by Paul Wylie

Created on: September 02, 2008

America's Best Interest Not On Government's Agenda

Have you ever come across legislation that you find incomprehensible? Ever wondered just how in the heck someone could have voted for a bill that seems, at face value, to be against the interests of the American people? Well, you're not alone. Several citizen oversight groups such as The Project For Government Oversight have been wondering the same thing, and are determined to get to the bottom of it all. Let's give them a few places to start.

As Congress tells the American people that they are reforming Washington, and making it harder for government workers to lobby for the industries they used to work for by instituting a 'cooling off' period of one year, what they failed to make public is that although the new rules state that one can not lobby the office in which they worked for one year, the slicksters conveniently left out any provision for lobbying the office right next door! And they also made a provision for government workers to obtain something called an Ethics Waiver. A what?

It works like this. Say you work for Congressman A. as their health care liaison. You want to go to work for the drug industry as a lobbyist for a lot of money. You leave the Congressman's office, go to K Street, and start lobbying the health care liaison of Congressman B, right next door. According to the pull the wool over everyone's eyes ethics reform, that's perfectly acceptable.

The most liberal media publication in the world, (I'm joking of course), the Wall Street Journal, has itself begun to decry the practice, noting that Tom Sculley, who was the person who wrote the rules on who profits from Medicare and Medicaid services, as the former head of Medicare and Medicaid Services, has just taken a job as the head of lobbyist law firm Alston and Bird LLP's health care division. Who would be in a better position than the person who wrote the rules, to help the firm help their clients obtain lucrative government contracts in the newly privatized Medicare and medicaid areas?

Alston also scooped up Colin Rosky, the Senate Finance Committee's head staffer on the Medicare Bill. And oh, I almost forgot. Bob Dole now works as a paid lobbyist for them too.

The game also catches Congress people in it's snare. Representative Bill Tauzin from Louisiana, a key player in the writing and passing of the new Medicare and Medicaid giveaways to the insurance industry, is reportedly considering a $1 million plus offer from PHRMA, the drug industry's

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