How much pork can you handle?

During the last day of the Nevada legislative session in June of 2007, two bills were brought forward. They consisted of all the special favors various Assemblymen and Senators had promised their friends, large donors, employers, and assorted puppet masters. I was one of the few Assemblymen who voted against it. My namesake in the Senate, State Senator Bob Beers, did not.

Senator Bob is not stupid. Actually he is one of the least stupid people I know. He was able to wrangle a multimillion dollar gift to Payroll Solutions, the company he served as vice president of sales. To cushion himself from conflict of interest charges he resigned that post. A further cushion from charges came when he got Senator Randal Townsend, the Reno clotheshorse/car salesman who represents his constituents from a penthouse condo in Las Vegas, to author the bill with another senator, Warren Hardy. With this bill, Payroll Solutions, a company deep into the accounts of the Nevada Casinos and developers, was handed the ability to run as a health insurance company without haveing to go through cumbersome licensing protocols, as well as its normal accounting business. Without the bill, it could have faced heavy fines and penalties for violating the law, which it was guilty of doing…until the after-the-fact legislation. Sound familiar?

What happens in Las Vegas does not stay in Las Vegas. The same goes for Nevada. On a far grander scale are the machinations that led to the current financial meltdown. Barack Obama and Acorn had a willing accomplice in Bill Clinton to begin this process. It makes Obama’s mention of McCain’s ties to the Keating five look like small potatoes.

Just how much pork can you handle? It seems the folks in Washington can’t get enough. We are finding out that those who couldn’t have their votes to pass the bail out bill bought were threatened. The Bush Administration even threatened some members of Congress with martial law if they refused to back the bill. Several accounting experts have tallied the actual liability to a mere 200 billion, rounded up. So where is the two trillion we’re hearing about coming from? Why did Bush have to twist Congress’ arm to write off nearly a trillion?

Well, it takes a lot of money to buy a vote. That’s why the Senate bill is so loaded with pork that it is dripping all over the taxpayer. I’m not sure what kids’ wooden arrows or Puerto Rican rum have to do with the US housing market, but I am sure we’ll hear about it. If you can get through the legalistic doubletalk in the inches-thick bill, you’ll find that nearly every U.S. senator added an earmark to it. They used the opportunity to pay off campaign favors and to cement future donations. Now Washington is the biggest mortgage holder in the country. Karl Marx actually wrote about that scenario as one of the needed actions to cement a socialist government. Early on, when I warned about this, a commenter said my assertion was absurd. No, I wasn’t being absurd; I was understating the potential danger.

Wall Street CEOs have committed crimes that would put ordinary citizens into federal prison for life. Most of congress has gone right along with them. The president of our country has now used threats of martial law to help protect his buddies in the penthouses and “conflict of interest” is obviously a natural condition in the senate. Senior citizens who were children in the early 30’s must be experiencing deja vu right now.