So many great ideas…so few people willing to put them into practice.
There’s an article out in today’s New York Times about how–surprise, surprise–homeland security officials are leaving public service to take lucrative lobbying positions with (you guessed it) companies that sell national security products to the government.
I’ll just supply the initial parts of the article; go read the whole thing and weep:
Dozens of members of the Bush administration’s domestic security team, assembled after the 2001 terrorist attacks, are now collecting bigger paychecks in different roles: working on behalf of companies that sell domestic security products, many directly to the federal agencies the officials once helped run.
What a surprise…
At least 90 officials at the Department of Homeland Security or the White House Office of Homeland Security — including the department’s former secretary, Tom Ridge; the former deputy secretary, Adm. James M. Loy; and the former under secretary, Asa Hutchinson — are executives, consultants or lobbyists for companies that collectively do billions of dollars’ worth of domestic security business.
Yup, the rot goes all the way to the top. As usual. And it’s not just a few bad apples…
More than two-thirds of the department’s most senior executives in its first years have moved through the revolving door. That pattern raises questions for some former officials.
Raises some questions? Uhhh, yeah. I’d say so. Last quote:
People have a right to make a living,” said Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the department, who now works at the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan public policy research center. “But working virtually immediately for a company that is bidding for work in an area where you were just setting the policy — that is too close. It is almost incestuous.”
It is incestuous. It is–pardon my French–an assraping of America by these motherfuckers. But it’s no different from everything else we’ve come to expect of this plutocratic, rotted shell of a party that the GOP has become.
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Of course, the Democrats–seeing a boundless opportunity to make heavy electoral hay before them–are saying…nothing. Crickets are chirping louder. Instead, they had to wait to find this out in the Times–and then they’ll come out with some halfhearted “Culture of Corruption” platitudes.
But nothing firm. Nothing substantial. Nothing that will show that we actually mean it.
Like, say, a law that would PREVENT A FEDERAL OFFICIAL FROM LOBBYING IN THE FIELD OF THEIR SERVICE FOR FIVE YEARS AFTER LEAVING GOVERNMENT OFFICE.
That might actually attract a voter’s attention. That might actually show we mean business. That would be bad. Better to keep the gravy train running on all sides–for the good of America, of course.
We wouldn’t want to go overboard or be populist or anything by trying a novel idea…