I sometimes miss things in emails - we all do that, don't we - among spam and in accounts not accessed as frequently as others when we use multiple email addresses.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, emailed me its "CREW Cuts" February 2009 [Issue #22], via an email service you can subscribe to from the CREW homepage,
http://www.citizensforethics.org/
Issue 22, of CREW Cuts reports:
On January 12th, CREW released Revolving Door, a first-of-its-kind report on the private-sector activities of 24 former Bush administration officials. The study demonstrates that the "revolving door" in our nation's capital remains wide open. Many of these former cabinet officials are receiving lucrative compensation for joining the companies they once regulated.
Among other startling facts, Revolving Door reveals:
• 17 former officials hold positions with a total of 119 companies;
• 17 former officials hold positions with 65 companies that lobby the federal government;
• 15 former officials hold positions with 40 companies that lobby those officials' former agencies, and;
• 9 former officials hold positions with 15 companies that began or resumed lobbying the former officials' agencies after those officials joined the companies.
By issuing the report, CREW hopes to shed a public light onto one of Washington's favorite pastimes - turning public sector influence into private sector wealth. While the actions of these former officials are legal, they epitomize the most dishonorable conduct of some of Washington's most powerful players.
Learn more
Read the report
Read the McClatchy Newspapers article
[italics emphasis added] Beyond the revolving door, there is a report of crass astroturf masquerading as grassroots:
On January 14th, CREW launched BermanExposed.org, a site dedicated to exposing the front group network of Richard Berman, one of Washington's most notorious hired guns.
Berman, through his public relations firm Berman and Company, has been a fierce and ruthless defender of the tobacco, alcohol, restaurant and tanning industries by publicly disparaging union groups, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and other groups that raise awareness of childhood obesity, the minimum wage, the dangers of smoking and tanning, drunk driving and other issues.
In operating at least 15 industry-funded front groups and projects, such as the Center for Union Facts, an anti-union propaganda organization, Berman has become enormously wealthy. He funnels big-business money through his anti-consumer and anti-safety groups to his PR firm. Berman and seven of his employees hold 49 positions in his myriad of organizations.
Berman's sleazy campaigns have attempted to muddle the public discourse surrounding a range of vitally important health, safety, and consumer issues. As BermanExposed.org demonstrates, Berman has only one true goal: to be the best snake-oil salesman ever.
Learn more
Visit BermanExposed.org
Read the Huffington Post article
I had posted earlier at least twice about "astroturf" vs. honest grassroots, here and then here, the latter being a catch of the Berman machine even before CREW put the sunshine on its reprehensible nature. Both of those earlier posts hammer on the correct nail, that's certain.
_______UPDATE________
I was hoping for a comment, that the revolving door thing was biased, showing only one party's move to the privateer spoils when voted away from the direct official spoils of election victory incumbancy. Biased is what the report is, and I now have to say it myself. For total credibliity this CREW group should be a bipartisan watchdog, or one should exist. In Anoka County we have Anoka County Watchdog, "Always On The Watch," because Harold cares, even with his politics shaded a way he makes no pretenses of hiding. Yet Harold and I from opposite ends of the general political spectrum are both against waste and skeptical of the Dan E. and Elwyn T. situation - and of the Anoka County old boys cabal at their worse.
Daschle's unfitness and removal from consideration for the medical reform leadership effort, if there's really to be one in the Obama administration and not just lip service, stands out.
Both parties do it.
The worse to me is that Independence Party insider, Elwyn Tinklenberg, who has been the poster child of a life after the pulpit of in-and-out public-and-private money making hand over fist -- the worse of the revolving door in Minnesota unless I have missed something even more egregious. I doubt I have.
Hence, I treasure this one image above all others, for what it admits beyond what may have been denied and allowed and winked at during a CFB hearing:
______FURTHER UPDATE_____
Thanks to letfreedomringblog.com webmaster Gary Gross, for these links, HERE and HERE, again fitting with CREW's lack of bipartisanship in its range of critical cackling. Crookedness, or the appearance of situations suggesting even a mere appearance of a possibility of crookedness should be equally disdained and denounced by all - there is no partisan right to wrongful spoils, in office or via the private sector, based on former actions and service in office.
It's wrong, whoever does it.