New York Times Story Ties Abramoff to Norquist
Scandal expanding toward White House?
In a very positive step in the right direction, the New York Times ran a front page story yesterday ("Link to Lobbyist Brings Scrutiny to G.O.P. Figure," May 23, 2005) tying indicted lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, to non-indicted lobbyist, Grover Norquist.
They are quite the pair of influence peddlers, Abramoff and Norquist are. Norquist is the man people are thinking about when they say they feel like they need to shower after a visit to Washington and Abramoff was so clever at facilitating the selling off of our democracy, and steering the bigger cut to the Republicans, that the Wall Street Journal ran a glowing front page article about him, praising him as a "GOP stalwart."
Norquist is a long-time enemy of immigration moderates; he and his stable of lesser stars have lobbied for and with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, American Businesses for Legal Immigration, and for the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands.
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Now, by the sheerest of coincidences, in the last election cycle, Chris Cannon's campaign paid Janus Merritt Strategies, the firm Grover Norquist started with David Safavian, Cannon's chief of staff in 2001, $5,960 for "Campaign Consulting & Fundraising Exp." Also during the 2004 cycle, Cannon's campaign paid $5,614 for fundraising expenses to Williams Mullen, the influence-peddling company that was in the process of buying Norquist's influence-peddling company.
We had a crushing response to Norquist ready to submit when he got word that word had come from higher up not to print any more articles from him that mentioned Chris Cannon.
I don't know what it is about corporations, but, as it turns out, News Corp, the foreign corporation that owns Fox News, has a political action committee, too. Just like Viacom! News Corp's vehicle for pooling its employees' political views is called News America Holdings.
In the 2004 cycle, News America Holdings gave $5,000 to Cannon for Congress. Undoubtedly, the money this particular foreign multinational gave to this particular American legislator was given out of love for democracy, and a desire to see higher quality political advertising. There was no relation whatsoever between the investment the corporation had in Chris Cannon and the multimedia megacorporation using its power to squelch our rebuttal, while allowing Norquist to publish lies (which Cannon, of course, distributed throughout his district, maybe using the money News America Holdings had given him, and possibly throwing the election--we were on a roll just then).
It was all a matter of pure coincidence, and not the sickening perversion of our democracy that it seems.
Just yesterday, on the day the New York Times connected a few dots on a truly dangerous and huge rogue element in our society, I heard a self-congratulating Senator speaking rapturously over having saved the filibuster. The Senator, one of the most irresponsible of an irresponsible bunch on immigration, and a corporate teat-sucker of the first order, repeated the familiar story of Ben Franklin saying, in answer to the old woman who approached him after the Constitutionl Convention asking what the Founders had given the people, "A Republic, madam, if you can keep it."
I've heard that story many times, but only as interesting history. I never before thought it would be our generation that failed.