Tag Archives: Corruption

News

Senator Tom Coburn lists some bad examples of government waste

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Here’s the story.

Excerpt:

Coburn, R-Muskogee, whose office regularly churns out reports mocking federal projects and programs, said Monday that “cutting wasteful and low-priority spending from the budget is not only sensible, but essential.”

“In today’s economy, we can’t afford to spend nearly $2 million to showcase neon signs no longer in use at Las Vegas casinos; nor can Congress and federal agencies afford to spend nearly $1 billion a year on unnecessary printing costs.”

The 100 projects cited on Monday tread some familiar ground for Coburn reports — road signs paid for with stimulus funds, research projects that sound like folly — and are mostly domestic. There is no mention of Iraq or Afghanistan, despite government reports documenting millions lost to fraud and waste.

Topping Coburn’s list is the conclusion of a FOX News story that the Department of Veterans Affairs spends $175 million each year to maintain buildings it can’t use, in some cases because they’re in such disrepair.

Other items on the list:

• $217,000 for a University of California and Stanford University study on when and why political candidates are ambiguous.

• $90,000 to fund promotion of the Vidalia onion, including $60,000 for a campaign timed to coincide with the release of a Shrek movie.

•  $2.5 million on the Census Bureau’s television ad that aired during the Super Bowl to promote the head-count but left many viewers scratching their heads in confusion.

• $465,000 for an international AIDS conference in Austria.

• $35 million paid in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims to an alleged Armenian crime ring.

• $48 million for a streetcar system in Atlanta that runs the same route as the city’s subway system.

• $900,000 to settle sexual harassment claims against a former housing director in Philadelphia.

•  And $28 million to print “rarely used” paper copies of the Congressional Record.

Here’s a recent post from the Washington Examiner that compares Democrats and Republicans on pork barrel spending. (H/T Gateway Pundit via Muddling)

Excerpt:

Press coverage of the budget frenzy on Capitol Hill has suggested that pork-barrel earmark spending is still a bipartisan problem, that after months of self-righteous rhetoric about fiscal discipline, Republicans and Democrats remain equal-opportunity earmarkers.

It’s not true. A new analysis by a group of federal-spending watchdogs shows a striking imbalance between the parties when it comes to earmark requests. Democrats remain raging spenders, while Republicans have made enormous strides in cleaning up their act.

In the Senate, the GOP made only one-third as many earmark requests as Democrats for 2011, and in the House, Republicans have nearly given up earmarking altogether — while Democrats roll on.

The watchdog groups — Taxpayers for Common Sense, WashingtonWatch.com, and Taxpayers Against Earmarks — counted total earmark requests in the 2011 budget. Those requests were made by lawmakers earlier this year, but Democratic leaders, afraid that their party’s spending priorities might cost them at the polls, decided not to pass a budget before the Nov. 2 elections. This week, they distilled those earmark requests — threw some out, combined others — into the omnibus bill that was under consideration in the Senate until Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled it Thursday night. While that bill was loaded with spending, looking back at the original earmark requests tells us a lot about the spending inclinations of both parties.

In the 2011 House budget, the groups found that House Democrats requested 18,189 earmarks, which would cost the taxpayers a total of $51.7 billion, while House Republicans requested just 241 earmarks, for a total of $1 billion.

This is why stimulus spending, which is advocated by Democrats, costs jobs. Democrats waste money. They take money out of the job-creating sector of the economy, and they waste on government spending. If private companies wasted money like government, they would go out of business. Unfortunately, government can waste money like this all the time, and they just borrow more money. When you hear a Democrat say that they want to “invest” money they stole from businesses and workers in order to “stimulate” the economy, what they are talking about is wasting money and/or buying votes from their favored special interest groups.

News

Number of Obamacare waivers granted doubles to 222

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From the Verum Serum.

Excerpt:

Last month it was revealed that 111 companies had received one year waivers from costly provisions of Obamacare.

[…]Yesterday HHS updated their site to show that the number of “waived” organizations has now doubled to 222. The total number of people excused from this particular requirement of the new law has gone from 1.1 million to 1.5 million in one month. The largest single addition is American Heritage Life Insurance Company with nearly 70,000 employees. There are also quite a few union locals on the updated list:

  • Bricklayers Local 1 – 1,985 employees
  • International Brotherhood of Trade Unions Local 713 – 861 employees
  • Local 1102 has three listings – 6,271 employees
  • Local 338 – 18,209 employees
  • SoCal Pipe Trades – 12,700
  • Teamsters Local 522 – 270
  • UFCW Local 1445 – 148
  • Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 630 – 1,166
  • UFCW Local 1000 – 3,855
  • SEIU Greater New York – 4,544
  • Laundry and Dry Cleaning Workers Local 52 – 1,547
  • Social Service Employees Union Local 371 – 34,000

I think that the aim is to cause small businesses to go out of businesses so that the government has an easier time controlling the economy, which is what socialists want. It is much harder to control a massive number of cats than a handful of mules.

News

Obama administration used spying, threats and bribes to build support for global warming treaty

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From the radically leftist UK Guardian of all places! (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.

Seeking negotiating chips, the US state department sent a secret cable on 31 July 2009 seeking human intelligence from UN diplomats across a range of issues, including climate change. The request originated with the CIA. As well as countries’ negotiating positions for Copenhagen, diplomats were asked to provide evidence of UN environmental “treaty circumvention” and deals between nations.

But intelligence gathering was not just one way. On 19 June 2009, the state department sent a cable detailing a “spear phishing” attack on the office of the US climate change envoy, Todd Stern, while talks with China on emissions took place in Beijing. Five people received emails, personalised to look as though they came from the National Journal. An attached file contained malicious code that would give complete control of the recipient’s computer to a hacker. While the attack was unsuccessful, the department’s cyber threat analysis division noted: “It is probable intrusion attempts such as this will persist.”

The Beijing talks failed to lead to a global deal at Copenhagen.

[…]Perhaps the most audacious appeal for funds revealed in the cables is from Saudi Arabia, the world’s second biggest oil producer and one of the 25 richest countries in the world. A secret cable sent on 12 February records a meeting between US embassy officials and lead climate change negotiator Mohammad al-Sabban. “The kingdom will need time to diversify its economy away from petroleum, [Sabban] said, noting a US commitment to help Saudi Arabia with its economic diversification efforts would ‘take the pressure off climate change negotiations‘.”

The Saudis did not like the accord, but were worried they had missed a trick. The assistant petroleum minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman told US officials that he had told his minister Ali al-Naimi that Saudi Arabia had “missed a real opportunity to submit ‘something clever’, like India or China, that was not legally binding but indicated some goodwill towards the process without compromising key economic interests”.

Wow, so this is what Obama has been working on as the unemployment rate has soared higher to 9.8%.