Budget showdown, government shutdown, debt ceiling debacle—the stakes
are real but the establishment seems to feed off the chaos they create
as a means to foment fear and outrage and translate it into campaign
donations for themselves.
Look closely and you’ll see that something seismic is going on under the surface of the manufactured chaos in D.C.
Washington has morphed into an extortion racket, a place where
members of the permanent political class threaten to inflict legislative
and regulatory pain to extract campaign donations that they can then
siphon into the pockets of themselves and their family members.
In a new book featured this Sunday on 60 Minutes titled Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets, Peter Schweizer explains
how Washington politicians use a set of mafia-style legislative tactics
to extort people and industries into donating to them out of fear of
political and legal reprisals.
Schweizer interviewed former Chairman of Apache Corporation Ray
Plank. Plank said campaign cash and lobbying contracts now function as
“protection money” to keep lawmakers and regulators from going after
you.
“It’s what you expect from the mafia,” said Plank. “They basically
come to you and say, ‘We are going to shove this bat up your ass and
give you an enema. You better play ball.’ We saw a great deal of it.
It’s an insidious blight.”
There are left-wing progressives on Wall Street and in the high-tech
world who bankrolled President Obama’s campaign because they love his
radical agenda. But as Schweizer points out, many gave because they know
they have to; if they don’t, Obama will come after them.
That’s a lesson the Tea Party knows all too well. After the Tea
Party’s historic 2010 midterm victory, Obama unleashed Attorney General
Eric Holder to go after the oil and gas sector, which had given four
times as much to Republicans as to Democrats. As Obama said in October
2010, “We are going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our
friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”
Of course, not everyone gets subjected to these Godfather-style
shakedowns. Case in point: Obama bundler and former New Jersey Governor
Jon Corzine of MF Global shame. After "losing" $1.6 billion of MF
Global customer money, Corzine walked away without a scratch. In Extortion,
Schweizer publishes a devastating quote from Lisa Timmerman, a 17-year
MF Global employee who served as the firm’s assistant comptroller for
five years, saying: “Corzine is a major Obama fundraiser [which] is
keeping prosecutors from bringing criminal charges against him.”
But what about the rest of us? What about the average American mom
and dad just trying to stay afloat in the disastrous Obama economy? We
don’t have the funds to throw “protection money” at the political
extortionists in Washington who are eager to foist things like Obamacare
on us. Only Obama’s union cronies and members of the permanent
political class are given Obamacare waivers and spared the pain of the
policies D.C. inflicts on the rest of us. Big business got an Obamacare
exemption that Obama refuses to give ordinary individuals who can’t even
sign up for Obamacare on the broken exchange websites, but they’ll
still be fined for not doing so!
And what about the GOP establishment? Why haven’t they been able to
clean up the extortion racket in Washington? You have to ask yourself,
has the party machine fought this corruption or does it participate in
it? As a senior House Republican told Fox News on Thursday, it’s “highly
unlikely” Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) will be challenged because few
have the muscle to match his ability to “raise money.”
In fact, the ability to raise money is apparently key to all the
power in Washington. Here’s how bad it’s gotten: the Democratic and
Republican Parties actually have a secret price list—officially
known as “party dues”—that tells members of Congress how much money
they must extract from donors in order to win a chairmanship or a top
slot on a powerful Congressional committee. Schweizer somehow obtained
the top-secret lists and included the never-before-published documents
in Extortion.
But fundraising isn’t the only thing D.C. employs to keep people in
line. Over in the Senate, Democrats like Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) use thug
tactics on Tea Party members and activists who stand in their way. In a
devastating chapter on Harry Reid, Schweizer includes a quote from
Reid’s former chief of staff Susan McCue, who in 2005 said Reid seizes
on a person’s weaknesses to “disarm, to endear, to threaten, but most of
all to instill fear.”
The fact that these strong-arm tactics take place in Washington
doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve fought this type of corruption my
entire political career. And those who disagreed with me politically
used thug-like tactics to try to bankrupt my family with frivolous
lawsuits in Alaska, and it hasn’t stopped to this day.
It’s time for Washington to stop threatening citizens and scaring up
dollars through an endless extortion scheme of manufactured crises. It’s
time for leaders to lead. That means doing right by voters without
requiring them to pay protection money in advance.
You have to wonder whether Constitutional rule of law even exists
when separate rules apply for powerful and well-connected men like Jon
Corzine. And you have to wonder whether we really have government of the
people, by the people, and for the people when the only way We the
People can be heard is if we grease the palms of the ruling class.
Enough is enough. If the permanent political class won’t drain the
swamp, we will. We should follow the advice in the title of Schweizer’s
last book and “Throw Them All Out.” 2014 is just around the corner.
