Goldman Sachs, Lockheed pay Congress supercommittee members in charge of cutting budget

Keeping things honest, Washington style.

Deep-pocketed corporate interest are writing big checks to members of the supercommittee, the group of 12 senators and members of Congress who have been tasked with coming up with a plan to cut over $1 trillion from the budget in the next decade.

Ten members of the committee got $83,000 from some of the biggest corporate donors in the country in the three-week period in August that is covered in the latest federal election filings, according to a new analysis by the Sunlight Foundation.

Supercommittee rakes in corporate donations

• [liquidstar]

  It is just possible that this “super” committee will be known in the future as the group that destroyed the U.S.

  • [.. .__.]

    Their flesh will taste delicious.

• [Joe F]

  Word on the street is that they rule the world.

• [jennybean42]

  in b4 “They are just speaking their mind as people.” and “Why do you HATE the job creators???”

  Sigh. Everything is broken.

  • [C Karen Stopford]

    Who precisely has created what jobs?  I keep hearing about job creators – you might as well be talking about Sasquatch or Nessie for all we’ve seen!  Get out of your fantasy world hun….

• [Gregory Boyer]

  $83,000 is an interesting number. To me, that says the budget for bribes was $1,000,000 split 12 was, and two of the committee members turned down the money.

  “Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. and Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., were the only members of the committee who did not receive donations.”

  • [Mordicai]

    Woah, basic math blowing it up at the mic!  That is a pretttttttty compelling analysis there.

• [rwmj]

  It’s amazing how little money is needed.  $83,000 per member is peanuts, a few % of a banker’s bonus.

• [Jeffrey Baker]

  I find it interesting that you linked to the short re-write on salon.com, with the interstitial video advert, instead of the primary source at the Sunlight Foundation, with no ads.  This is the Internet: it’s OK to cut out the middleman.

  • [Mark_Frauenfelder]

    Did you click on the word “analysis?” Did you notice that the quote is from the Salon article, which I read first? The answer to both questions is probably yes, but you chose to ignore it so you could make a snarky point.

• [we_the_people324]

  So, remind me, how exactly do we get our congresspeoples to write a law criminalizing this type of conflict of interest? Oh yeah… this is America, we don’t worry about those things. We have problems like Mexicans stealing out jobs, dangerous drugs & our kids, sanctity of marriage, homosexual agendas, abortion wars, and a million other petty issues to keep us distracted.

  Ladies and gentlemen, the shit has already hit the fan, we were just looking the other way so the other half of us we refuse to look at is the side that took the flak. as usual.

• [Scott Stadum]

  sunlightfoundation.com/opensupercongress/ needs some help stopping this!

• [surreality]

  Can someone remind me why, precisely, this is legal? I need to know where to direct my anger.

  • [Stefan Jones]

    Bribery by corporations is free speech.

• [donovan acree]

  Short of removing every single member of Congress, there is nothing we as voters can do about this.
  If you vote Republican or Democrat, you are part of the problem.

  • [Robin goodfellow]

     Note in Gregory Boyer’s earlier comment “Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. and Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., were the only members of the committee who did not receive donations.”  These two guys are spiffy and show we don’t need to remove every single member of Congress.  Just ones at the corporate trough. 
    And what exactly is your solution?  Encourage everyone not to vote?  That won’t have negative consequences.  I mean who needs abortion, gay rights, unemployment benefits, healthcare or anything else?  The system is imperfect but the solution is not to boycott it. It’s better to try to fix it from both the inside(voting) and the outside(Occupy Wall Street) and go out of your way to support candidates that don’t suck.

    • [donovan acree]

      A solution? take a look at http://www.blowoutcongress.com/
      We need a complete turnover of our congress. That is the only way to be sure.

• [Oliver Schmieding]

  so, basically you are saying that the american political system is THAT broken ?

  neither the giving nor the receiving end has to answer for such obvious…eh..looking for the correct word here…anyway, it’s a crime. legally (at least here in germany) and morally (worldwide, i’d like to believe).  

  *heh* i think i wanted to say “mafia-esque” :)

• [atimoshenko]

  So instead of governments silencing citizens, top corporations drown them out with cash. What a wonderful world we live in.

• [eyeballtickler]

  For those wondering why the Occupy Wall Street protests are happening, please refer to this committee.  It’s almost like these clowns aren’t even afraid of being found out by their constituents because their campaigns are already taken care of.

• [PJDK]

  If this was happening in Britain these guys’ faces would be all over the papers (remember cash for questions/tobacco advertising/cash for peerages…)

  But there is this weird politeness in America.  Even here at Boing Boing there’s no mention in the article over these guys names, no pictures of them, nothing.  If tomorrow one of them says something on the news I won’t think “that money raking bastard”, he’ll just be some suit talking about something.  

  This is how to win this fight, everytime a story like this comes up, don’t just wash your hands of the thing.  Post their pictures up and say “this man takes bribes!”, when he’s up in the primaries say “vote for some other guy, that one takes bribes!”.

  The way things are everyone seems to get a vague impression that everyone is on the take, then they see a bunch of adverts.  Start naming them then every advert people see will ring a bell in their heads saying “didn’t he take $83,000 from evil corp, that’s what paid for this crappy advert that is wasting my precious House watching time”

  Although this is corruption, it’s democratic corruption.  The money they are taking is to win votes.  $83,000 is worth what 10 tv commercials (no idea, vague guess)?  So make sure that when they take the money they get more than 10 commercials worth of negative publicity.  Suddenly taking money is a net negative for an aspiring politician.

  The great thing about primaries is you can vote out the corrupt incumbent without voting for the “wrong” party. 

• [William George]

  This quote should be engraved on every government building in every democracy  in the world as a reminder to us all to not be like this;

  “Now, there’s one thing you might have noticed I don’t complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? 

  They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. 

  If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. 

  There’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: ‘The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.’”

  -George Carlin

  • [Eric Rucker]

    So, the answer is to launch nukes. Targeting our own population centers.

    On a serious note, with our political climate being, “vote for the lesser of two evils”, I’m wondering if a slight tweak to the voting systems would work, that would be simpler than approval or instant runoff, with the drawback that it doesn’t support write-ins.

    Least votes wins. So, you vote for the politician that you want in office the LEAST, of the choices, and the winner is who is opposed the least, rather than the lesser of two evils.

    You almost guarantee third parties that way.

• [Niall Litchfield]

  I like Gregory Boyer’s comment,  just a couple of remarks though. 

  First the linked Salon.com story details an imbalance of money taken by different committee members and second (but possibly just rounded by the press) $1m/12 != $83,000 – the extra 333 doesn’t matter much in the scheme of things but taken together I’d say that the payments were tailored to the representative involved. 

  None of this of course matters that much, the problem is the apparent bribery, not the amount.