Why It's Tough To Have Faith In Government
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By Gary [email protected]
You know, feel good about it. Feel like they were doing the right thing for the people of America.
But no.
A couple things I stumbled across this week just really illustrate how messed up things truly are in Washington.
The first thing is kind of under the radar, but I was perusing the Scripps Howard News Service the other day and I came across a release from the American Small Business League.
Seems there is an arm of the government called the Federal Procurement Data System - Next Generation. What it does is track government contracts. Basically, it watches which companies are getting our tax dollars.
The ASBL, as a big advocate of small business, thinks small businesses are the true incubators of jobs. Just last week, the US Department of Labor announced that unemployment hit 9.8 percent. But the ASBL notes that if you include frustrated workers who have dropped off unemployment rolls, taken part-time work, the rate could be as high as 17 percent.
So ASBL thinks the government should be sending contracts to small businesses to help create jobs. Makes sense.
Well, apparently not to the government, which continues to award billions of dollars in small-business contracts to giant corporations which are more likely to outsource or send jobs overseas.
According to the most recent FPDS data, the top recipient of Obama administration small-business contracts was a Fortune 500 firm called Textron. It got $775.7 million in federal small business contracts. Then there's Ssangyong Corp., headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. They got more than $254 million in small business contracts. Finmeccanica SpA, which is headquartered in Italy with 73,000 employees, got more than $283 million.
In February of this year, Bechtel Bettis Inc. got a $128 million small business contract from the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration.
Here are some other firms included in the Obama administration's small business data:
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, AT&T, 3M Corp., Xerox, Dell Computer, Booz Allen Hamilton, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Staples, Office Depot, British Aerospace (BAE), Rolls-Royce and French firm Thales Communications.
This has been investigated many times by the US Small Business Administration Office of Inspector General. In fact, one report referred to the small-business contract diversions to giant corporations as, "One of the most important challenges facing the SBA and the entire federal government today."
And it's not like President Obama is unaware, because when he was campaigning in February 2008 he said, "It is time to end the diversion of federal small business contracts to corporate giants."
Yeah, do that. Great idea.
To date, however, his administration hasn't come up with any laws or policies to deal with the problem. I know, I know, he's got a lot going on.
All of this led ASBL President Lloyd Chapman to say, "It's hard not to question President Obama's sincerity about creating jobs when he is giving billions of dollars a month in federal small business contracts to corporate giants around the world. Until we stop this problem, unemployment is going to continue to rise."
I tend to agree.
But as long as lobbyists for huge corporations are stuffing cash into the pockets of lawmakers, I doubt anything is going to change.
*****[[In-content Ad]]The other thing is the Charlie Rangel situation. Rangel is a Democrat congressman from New York.
Here's what he's been up to, according to an investigation by the House Ethics Committee (House Ethics? Talk about your glaring oxymoron.):
- failure to report more than $1 million in outside income and $3 million in business transactions as required by the House,
- failure to disclose at least $650,000 in assets he had previously failed to list on his House financial disclosure forms,
- failure to disclose to the IRS or on his financial disclosure forms $75,000 in rental income for a beach villa in the Dominican Republic,
- violation of state laws by claiming three primary residences and broke municipal laws by maintaining four rent-controlled apartments,
- violation of House rules by using congressional letterhead to solicit donations for an education center bearing his name at City College of New York, and
- delinquency in paying his property taxes on two New Jersey parcels and failure to report the sale of a $1.3 million brownstone.
Problem is, well, aside from the obvious, that Rangel is the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means committee. (Ironically, that's the committee that oversees tax and finance laws.)
Some House members in the minority thought maybe he shouldn't be chairman anymore. So a Republican House member offered a resolution to remove him.
On a 246 to 153 vote, the Dems procedurally voted instead to move the resolution to the Ethics Committee, which, as I said, is already investigating. It was a basic "sweep it under the rug" move.
The Ethics Committee has been looking into this for months, and even though the violations are pretty obvious, there has been no action. Committee members are totally dragging their feet.
But why wouldn't they?
According to CBS News, since the ethics probe into Rangel's tomfoolery began last year, Rangel has given campaign contributions to 119 members of Congress - including three of the five Dems on the Ethics Committee investigating him.
Nice.
Now, I want to be clear. I am confident you could rearrange the Rs and Ds in this Rangel nonsense. By that I mean I am quite sure the GOP would pull the same crap given a similar set of circumstances.
There, doesn't that make you feel better about it?
You know, feel good about it. Feel like they were doing the right thing for the people of America.
But no.
A couple things I stumbled across this week just really illustrate how messed up things truly are in Washington.
The first thing is kind of under the radar, but I was perusing the Scripps Howard News Service the other day and I came across a release from the American Small Business League.
Seems there is an arm of the government called the Federal Procurement Data System - Next Generation. What it does is track government contracts. Basically, it watches which companies are getting our tax dollars.
The ASBL, as a big advocate of small business, thinks small businesses are the true incubators of jobs. Just last week, the US Department of Labor announced that unemployment hit 9.8 percent. But the ASBL notes that if you include frustrated workers who have dropped off unemployment rolls, taken part-time work, the rate could be as high as 17 percent.
So ASBL thinks the government should be sending contracts to small businesses to help create jobs. Makes sense.
Well, apparently not to the government, which continues to award billions of dollars in small-business contracts to giant corporations which are more likely to outsource or send jobs overseas.
According to the most recent FPDS data, the top recipient of Obama administration small-business contracts was a Fortune 500 firm called Textron. It got $775.7 million in federal small business contracts. Then there's Ssangyong Corp., headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. They got more than $254 million in small business contracts. Finmeccanica SpA, which is headquartered in Italy with 73,000 employees, got more than $283 million.
In February of this year, Bechtel Bettis Inc. got a $128 million small business contract from the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration.
Here are some other firms included in the Obama administration's small business data:
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, AT&T, 3M Corp., Xerox, Dell Computer, Booz Allen Hamilton, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Staples, Office Depot, British Aerospace (BAE), Rolls-Royce and French firm Thales Communications.
This has been investigated many times by the US Small Business Administration Office of Inspector General. In fact, one report referred to the small-business contract diversions to giant corporations as, "One of the most important challenges facing the SBA and the entire federal government today."
And it's not like President Obama is unaware, because when he was campaigning in February 2008 he said, "It is time to end the diversion of federal small business contracts to corporate giants."
Yeah, do that. Great idea.
To date, however, his administration hasn't come up with any laws or policies to deal with the problem. I know, I know, he's got a lot going on.
All of this led ASBL President Lloyd Chapman to say, "It's hard not to question President Obama's sincerity about creating jobs when he is giving billions of dollars a month in federal small business contracts to corporate giants around the world. Until we stop this problem, unemployment is going to continue to rise."
I tend to agree.
But as long as lobbyists for huge corporations are stuffing cash into the pockets of lawmakers, I doubt anything is going to change.
*****[[In-content Ad]]The other thing is the Charlie Rangel situation. Rangel is a Democrat congressman from New York.
Here's what he's been up to, according to an investigation by the House Ethics Committee (House Ethics? Talk about your glaring oxymoron.):
- failure to report more than $1 million in outside income and $3 million in business transactions as required by the House,
- failure to disclose at least $650,000 in assets he had previously failed to list on his House financial disclosure forms,
- failure to disclose to the IRS or on his financial disclosure forms $75,000 in rental income for a beach villa in the Dominican Republic,
- violation of state laws by claiming three primary residences and broke municipal laws by maintaining four rent-controlled apartments,
- violation of House rules by using congressional letterhead to solicit donations for an education center bearing his name at City College of New York, and
- delinquency in paying his property taxes on two New Jersey parcels and failure to report the sale of a $1.3 million brownstone.
Problem is, well, aside from the obvious, that Rangel is the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means committee. (Ironically, that's the committee that oversees tax and finance laws.)
Some House members in the minority thought maybe he shouldn't be chairman anymore. So a Republican House member offered a resolution to remove him.
On a 246 to 153 vote, the Dems procedurally voted instead to move the resolution to the Ethics Committee, which, as I said, is already investigating. It was a basic "sweep it under the rug" move.
The Ethics Committee has been looking into this for months, and even though the violations are pretty obvious, there has been no action. Committee members are totally dragging their feet.
But why wouldn't they?
According to CBS News, since the ethics probe into Rangel's tomfoolery began last year, Rangel has given campaign contributions to 119 members of Congress - including three of the five Dems on the Ethics Committee investigating him.
Nice.
Now, I want to be clear. I am confident you could rearrange the Rs and Ds in this Rangel nonsense. By that I mean I am quite sure the GOP would pull the same crap given a similar set of circumstances.
There, doesn't that make you feel better about it?
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