Not since Teapot Dome has this country been in such a governmental mess. Even Richard Nixon couldn’t come close to the sewer slime we have in Washington these days. How have we managed to avoid this kind of slime for so many years? And why are we back in a similar situation?
The comparison to Teapot Dome isn’t accidental. There are more comparisons than just the fact that both administrations were Republican – though that is significant. This administration, like the Harding Administration, is staffed with people who have no compunctions at all against letting their high-rolling backers suck up loose federal bucks. On top of that, they took an axe to regulations so that the top one percent could take all they can grab from the lower classes in here at home. (That’s how we got into this home lending crisis that’s about to drag us under.)
In Teapot Dome it was leases of oil in federal reserves for backers in exchange for appointment to high office, prestige, and interest free loans.
In our day, it is unopposed contracts for various services in Iraq and other places (read Halliburton, KBR, and Blackwater) in exchange for high office (Someday it is likely that the behind-the-scenes process by which the last two elections were rigged will be revealed.), prestige and, most likely, future rewards. Instead of oil leases, we have opportunities provided by war, which is to my mind a much more egregious offense than the Teapot Dome schemers could ever have imagined.
Ultimately, Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, was fined (a paltry $100,000 so he got to keep the other $300,000 involved.) and became the first presidential cabinet member ever sent to prison. Another significant outcome of Teapot Dome was a Supreme Court case which, for the first time, clearly established the Congressional right to subpoena witnesses and obtain their testimony.
Pray to whatever you believe in that this power gets exercised to the max one of these days and some more muckety-mucks get a free federal vacation, but you might hedge your bets by voting only for progressive candidates the next time we get a chance to rebuild Congress.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi
Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR
The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle
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