Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (24 page)

LaHood is a klieg-light shining example of Obama’s anti-earmark disingenuousness. The
Wall Street Journal
dubbed the Transportation Secretary the “Earmark King.”
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But that title belongs solely to the man in the White House who pledged to “ban all earmarks” in the stimulus—and then promptly broke the pledge by rubber-stamping billions of dollars worth of earmarks. President Obama is the Earmark King. Transportation Secretary LaHood is the Earmark Courtier.

Taxpayers for Common Sense reported that in fiscal year 2008, LaHood scored $62.7 million in federal earmarks for his district, either solo or with other colleagues. The
Washington Post
added that LaHood directed at least $9 million of that oft-hidden, last-minute pork project money to campaign donors.
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LaHood has a special fetish for road-building earmarks—doling out millions to home state paving companies and projects, including an unsolicited $245,000 check in December 2007 to fix roads leading to a Springfield, Illinois, cemetery where Abraham Lincoln is buried.

One of LaHood’s top back-scratching donors was Republican William Cellini Sr., an Illinois pal who shares the bipartisan Chicago spirit of pay-to-play.
Chicago Tribune
columnist John Kass introduces you:

Obama selected outgoing Illinois U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Combine) for the post of secretary of transportation, putting LaHood in charge of Obama’s planned trillion-dollar public works bonanza being sold as a jobs bill. “Every dollar that we spend, we want it spent on projects that are there, not because of politics, but because they’re good for the American people,” Obama said. “If we’re building a road, it better not be a road to nowhere.” Not because of politics? What does the great reformer take us for, a bunch of chumbolones? What Obama forgot to mention is that with LaHood in charge of the roads, they’ll lead to one place: Bill Cellini.

Cellini, the Republican boss of Springfield who has been indicted in the Blagojevich scandal for allegedly shaking down the producer of the movie “Million Dollar Baby,” is a strong LaHood ally. Cellini runs Sangamon County, and LaHood has enjoyed Cellini’s political support. They also joined to help oust the last true reformer in Illinois politics, former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, the Republican who was denied an endorsement from his own state party after he brought federal prosecutors to Illinois with no connection to the bipartisan Combine that runs things here. Republican money man Cellini is not only the Chicago political connection to machine Democrats and Mayor Richard Daley’s City Hall—and a Blagojevich fundraiser—he’s also the boss of the Illinois Asphalt Pavement Association.

They’re the guys behind the guys who pour that hot sticky stuff on the roads, but don’t get their cashmere sweaters dirty and drive black Escalades to the job site, before wheeling off for some osso bucco at Volare or other fine restaurants.
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Cellini was indicted in the fall of 2008 after a criminal investigation spearheaded by Northern District U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald. The charges? Shaking down government vendors to raise money for—wait for it—disgraced Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich. Asked to explain how a lifelong Republican had insinuated himself into Blago World, Cellini once quipped before his indictment: “When we’re in, we’re in. And when you’re in, we’re in.”
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The autumn 2008 indictment cited thirty charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, conspiracy to commit extortion, attempted extortion, and soliciting. A new indictment released in March 2009 dropped the bribery solicitation, but the basic pay-to-play allegations should sound eerily familiar: A financial firm called Capri Capital wanted a piece of the state government pie—control and management of $200 million worth of state teachers’ pension money. The Chicago Political Machine named its price. Cellini and others, including convicted Obama/Blago real estate mogul Tony Rezko, “agreed to demand that Thomas Rosenberg, the owner of Capri Capital, arrange to raise or donate substantial funds to Friends of Blagojevich, and to threaten that if such funds were not forthcoming, they would block” a proposed investment by the state teachers’ pension fund of $220 million with Capri Capital, according to impeached former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s criminal indictment.
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These are the friends of Obama’s Transportation Secretary, an earmark-addicted influence peddler born and raised on the politics of pay-to-play. For his “disregard for the taxpayers’ money and an abundance of concern over how he will administer the Department of Transportation,” the non-partisan Citizens Against Government Waste designated LaHood its “Porker of the Month” in January 2009.
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“Change?” It’s all we’ll have left after Ray LaHood gets done plundering the stimulus coffers for his pet projects and pals.

EPA CHIEF LISA JACKSON: CLEAN AS SHE SAYS, NOT AS SHE CLEANS

President Obama’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, racked up a controversial record as chief eco-regulator for the state of New Jersey. But national journalists seemed more interested in her skin color than the dark spots on her resume. Diversity consultants cheered and the Associated Press trumpeted: “Lisa Jackson in line to be first black EPA chief.”
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Jackson stressed her green credentials while posing as an adherent of sound science and regulations. In her Senate confirmation testimony, Jackson promised that “Science will be the backbone of what EPA does.”
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But some of her own scientists and the EPA’s own inspector general say Jackson did not practice in New Jersey what she now preaches. Critics on both the left and right pointed to an EPA inspector general’s report lambasting Jackson’s state agency for failing to clean up toxic sites in a timely manner and for “not implement[ing] agreements on cleanup milestones, Agency responsibilities, and enforcement actions.”
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A former senior scientist who worked for Jackson, Jeff Ruch of the activist Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, lambasted Jackson’s oversight (or rather, lack of oversight) when the OIG report was released:

The new EPA OIG report blasts inordinate delays and mismanagement of state-supervised Superfund clean-ups performed under the authority of federal law. The report focuses on several toxic clean-up operations that had been going on for more than 20 years without completion and concludes that—

• New Jersey has the worst track record in the nation, accounting for more than one quarter of all unresolved Superfund clean-ups more than 20 years old;

• Delays are primarily due to the state department of Environmental protection (DEP) not using legal tools available to them to force responsible parties to clean up pollution; and

• The U.S. EPA should step in and take over mired state-supervised clean-ups. “New Jersey used to have the strongest clean-up program in the country but now it is among the worst,” stated New Jersey PEER Director Bill Wolfe, a former DEP analyst. “We should be embarrassed that George Bush’s EPA has to step in and take over pollution control in our state.”
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In 2008, a Justice Department investigation led to several guilty pleas from New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection contractors under Jackson’s watch who were involved in a Superfund clean-up kickback conspiracy: “The owner of a Camden County wastewater treatment supply company and a former contracts administrator pleaded guilty to big rigging, fraud and tax charges involving work at two Superfund sites in New Jersey, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.” More than $410,000 in kickbacks was exchanged “in the form of checks, cash, cruises, home renovations, boat trailers and airline flights, as well as inflated invoices.”
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Another co-conspirator was ordered to pay a $1 million criminal fine related to the conspiracy. And in March 2009, as Jackson settled in to her new position at EPA, the Justice Department secured still more guilty pleas related to the kickback scheme.
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Risk and environmental policy analyst Jonathan Tolman of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., stated the obvious: “If a Republican president had nominated a former Republican State DEP head with the exact same environmental record as Lisa Jackson, environmental groups in Washington would be howling. But all one seems to be hearing from the major environmental groups is the sound of one hand clapping.”
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As the official Cabinet nominees stumbled, bumbled, or greased their way through the nomination process, the Obama administration was installing a shadow cadre of unaccountable advisers and regulators pulling the strings. If at first you don’t succeed, the White House learned, circumvent the democratic process.

CHAPTER 5

BACKROOM BUDDIES

DANCING WITH THE CZARS

T
here seems to be an unwritten mandate in the Obama White House: If you can’t beat ’em, czar ’em. The nomination process has proved to be a dangerous landmine for one too many Obama picks. So the vetters found a convenient way to circumvent the problem—by creating a handful of new posts through presidential executive orders that require no Senate approval.

No Senate review, no questions. No questions, no problems. Viva la transparency.

In effect, the Obama administration has created a two-tiered government—fronted by Cabinet secretaries able to withstand public scrutiny (some of them, just barely) and run behind the scenes by shadow secretaries with broad powers beyond the reach of congressional accountability.

A few lawmakers aren’t too crazy about Obama’s czar-mania. Democrat Senator Robert Byrd (yes, even a broken clock is right twice a day) warned the White House in a February 2009 letter about his worries regarding the new czar positions in health care, urban affairs, energy and climate policy, and technology and management performance. “I am concerned about the relationship between these new White House positions and their executive branch counterparts,” Byrd wrote. “Too often, I have seen these lines of authority and responsibility become tangled and blurred, sometimes purposely, to shield information and to obscure the decision-making process.”
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GOP Senator James Inhofe questioned whether hearings on Obama’s pick to chair the Council on Environmental Quality, which requires Senate confirmation, were directed at the wrong person: “I’m quite concerned that the chair’s role has been diluted by the addition of former EPA Administrator Carol Browner as White House climate and energy czar.”
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It’s one thing to create a White House coordinator slot to handle sensitive tasks that no other agency is handling. Ten days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration appointed a new domestic security czar to coordinate the counter-terrorism efforts of more than forty federal agencies, including the CIA, FBI, and National Guard.

But Obama’s key czars all have Cabinet counterparts already in place. While past administrations dating back to the Nixon era have designated such “super aides,” none has extended the concept as widely as Obama has—which raises another bureaucratic concern: sheer chaos. New York University professor Paul Light, who has written extensively on government organization, said that in addition to Byrd’s constitutional concerns, “there are so many czars in this White House, they’ll be constantly bumping into each other.”
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That chaos could serve as a useful smokescreen to obscure the true source of decision-making. “If the czars are working behind the scenes and the secretaries will be the mouthpieces of the administration, it calls into question who is actually making the policy decision,” Senator Byrd concluded. “Whoever is making the policy decisions needs to be accountable and available to Congress and the American public.”
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Obama’s czar class, however, operates by different rules and different ethics.

CAROL BROWNER: ETHICALLY CHALLENGED ENERGY CZAR

In December 2008, the Obama White House wheeled out yet another moldy old Clinton/Gore corruptocrat to serve in the administration of Hope and Change. Obama named Carol Browner, a neon green extremist who headed the Environmental Protection Agency from 1993 to 2000 and served as former Senator Al Gore’s legislative director, to the post of “Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change.” The control freaks preferred the title “Energy Czar.” Perhaps they should have called her “Energy Commissar” given her membership in a Socialist International organ called the Commission for a Sustainable World Society. By February 2009, she had already announced radical plans to declare carbon-dioxide emissions a danger to the public—a move that could potentially subject not just power and chemical plants, refineries, and vehicles, but also schools, hospitals, and any other emitters of carbon dioxide to costly new regulations and litigation.
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Initially, the White House pegged the cost of the cap-and-trade program supported by Browner at $646 billion over eight years. In March 2009, Senate staffers learned the true cost would be closer to $2 trillion.
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The Browner appointment (which, like other czar appointments, bypassed the Senate confirmation process) came despite concerns about her ideological zealotry. As the
Washington Examiner
reported, the Socialist International organization responded to exposure of Browner’s membership by scrubbing its web site to remove Browner’s photo and biography.
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Such whitewashing is par for the course for Browner. On her last day as Clinton’s EPA chief, nearly eight years ago, Browner oversaw the destruction of agency computer files in brazen violation of a federal judge’s order requiring the agency to preserve its records. This from a public official who bragged about her tenure: “One of the things I’m the proudest of at EPA is the work we’ve done to expand the public’s right to know.”
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