Saturday, April 23, 2011

Lobbying and bribery determine military contracts

For Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, the past few weeks have been champagne time. His firm, the Podesta Group, represents the winners of two of the most high-priced and fiercely fought lobbying battles in years.

The firm’s clients include the Boeing Co., which last week beat out EADS North America for a $35 billion defense contract to build a new generation of aerial tankers.

Podesta also lobbies for United Technologies Corp., the parent company of Pratt & Whitney, which won a crucial Congressional battle when the House voted to deny funding for a competing fighter jet engine bid by General Electric and Rolls-Royce.

While there could be several more twists before the contracts are finalized, experts already are tallying up the victors and losers.Roll Call Lobbying
They even have web site on how to bribe corrupt Senators. Then we have this:
In what may be the strongest signal yet of the new pro-labor orientation of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama, the agency filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to force Boeing to bring an airplane production line back to its unionized facilities in Washington State instead of moving the work to a nonunion plant in South Carolina.NYT

What should we think?
All of this stuff smells of corruption in the age of the internet. We can sit here and post details about the corrupt socialists on either side. We are not forcing Congress into default because they are corrupt, but forcing default because the internet provides much better and efficient methods to allocate government goods. Default is simply the mechanism, the only mechanism, to accomplish a restructuring of government. It sounds bad because rich bankers scare us, but default is simply the name we ascribe to government restructuring.

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