Come see where your democracy went.
These profiles can show you how the art of pimping is mastered in your state, as well as where the money’s coming from. Find links to a money profile of your Congress member. Pick a state, any state. There will be lobbying and there will be corruption. Welcome to Casino Jack and the United States of Money
So, you live in a state where potholes in the roads have your teeth chattering, the schools are more like medieval detention centers, and the infrastructure is older than original silent movies. Don’t feel alone.
Your internet speed is slower than a herd of snails traveling through peanut butter and this is on a good day. We all like a little sunshine now don’t we?
You live in an age where the policies of government look like something out of the middle ages and… at least 79% of you think that Congress is less popular than an invasion of giant cockroaches!
Is it any wonder that the Congress approval rating is so low? Among the many evils in government, lobbying is right at the top of the heap of refuse. Pay to play has never been greater, the stakes have never been higher, and the corruption has never been more obvious. Why should anybody like lobbyists? Why should anybody like corrupt politicians who keep getting richer?
Subtlety plays a huge role in political corruption because lobbying is institutionalized, it’s legal, and the contributions are blurred in deep secrecy. Congress members rationalize in their minds that accepting money is just part of the system. They just don’t get the bigger picture.
Casino Jack Abramoff is critical of the system that he helped to create: “I was involved deeply in a system of bribery — legalized bribery for the most part that still to a large part exists today.” Abramoff served four years of a six-year sentence and his description of prison isn’t very favorable at all.
Was Abramoff The Perfect Villain
One can’t help but to think that politics is a part of the investigative process itself. How is it that guys like Jack Abramoff and Raj Rajaratnam get caught, while thousands of others are doing similar things and are not getting caught?
While the Abramoff story has been around some time, what happened in the Abramoff Indian lobbying scandal is relatively unknown to the average person in the United States. He has become another symbol of what is going wrong in the culture of corruption, yet little is known about the system itself. Maybe politicians have made their culture of corruption the norm and the people have bought into their storytelling.
Why is it then, that the majority of Americans are clueless about legalized bribery in Congress?
Does lobbying pay off for corporations? You bet it does. Oil industry lobbying was $110,000,000 (that’$ million) in 2010. Benefits from oil industry lobbying in 2010 was $24,000,000,000 (that’$ billion).
