Just plain wrong

Be sure to check out this story by my colleague Alex Leary in our Tallahassee bureau. It's about a "political committee" established by a prominent member of the Legislature that has taken in nearly $100,000 in contributions from lobbyists and corporations since the Legislature's session began in March.

It's illegal for members to accept campaign contributions during a session -- the idea being that you ought not be able to shower a legislator with cash while he or she is voting on the laws of the state. But it's perfectly legal for committees established by those same legislators to raise dough.

Hence, as Leary reports, the committee of Rep. Stan Mayfield, R-Vero Beach, has taken $20,000 from Progress Energy (remember the "energy bill" that contains many favors for the electric industry), and $20,000 from Florida Power & Light, to name a couple.

Several members of the Legislature have committees like this, with innocuous names like "Floridians for So-and-So Reform." They are basically devices that allow interests with a lot of money to evade campaign-contribution limits.

Comments

[guy]

I hate to be the only or first responce to this caption but I think that thas subject is probably the main cause of what is causing our country to circle toward the drain.
If this is not a felony, it shows the stupidity of our elected officials and the need for term limits. Progress Energy should not be left looking smug here either.
Someone should take a fall there also.

[Rich]

Guy I agree. Campaign finance reform is the biggest issue concerning our government. Not sure term limits would do anything to change the system. This is nothing more than government bought and paid for by special interests and lobbyists.

Not sure that buying votes during session is any worse than buying them before or after. Fat private sector lobby jobs are waiting for these guys after public office. Kind of like Cheney running Haliburton before he takes this country to war. Just in reverse. Huge conflicts of interest.

[Larry]

You guys make good points, but you and I sitting here chatting about it ain't gonna change nothing. The creeps in Tallahassee and government in general, know they can get away with it. Why? Because the apathetic voters just go to the polls and continue to elect the fools. It's the people of this once great nation that are, thanks Guy, letting us circle toward the proverbial drain.

Larry, correction....not even enough APATHETIC voters go to the polls...look at our last city council elections. Hopefully all three of you attend public meetings available on one or another topics that truly interest you........and make the effort to stir up the populace to think, pay attention and VOTE. As I said on another of Howard's blogs recently........we need, each and every one of us who KNOWS we're in big trouble in this country to get up, get out, and PARTICIPATE in a public manner.....which will hopefully encourage participation in others.......

Lorraine

[Rich]

Voting won't cure what ails us. The fact is the system is broken and nobody with the power we give them by voting them in is willing to change it. They work for the people who fund their campaigns not the citizens who vote them in. They don't want campaign finance reform.

People are fed up with this system. That's why we have voter apathy. That's why politics attract some unsavory characters.

The internet will change things. An independent, who breaks free from the 2 party system, will raise money from the people online (ex. Ron Paul, or even Obama recently). They will not be held hostage by the special interests that fund all democrat and republican campaigns.

They will be true public servants unlike Clinton who makes $100M after leaving office or Cheney who makes $50M with Haliburton.

It will start at the top and work it's way down. People are ready for true government reform. $100 from 100M americans is $10B in possible campaign contributions. It's starting now.

We will leave our kids a much better form of representative government. It's all a part of the evolutionary process.

[Kay]

For what purpose does a commitee even need contributions?

[guy]

I think the press and TV stations are a lot to blame for the decline in ethics.
Hey look at the TV right now and try to watch a news station that doesn't have "Reverand Wright" ranting away.
There are much more important issues out there.
It's no longer 5 minutes of fame for idiots, its 1000 hours.

[guy]

The commitees for any type of action should be drawn by lots not by political parties.
Your so right Kay!!!!!!

[Chris Jenkins]

Unbelievable. And yet, not so unbelievable. When are we finally going to stop being sheeple and start holding our politicians accountable?

[Farmer]

This November would be a good a time as any to start, Chris!

This Election could be a huge "We've Had Enough" signal... by voting every incumbent out.

[Smokey]

WHAT!... a dirty, corrupt, sneaky Floriduuuh politician!

... why, I never heard of such a thing. Good thing we took care of that trucknuts issue, aye boys?

[Jon McPhee]

I was once-upon-a-time a government attorney, who lived and worked through the Reagan Revolution, the Contract On -- oops, With America and all those sucker punches planned and executed under the guidance of people like Newt Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation's book, "Mandate For Leadership."

Mr. Troxler alludes above to one of many fundamental problems that may be part of a dead-end death wish by our species. That's the demise of the "rule of law."

We are taught to believe in that principle. But it's a snare and a delusion, if you pay any attention at all to things like Congress, which exempted its own personal coal-fired power plant from the Clean Air Act, and Dick "I'm In Charge Here" Cheney's take on the role of the vice president, and the legalisms attending waterboarding and "rendition" and so on.

We various voters have installed over the years an Imperial court, in state and federal capitols, complete with the special pleaders, sycophants, courtesans (some of whom conveniently hang themselves), and huge egos and ambitions. The executive power concentrates, the legislature pursues its own private pleasures, taxes flow in like blood, and the culture slowly or quickly dies.

The "rule of law" gets warped into the power of unaccountable, toe-tapping, Page-turning people to exempt themselves from the law everyone else has to obey. Therefore, of course, what we do is "illegal," and what they do is not, because they wrote it that way. It's too complicated for anyone to keep track of and really understand, though Mr. Troxler and a few others do work at it.

I got to watch as this process accelerated, as statutes sneakily warped beyond recognition, as lobbyists began to brag about the language "we" wrote into bills that became law, as the enforcement and regulatory apparatus of the '70s and '80s, with its own creaks and groans of course, ground to an almost complete halt.

There are whole collections of silly laws, from trucknutz, to anything by Rhonda Storms, to prohibitions about riding a horse backward down Main Street on a Sunday.

It would be good if most people could agree on a fundamental organizing principle that everything could be measured against. Something like the Golden Rule, maybe. Maybe then there might be a chance for the, ahem, change that people seem to crave.

But we all like the idea that the-legal-fix-is-in might someday favor us. So we praise our Senators and Congressmen for bringing billions in pork to our district, by writing "earmarks" into, what else, Law.

Ear marking, by the way, was one of the punishments reserved for thieves in olden days. Maybe it could be revived and written into law for what goes on inside the Beltway and in Tallahassee these days?

Naawww.

[Candidman]

Here is the back story, Terry Rhodes who is Charlie Bronsons Chief of Staff and a bunch of her posse hooked Mayfield up. They have been not so secretly working for Mayfield to help him replace Bronson. Thank you for writing about these un-etheical slobs...Trey McCarley

[Allan]

May 4, 2008: Well, gee whiz, what do you expect from capitalist predators and their bought-and-paid-for capitalist politicians? There is no justice under capitalism, guys.

The way the system works is, all profit comes from labor. All wealth comes from labor. It wasn't Karl Marx who originated that view. That view originated with Adam Smith, and was held to right here in this country in both the 18th and 19th Centuries by many great Americans as well, such as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin. Smith wrote of it in 1776 in "Wealth of Nations." Karl Marx, the revolutionary socialist of the 19th Century, was a great genius and critic of the capitalist system, but he, too, accepted this view that many earlier capitalist economic and political thinkers had held to.

Politics, as the early 20th Century American socialist activist and thinker, Daniel DeLeon said, is concentrated economics. Marx taught that capital starts out decentralized, then gradually over historical time, centralizes into fewer and fewer and fewer hands. Today, it's gotten to where, at least according to this 1996 New York Times article, something like 537 individual human beings on the planet earth own 60 percent of the assets. And that was in 1996; today, in 2008, 12 years later, it's even more concentrated and centralized.

And what happens is, politics simply follows after economics. That is, as capital becomes more and more centralized, politics centralizes more and more to "regulate" or "rationalize" or "oversee" that process.

We, however, are the wage workers. We produce the profits. But we don't see or get back most of the fruits of our labor. Most of the fruits of our labor go to the ruling class of big owners who make their real decisions in private clubs and in private boardrooms.

Then, later on, legislators, senators, congresspeople, presidents, military people, follow after and "do what has to be done" to insure the handful of super-rich propertied and possessing classes of capitalist owners are kept in charge.

Big lobbyists simply are employees working for big capitalists. That's all. It's a big, bipartisan shell game.

And no matter who wins in the capitalist elections every 2 years or 4 years or 6 years or 8 years, the vast majority, we wage workers (and we're wage workers whether we're paid a salary or a wage) lose.

We own primarily one and only one thing: our labor power, our ability to work. We sell it to capitalists -- to employers, bosses. They sell the product of our labor on the market. They extort from that part of what they get back, and instead of us getting back the full fruits of our labor, we only get back a small portion.

That process is called, exploitation. It's not a moral epithet. It's the entire basis for how the entire capitalist system works.

And we can call ourselves "self-employed" or we can call ourselves "salaried" or we can call ourselves "employees" or we can call ourselves "workers," but it's all the same to the capitalist employers or bosses. They live off the labor we do, and then, when they no longer think we're useful, they throw us on the scrap heap to die. Their view becomes when we get too old, "Die, you're no longer useful."

That's how capitalism works.

Marx was right on the money -- spot on -- on that issue.