November 4, 2009
And we call politicians public servants why? They seem to only serve themselves.

Posted at 12:06 pm, in: Corruption
Tags: Congress, Dick Lugar, Lobbyists

Where there’s a will there’s a way, and when it comes to politicians getting free travel, food, and gifts from lobbyists, there is always a will:

In February, Sen. Dick Lugar and his wife took a $16,000 trip to Jordan.

In April, Lugar and his son John took a $9,300 trip to Valencia, Spain.

In May, Lugar and his wife took a $10,000 trip to Croatia.

And in August, Lugar and his wife took a $6,500 trip to Banff, a tourist hot spot tucked in Canada’s vast mountainous terrain.

Total cost to Lugar and his family for the travel, lodging and food: zero.

The travel costs for the Indiana Republican and his family members were picked up by the nonprofit Aspen Institute, a group synonymous on Capitol Hill with paying for travel and lodging for members of Congress to attend seminars on public policy issues.

Two years after Congress toughened ethics laws that prevent lobbyists and corporations from paying for members’ trips, lawmakers are still seeing the world courtesy of other outside groups.

Although the trips are permissible because the money doesn’t come directly from lobbyists or corporations, the walls can be very thin. Some of the nonprofit groups that sponsor member travel are themselves funded by corporate sponsors, and the conferences that members attend on the groups’ dime often put them in direct contact with representatives of the corporate sponsors.

It must be nice to be a politician. The taxpayers pay for everything. They have awesome health insurance, with options (unlike the health insurance us peasants will be left with after the passage of the current “reform”). They vote themselves raises and increase their own budgets, as the rest of America suffers and is forced to face economic realities in their own lives and cut back. And, to top it all off, they get to take their families on a tour of the world without incurring any of the associated costs. And they call these people public servants? It would seem to me they only people they serve is themselves.