Catastrophe - Dick Morris [111]
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BLAGO’S CORRUPTION
The Chicago Tribune reports that a former agency director for Blagojevich admitted to federal prosecutors that he “bought his job, in part, with two $25,000 donations” to the Blagojevich campaign.389
A Chicago engineering firm “wrote two $25,000 checks in 2006 and, within months won $25.4 million in new state business.”390
A Chicago pharmacist said that “his $25,000 check to the governor’s campaign was the price tag for fixing a critical state audit of his drug store.”391
Six months after a Chicago attorney, Myron Cherry, gave the Blagojevich campaign the second of two $25,000 checks, “the state insurance agency hired his law firm as part of a team to negotiate a multi-state legal dispute over alleged fraud by insurance companies for which his firm was paid $900,000 in legal fees.”392
A Chicago architectural firm gave $25,000 and got a contract to revamp the “oases” on the Illinois Thruway. Then, when the contract got mired in bureaucracy, the firm kicked in another $50,000. After that, the project went ahead smoothly.393
Ali Ata, the director of the Illinois Finance Agency, pled guilty to lying to federal prosecutors when he denied that his $50,000 campaign donation was a reason for his getting the $127,000 job.394
ACS State & Local Solutions donated $25,000 and got $79 million in contracts, including one for “$15 million to oversee the disbursement of child-support checks.”395
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We’ll probably never know the full scope of his corruption, but what we do know makes quite a story.
And on and on. If Blagojevich had a job or a contract within his power to award, it seems, it was available in exchange for campaign contributions. The price? Twenty-five thousand dollars—not a princely sum, but a little here and a little there, and soon you’re talking about real money!
GOVERNOR ED RENDELL (D-PA)
At least they caught Blagojevich. As of this writing, another governor is still in office despite awarding no-bid contracts to special friends, former colleagues, and donors. Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, a former Democratic National Committee chairman, has come under withering media criticism for giving out legal and consulting contracts without bidding, but not without demanding favors from the recipients.
There was so much pressure in the state that Rendell finally signed a bill to ban pay-to-play contracts in Pennsylvania in March 2009.
But before the well dried up, Rendell took the process of fleecing the public one big step further when he started paying money to his friends and political allies—not only without bidding but without any contract at all! And guess what? The firm that got the contractless money was the very one where Rendell had worked before he became governor!
The Ballard Spahr law firm, where Rendell worked, got $773,000 from the state Department of Transportation without a contract. Why was there no bidding? Why no contract? According to Rendell, it was an emergency: the document Ballard had to sign to get paid after it had finished the work said that it had to work without a contract “due to the extreme urgency of the work required.”396
What was the cause of such “extreme urgency”? A flood? A tornado? Some other natural disaster? No. It was because the governor wanted to sell off the Pennsylvania Turnpike to private business and wanted his old law firm to do the lucrative legal work. As the Philadelphia Bulletin noted, “the turnpike is in no danger of disappearing or being unable to continue operations.”397
Of course, the emergency no-bid provision nicely eliminated the unpleasant possibility that another firm might get the work. But that’s surely just a coincidence—right, Governor?
And what lucrative work it was! Ballard’s chairman, Arthur Makadon, billed the state $637.50 per hour for his services, and his partners Kenneth M. Jarin and Adrian R. King, Jr., billed