million cars worldwide for defects linked to more than 30 deaths in the United States that have sparked a host of US lawsuits which could cost the company billions of dollars in damages. ...

Payments in question - baltimoresun.com

Payments in question - baltimoresun.com

WASHINGTON — - Former Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele's personal political accounts were billed at least $188,000 by Washington law firms during his first year as chairman of the Republican National Committee, according to state and federal disclosure reports.

Steele used state campaign funds to pay the law firms, but the specific purpose for most of the expenditures wasn't disclosed, in apparent violation of Maryland reporting guidelines.

Some of the costs appear to involve activity that predated his tenure as Republican national chairman. An RNC spokesman declined comment, on grounds that the payments didn't involve national party business.

...

According to elections board guidance, campaign finance reports "are supposed to inform the public on how the campaign funds are being used. Simply recording a large expenditure for 'consultant services' is not sufficiently descriptive."

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Last summer, the Republican State Central Committee agreed to return $77,500 to Steele's state campaign committee, which improperly spent leftover campaign funds to help settle an old legal bill dating from Steele's service as Maryland Republican chairman.

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Over the years, Steele has been dogged by questions involving finances.

His decision to continue giving paid speeches while serving as party chairman drew criticism recently from some former RNC chairmen, who said that he should treat the position as a full-time job.

Steele, who is paid $223,500 a year plus benefits, also received undisclosed royalties for a book published last month. His defenders have pointed out that some of his predecessors as Republican chairman also received outside income in addition to their party salary. ...

Washington Times - Stimulus foes see value in seeking cash

Washington Times - Stimulus foes see value in seeking cash
...

Sen. Christopher S. Bond regularly railed against President Obama's economic stimulus plan as irresponsible spending that would drive up the national debt. But behind the scenes, the Missouri Republican quietly sought more than $50 million from a federal agency for two projects in his state.

Mr. Bond was not alone. More than a dozen Republican lawmakers, while denouncing the stimulus to the media and their constituents, privately sent letters to just one of the federal government's many agencies seeking stimulus money for home-state pork projects.

The letters to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, expose the gulf between lawmakers' public criticism of the overall stimulus package and their private lobbying for projects close to home.

"It's not illegal to talk out of both sides of your mouth, but it does seem to be a level of dishonesty troubling to the American public," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Mr. Bond noted that one project applying to the USDA for stimulus money would "create jobs and ultimately spur economic opportunities."

He and other lawmakers make no apologies for privately seeking stimulus money after they voted against it and continue to criticize the plan: "I strongly opposed the stimulus, but the only thing that could make it worse would be if none of it returned to the taxpayers of Missouri," said Mr. Bond, who is retiring.

But watchdog groups say the lawmakers' public talk and private letters don't square, highlighting a side of government spending largely overshadowed by the "earmarking" process. While members of Congress must disclose their earmarks — or pet projects they slip into broader spending bills — the private funding requests they make in letters to agencies fall outside of the public's view.

"There is a definite disconnect between the public statements and the private letters," said Thomas A. Schatz, president of the nonpartisan Citizens Against Government Waste. "It does seem inconsistent to say you're against the bill but then you want some little piece of it." ...

..

Rep. Joe Wilson, South Carolina Republican who became famous after yelling, "You lie," during Mr. Obama's addresses to Congress in September, voted against the stimulus. Nonetheless, Mr. Wilson elbowed his way into the rush for federal stimulus cash in a letter he sent to Mr. Vilsack on behalf of a foundation seeking funding.

"We know their endeavor will provide jobs and investment in one of the poorer sections of the Congressional District," he wrote to Mr. Vilsack in the Aug. 26, 2009, letter.

...

Also facing a competitive race, Rep. Pat Tiberi, Ohio Republican, in October called the final Democratic stimulus bill "loaded with [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi's grab bag of big spending wishes" and that it "saddles future generations with mountains of debt."

He struck a different tone in a letter to Mr. Vilsack.

"While this project is intended to expand rural broadband in Alaska, I understand that the project could support businesses and jobs in communities across the country," Mr. Tiberi wrote, citing one such company in his district.

...

Sen. Lamar Alexander, Tennessee Republican, who easily won re-election in 2008, said of the stimulus, "This is spending, not stimulus."

In a letter to Mr. Vilsack for a project applying for stimulus money, Mr. Alexander noted, "It is anticipated that the project will create over 200 jobs in the first year and at least another 40 new jobs in the following years." ...

Daily Kos: Shelby holds Senate hostage to win military contract for European firm

Daily Kos: Shelby holds Senate hostage to win military contract for European firm

by Jed Lewison

Fri Feb 05, 2010

As you may have heard, U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) has placed a hold on all Obama Administration nominees, effectively holding every Obama appointment hostage to the Senate's filibuster rule.

So what's Shelby's ransom? Basically, he wants the Pentagon contract for aerial refueling tankers to be awarded to Airbus, the European aerospace firm, instead of Boeing, the domestic aerospace giant. Why does Shelby want to award a key military contract to a foreign company? Because portions of the Airbus-built tankers would be assembled in Alabama.

Marcy Wheeler explains:

The key issue is that Shelby wants the Air Force to tweak an RFP for refueling tankers so that Airbus (partnered with Northrup Grumman) would win the bid again over Boeing. The contract had been awarded in 2008, but the GAO found that the Air Force had erred in calculating the award. After the Air Force wrote a new RFP in preparation to rebid the contract, Airbus calculated that it would not win the new bid, and started complaining. Now, Airbus is threatening to withdraw from the competition unless the specs in the RFP are revised.

Essentially, then, Shelby’s threat is primarily about gaming this bidding process to make sure Airbus–and not Boeing–wins the contract (there’s a smaller program he’s complaining about, too, but this is the truly huge potential bounty for his state). ...

Josh Silver: Senator Franken Rips Into Comcast CEO Brian Roberts

Josh Silver: Senator Franken Rips Into Comcast CEO Brian Roberts

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and NBC President Jeff Zucker testified in front of House and Senate subcommittees Thursday as regulators decide whether to allow the proposed merger of the two media giants. Comcast is the largest cable TV and residential high-speed Internet company in the nation. NBC is one of the largest content providers.

...

"You'll have to excuse me if I don't trust these promises, and that is from experience in this business," Franken said. "It matters who runs our media companies....the media are our source of entertainment, but they're also the way we get our information about the world. So when the same company produces the programs and runs the pipes that bring us those programs, we have a reason to be nervous."

We sure do. Here are 10 more reasons to be very afraid of the proposed Comcast/NBC merger:

1) Comcast Buys Influence
The communications industry is, after all, second only to Big Pharma in Washington influence-peddling. Comcast spent more than $5.5 million in campaign contributions since 2006 alone to have their way in Washington. That's not counting more than $50 million they've spent on lobbying in the past three years!

2) How Much Is Enough?
Comcast earned more than $3.6 billion in profits in 2009 while claiming they didn't have enough money to invest in faster Internet networks ... and while raising rates as much as 50 percent over the past five years in some markets.

3) Fat Cat CEO
In 2008, CEO Brian Roberts was ranked as one of five "Highest Paid Worst Performers" in America. 2008 income: $40.8 million. Sitting on Capitol Hill yesterday, he raked in more than $100,000.

4) Bad Customer Service
Comcast ranked second only to AOL in poor customer service, according to a 2009Zogby/MSM Money poll. Comcast service is so bad they drove a 75-year-old woman named Mona Shaw to wreck one of their stores with a hammer.

5) Comcast Lies and Plays Dirty
In official 2006 testimony, Comcast Vice President David L. Cohen said: "If Comcast were to try to 'deny, delay, or degrade' the Internet experience that our more than 9 million cable Internet customers have paid for, how can we possibly expect to keep them as customers. ... Any provider that does not meet the needs of users will suffer from a serious backlash from consumers and policymakers."

In 2008, after being caught illegally blocking content Cohen admitted: "Comcast may on a limited basis temporarily delay certain P2P traffic." That's the same year Comcast was caught paying for seat fillers at a public FCC hearing into their illegal Internet blocking. Only this year, after being censured by the FCC, did Roberts admit to the company's "mistake."

6) Comcast Censors Political Speech
Comcast prevents ads from running that criticize the company's political friends. They evenfired a newscaster who dared to question an award they were bestowing on Bill O'Reilly.

7) Comcast Blocks Independent Voices
Despite digging up our city streets and enjoying a near-monopoly for decades, Comcast has consistently tried to shirk its community responsibilities - including trying to kick public, educational and government channels into the cable-tier equivalent of Siberia. ...

Sen. Conrad, Deficit Hawk, Brings U.S. Dollars Home to North Dakota - WSJ.com

Sen. Conrad, Deficit Hawk, Brings U.S. Dollars Home to North Dakota - WSJ.com

...

Mr. Conrad has long pushed to curb deficit spending. As a freshman senator, he had a hand in a bruising 1990 budget deal that raised taxes and restrained spending. In 1993 and 1997, he backed legislation that trimmed Medicare and required Congress to pay for all spending hikes or tax cuts.

Those steps helped pave the way for surpluses beginning in 1998. With increased taxes, a booming economy and strict spending restraints, Congress racked up surpluses until 2001, the longest such stretch since the 1920s.

"Those balanced budgets got us to stop borrowing from the Social Security trust fund," Mr. Conrad says. "That was our high-water mark, if you will."

While advocating fiscal responsibility at the national level, the senator has ministered adroitly to one of the most government-dependent states in the country: a vast swath of parched prairie that is home to needy military air bases, Indian reservations, an aging population of 639,000 and thousands of farmers who, over the last decade, have collectively gobbled up an average of $715 million a year in crop subsidies and disaster payments.

"His heart is in the right place," says Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office who now advises Republican campaigns. "But when your party, your colleagues, and even your constituents are all pressuring you to give in to the dark side, it's tough to make real progress." ...

Study: Charter schools promote segregation, perform worse than traditional schools | Minnesota Public Radio NewsQ

Study: Charter schools promote segregation, perform worse than traditional schools | Minnesota Public Radio NewsQ

by Tom Weber, Minnesota Public Radio

November 26, 2008

Nearly 20 years after Minnesota passed the nation's first charter school law, charters in the Twin Cities continue to perform worse, are more segregated than traditional public schools and are forcing those traditional public schools to become more segregated.

Those are the findings of a new report called "Failed Promises" -- from the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota.

But the conclusions are not necessarily swaying those who run charters.

...

Orfield's research team gathered test scores and other data from all traditional public and charter schools in the Twin Cities. That other data included poverty measurements, as a way of lining up schools in similar economic situations.

What they found was charter schools performed worse than traditional public schools.

To read the entire report, click here.

The report also looks at schools' racial make-up, and includes a map that plots all metro area charter schools. It shows segregated schools far outnumber integrated - and in some cases, predominately white schools are surrounded by predominately non-white schools.

To see a map of Twin Cities charter schools, click here.

This is the result of charters locating in poor neighborhoods where kids are having bad experiences in the public schools, Orfield says.

"Parents that have had a bad experience with the public schools will take almost any choice, and they will move to the charter school. This will pull enrollment out of the public school, so you have two schools racing towards more segregated schools - and both types of schools are doing badly," he says. ...

Charter schools' growth promoting segregation, studies say - latimes.com

Charter schools' growth promoting segregation, studies say - latimes.com

A UCLA study is one of two finding that the increasingly popular campuses skew toward racially separate student bodies. Charter advocates criticize the reports.

The growth of charter schools has promoted segregation both in California and nationwide, increasing the odds that black, Latino and white students will attend class with fewer children who look different from themselves, according to two new studies.

Charter school advocates contend that the researchers' presumptions about racial separation are out of date. They said parents -- including low-income minority parents -- are turning to charters for a quality education that traditional schools have not provided.

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The trend toward segregation was especially notable for African American students. Nationally, 70% of black charter students attend schools where at least 90% of students are minorities. That's double the figure for traditional public schools. The typical black charter-school student attends a campus where nearly three in four students also are black, researchers with the Civil Rights Project at UCLA said Thursday.

The other researchers also focused on economic segregation, looking at private companies that manage schools, in most cases charters. The enrollments at most of these campuses exacerbated income extremes, they concluded. Charters tended to serve higher-income students or lower-income students. Charters also were likely to serve fewer disabled students and fewer English learners. This report, soon to be officially released, was developed by education policy centers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Arizona State University.

Both research teams, using somewhat different methods and data, questioned the direction of the Obama administration, which has pushed states to authorize more charter schools as a condition for receiving funding through "Race to the Top" grants. That position has proved to be powerful leverage as states struggle with decreased funding.

"We don't want the Race to the Top to become a race to the past," said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project, alluding to the era of enforced segregation.

Orfield's UCLA team previously documented how court decisions since 1991 had gradually eroded the halting progress in integration. Segregation remains a marker for inequality, just as it was in the 1950s, he said. ...

McConnell Raised Big Bucks From Foreign Defense Contractor Probed For Bribery | TPMMuckraker

McConnell Raised Big Bucks From Foreign Defense Contractor Probed For Bribery | TPMMuckraker

In the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been quick to denounce a bid by Democrats to stop foreign corporations from pouring money into U.S. elections, claiming current law already bars such spending. As we've reported before, it's not nearly as simple as that -- but McConnell should know: The GOP Senate leader has raked in campaign cash from a subsidiary of a major foreign defense contractor that's currently being investigated by the Justice Department for bribery.

As we reported yesterday, McConnell, a longtime foe of efforts to get money out of politics, last week took to the Senate floor to pooh-pooh the notion that the court's decision could allow a flood of foreign money to sway our elections, citing an existing law that prevents foreign nationals, including corporations, from spending on U.S. elections. But that ban doesn't cover the U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies, or to foreign-owned corporations that incorporate in the U.S.

...

Since 2005, McConnell has received $21,000 -- spread between his campaign and his leadership PAC -- from a PAC run by BAE Systems Inc., according to federal campaign disclosure records examined by TPMmuckraker. BAE Systems Inc. is the American subsidiary of BAE Systems, the world's second largest defense contractor, headquartered in Britain.

In addition, United Defense Industries, another defense contractor bought by BAE in 2005, reportedlypledged half a million dollars to the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, a political science foundation that the senator created.

McConnell has been good to BAE, which owns a facility in Louisville, Kentucky. For fiscal year 2010, the senator requested earmarks for the company worth a combined $17 million.

BAE is hardly a squeaky clean corporate citizen, either. The Justice Department is conducting an ongoing investigation (pdf) into allegations that the company bribed members of the Saudi Royal family, including the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, in support of a mulit-billion dollar, decades-long deal to barter arms for oil.

To be sure, as election lawyer Kenneth Gross points out, the existing law does make it illegal for foreign corporations to "funnel foreign corporate funds through domestic entities or to have foreign officers, directors, or employees direct foreign or domestic funds with regards to federal, state, or local elections."

But in practice, reform advocates argue, this prohibition doesn't get to the root of the issue. Even if a U.S. subsidiary uses its own funds to contribute, and the decision to contribute is made only by Americans, the money nonetheless comes from a subsidiary of a foreign corporation, whose officers can hardly be expected not to act with that interest in mind.