Extorted a person to agree to silence in return for payment of fees.
Solicited campaign contributions tied to official actions.
Accepts illegal gratuities
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The Cult of the Cons
Polecats in this cult are conservatives who mostly occupy the right wing of the Republican Party, including its theatrical and Looney Tee Party. The cult has become, says the Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, "a strident group of malcontents "acting out of pure spite like a "bratty 13-year-old.'" [12]
Cons spew provocative and deceitful exhortations and slogans (e.g., "let's reload," "don't tread on me," "freedom works"). They are against government solutions, particularly social welfare (so miserly it is dwarfed by corporate welfare) and, says another critic, are "endlessly worried that one's neighbor may be getting more than his or her "fair' share." [13] They perpetuate the myth that people on the dole want to be on the dole and like staying there. They apparently want public services that benefit only them and the rest of the corpocracy tangibly and want to be barely taxed for them. They regard any government efforts to improve our general welfare as totalitarianism or socialism. They call efforts to require physicians to counsel terminally ill patients "death panels." [14]
Wondering what makes malcontent cons tick I searched the literature looking for their psychological makeup (PMU). I found it in a big study of many smaller studies spanning 50 years. While there are always caveats about most research findings, a 50-year trail that doesn't detour would seem to lead straight to a durable conclusion; namely, cons by and large (there are always individual exceptions) and wherever they are (cons from 12 different countries were studied) resist change, are fearful, are aggressive, are tolerant of inequality to the extent of even endorsing it, are dogmatic, are intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, are hostile to outsiders, and are more comfortable with simplicity than with complexity. [15]
If this PMU is really true, PU! It's "repugnantlican!"
The Swarming Touts
Another name for lobbyists is "touts." Name an industry that doesn't have a school of touts. When any of them comes through a Capitol Hill door the public's interest in getting legislation and budget allocations for the common good gets thrown out the window.
Washington, DC is swarming with them. There are so many of them (over 11,000) that when they attend public hearings they pay "line sitters" who are law school students, bicycle messengers, even the homeless, to camp out overnight to get tickets in the Chamber's galleries. [16] Seems kind of silly and unnecessary to me. The hearings are just for show. By the time an issue of real significance gets a public hearing, the touts behind the scenes have already ghost written legislative drafts and their pawns are committed to them.
Lobbying is a follow up to the tacit bribery on the campaign trail. The follow up doesn't come cheaply. In recent years over $3 billion has been spent annually by lobbyists swarming the halls and offices of Capitol Hill. Those lobbyists aren't there on behalf of what the public needs from public services. They are there on behalf of powerful, wealthy and greedy industries and their corporations. The six more dangerous industries spent almost half of the lobbying expenses of all 20 industries combined in 2012. [17]
The biggest spender is Big Pharma (bigger than the war and spy industries that have moiré political clout). What has it gotten for its lobbying expenses? Its return has been estimated at a mindboggling 77,500% from lobbying on just one single issue; barring the government from bargaining for cheaper drug prices through Medicare (I have never ever seen such a huge percentage on anything). [18] Besides that big ticket item, the Center for Public Integrity looked at the entire Congress-Drug lobby track record from 1980 until 2006. [19] I have paraphrased their findings in Table 3. The case of Big Pharma clearly shows that it pays handsomely to lobby.
Table 3
Big Pharma's Return on its Touts
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