Meanwhile, in Washington, Debbie Stabenow and her liberal colleagues voted in mileage efficiency standards that made Detroit uncompetitive and gave foreign cars a huge advantage.
Meanwhile, Stabenow helped to maintain the illusion that the car industry was coming back, finally orchestrating the deal in which the UAW and Washington combined to take over GM, defraud the people who had lent it money, and try to make a go of it. The recent IPO for GM does not even begin to repay the $50 billion American taxpayers have invested in this moribund company.112 And, even if it recovers, GM now employs two-thirds of its labor force abroad.
Stabenow is very good at getting earmarks for Michigan. She lives off the campaign contributions her earmarks generate. In 2010, we paid for $235 million in 208 different earmarks.113 For Debbie, they generated $5 million in campaign contributions from lobbyists for those who got earmarks, more than a third of the $12.4 million her campaign has raised in this cycle to date!114
* * *
DEBBIE STABENOW: EARMARKS FOR CAMPAIGN DONATIONS
Earmark: National Rural Water Assn.
Amount: $13,000,000
Donation from lobbyists: $679,916
Earmark: Karmanos Cancer Institute
Amount: $ 4,760,000
Donation from lobbyists: $120,000
Earmark: Cybernet Systems
Amount: $ 3,200,000
Donation from lobbyists: $108,000
Earmark: Michigan State University
Amount: $ 2,800,000
Donation from lobbyists: $330,000
Earmark: Bosch Rexroth Corp.
Amount: $ 2,800,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 50,000
Earmark: A123 Systems
Amount: $ 2,400,000
Donation from lobbyists: $110,000
Earmark: Eaton Corp.
Amount: $2,000,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 674,942
Earmark: South Carolina Research Authority
Amount: $2,000,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 240,000
Earmark: SYS-TEC Corp.
Amount: $2,000,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 30,000
Earmark: Lawrence Technological Univ.
Amount: $1,600,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 109,053
Earmark: Michigan Technological Univ.
Amount: $1,600,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 50,000
Earmark: IQ Technologies NY; OH
Amount: $1,200,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 10,000
Earmark: Consortium for Plant Biotech Research
Amount: $1,000,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 33,000
Earmark: Starr Commonwealth
Amount: $ 876,600
Donation from lobbyists: $ 120,000
Earmark: ProModel Corp.
Amount: $ 800,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 100,000
Earmark: Calumet Electronics
Amount: $ 800,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 40,000
Earmark: Mott Community College
Amount: $ 800,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 40,000
Amount: $ 800,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 80,000
Earmark: Wayne State University
Amount: $ 840,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 200,000
Earmark: Wayne County, MI
Amount: $1,100,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 390,000
Earmark: Eastern Michigan University
Amount: $ 500,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 140,000
Earmark: City of Detroit, MI
Amount: $1,250,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 240,000
Earmark: Detroit Economic Growth Corp.
Amount: $ 500,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 110,000
Earmark: Automation Alley
Amount: $ 394,800
Donation from lobbyists: $ 70,000
Earmark: Buena Vista Charter Township
Amount: $ 389,600
Donation from lobbyists: $ 80,000
Earmark: Rape, Abuse & Incest Ntnl. Network
Amount: $ 300,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 60,000
Earmark: Wayne County, MI
Amount: $ 300,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 390,000
Earmark: United Way for Southeastern Michigan
Amount: $ 250,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 250,000
Earmark: Starr Commonwealth
Amount: $ 200,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 120,000
Earmark: Detroit Renaissance
Amount: $ 200,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 60,000
Earmark: Ducks Unlimited
Amount: $ 155,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 165,000
Earmark: Cleary University
Amount: $ 100,000
Donation from lobbyists: $ 80,000
Amount: Total
Donation from lobbyists: $5,029,000
Source: opensecrets.org115
* * *
Stabenow added insult to injury this year when she accepted a $5,000 donation from General Motors, right after she voted to make us invest $50 billion of our money in the company.116
Michigan voters began to see the light in 2010, when they reversed their habit of electing Democrats who kept promising salvation. They turned the state over to a free-market, business-oriented, pro-growth Republican governor—Rick Snyder—and elected GOP majorities in each house of the legislature. They even ousted one of their Democratic congressmen.
But now the time has come to get rid of the establishment itself, as embodied in Stabenow and, in 2014, her colleague Carl Levin. Rarely has a pair of senators served as better enablers of a destructive addiction to unions, government, wage raises, and pork.
Vulnerable Democrats from States We Lost in 2010
Joe Manchin
West Virginia
Elected: 2010
Manchin has a problem. He’s a Democrat. Even though West Virginia voters knew him as a pro-gun, pro-life conservative, he had to run in 2010 as the candidate of the party of Harry Reid and Barack Obama. Elected governor in 2004 and reelected to the post in 2008, he was expecting an easy run for the Senate. But West Virginia does not like Obama. His Republican opponent, John Raese, instead began to close the gap and the governor’s lead vanished by early October.
Then Manchin made a fundamental—and brilliant—strategic decision. He would remain a Democrat, but run as a Republican. In his ads, he began to criticize ObamaCare, the stimulus spending, and cap and trade legislation. It worked. He pulled ahead of Raese and won handily.
Now he has to pull off an encore.
But the encore has to come in 2012, after two years of service in the Senate. With only a 53–47 majority, the Democratic majority doesn’t have a lot of votes to spare. Harry Reid is likely to need Manchin’s vote on a host of issues. If Manchin reveals his true colors and votes like a Democrat, approving Obama’s programs, the voters of West Virginia will not be pleased. They will remember the saying: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!”
Of course, Manchin may just vote Republican on the key issues, knowing that even if the Senate passes a conservative Republican bill that comes over from the House, Obama will veto it and there will be no override. He did just that on December 4, 2010, when he voted to defeat the Democratic bill that would have extended the Bush tax cuts only to those making under $250,000. Will that fool West Virginia voters?
Meanwhile, federal investigators are closing in on the West Virginia state government. Nobody knows who they are after, but the subpoenas are falling uncomfort
ably close to Manchin. There are at least four investigations under way.
In the months before the 2010 election, federal probers began looking at the $150 million Fairmont Gateway project, particularly a $1.3 million four-lane section of it that has been under construction for years. Governor Manchin’s former chief of staff, Larry Puccio, has a real estate business in Fairmont, West Virginia, and $57.6 million of the project’s cost is for buying properties and relocating utilities.117 Did he profit from any of that money?
In a second probe, the Feds recently subpoenaed the flight logs of official state aircraft, including those of the State Aviation Division’s hangar at Yaeger Airport, where Manchin leases space for his personal airplane.118 Could there have been misuse of the state plane?
The third probe centers around Clark Diehl, a contractor who wall-papered the governor’s reception room and Puccio’s office. He pled guilty to bypassing the regular contract bidding process to get the job. Diehl is cooperating with prosecutors.
A fourth investigation concerns possible help Manchin may have given his daughter to help her get an MBA degree from the University of West Virginia, a state school. She apparently did not meet the requirements for getting the degree, and some question was raised as to whether she had been granted favoritism at the institution because of her father’s position. After the matter became public, following an investigation by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a university committee led by Provost Gerald Lang and the dean of the College of Business and Economics, R. Stephen Sears, found that she was, indeed, entitled to the degree and awarded it to her.
After a public outcry, a special independent investigation found that the process by which she got her degree was “seriously flawed.” Lang and Sears resigned, and university president Michael Garrison was given a vote of no confidence by the faculty senate.119
So far, Manchin has skated away from all these scandals, but his luck might be running out as the federal investigation spreads.
In any event, Manchin was elected as an opponent of Obama’s programs. It remains to be seen whether he turns out to be that or just a faker.
Our money’s on the latter.
Robert Menendez
New Jersey
Elected 2006
Voted with the Democrats 96% of the time120
Banking Committee
Finance Committee
Foreign Relations Committee
Energy Committee
There is no doubt in our minds who is the single sleaziest member of the United States Senate: Robert Menendez of New Jersey, hands down! Let’s throw him out of public office in 2012!
Here is a partial—very partial—list of the scandal charges that have been lodged against him. Some triggered prosecutorial attention. Others didn’t. But let’s all remember that there is a vast difference between innocent and not guilty!
On July 21, 2009, Senator Menendez wrote Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, asking him to grant permission for JJR Holdings to acquire First BankAmericano of Elizabeth, New Jersey. He noted that the Fed was about put the bank into receivership in three days. He said that the failure of a “minority-owned” bank “would send yet another negative message to consumers and investors and further impact our fragile economy.”121
The senator neglected to mention that the bank’s president, Joseph Ginarte, and the vice president, State Senator Raymond Lesniak, were prominent contributors to his campaign.122
Bernanke didn’t intervene and the Fed closed the bank. Why? Because Lesniak and five other directors “received more than $2 million in mortgages and commercial loans, some made even after the bank was warned that its banking practices were unsound,” according to The Record.123 In 2007, the FDIC had ordered the bank to “‘cease and desist’ from its loan practices. It described inadequate supervision and management of its loans and corner-cutting on anti-money-laundering regulations, among other faults. Yet the insider loans continued even after the bank received this order…”124
Menendez claims he was just helping a constituent in trouble. Right.
Menendez’s friends, contributors, and political allies are all profiting handsomely from a 437-acre waterfront development in Bayonne, New Jersey, being built with $30 million in federal money that Menendez helped to get.125 The New York Times reports that “the first major contract to develop the site went to a company that hired a Menendez friend and political confidant, Donald Scarinci, to lobby for it. The obliging developer later took on Mr. Menendez’s former campaign treasurer, Carl Goldberg, as a partner. Bonds for a portion of the project were underwritten by Dennis Enright, a top campaign contributor, while Kay LiCausi, a former Menendez Congressional aide and major fund-raiser, received lucrative work lobbying for the project.”126
Scarinci, who lobbied for the contractor in the Bayonne project, has donated “more than $250,000 to [New Jersey] Democrats and helped raise millions more; he and his wife and members of his law firm have contributed more than $40,000 to Menendez’s…campaigns.”127
Of Scarinci, the Times writes, “perhaps no one has done more to foster Mr. Menendez’s political success than Mr. Scarinci, a childhood friend…[He] has won millions of dollars in state and local contracts for his law firm, many of them with government entities over which Menendez and his allies hold immense influence.”128
Menendez got Scarinci a legal contract with the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority in New Jersey. Scarinci’s firm has made $2.8 million in fees from the Authority since 2002.129
When Mayor Rudy Garcia of Union City fired Scarinci as city attorney, Menendez led what the Times calls “a fierce recall effort” against him that led to his resignation. Garcia’s successor saw the light and rehired Scarinci.130
During Menendez’s campaign for the Senate in 2006, Scarinci was heard on an audio tape advising a client to hire someone as a “favor” to Menendez. The Times reported that the client said “Scarinci’s message was clear: hire Mr. Menendez’s friend or risk losing the contracts” he had with Hudson County.131
The New York Times reported that while serving as U.S. attorney, future New Jersey governor Chris Christie “subpoenaed the records of a Hudson County social services agency that leased a building, for $300,000 over nearly ten years, from Mr. Menendez while, as a House member, he helped it win millions in federal financing.”132
Randy Bergmann, editorial page editor of the Asbury Park Press, wrote that Menendez “wrote a letter to federal prison officials asking that a father and son who were in jail on racketeering and drug charges be allowed to transfer to a facility closer to home, allowing them to be reunited…A Menendez spokesman said that [he] had no relationship with the mobsters” and that he sent the letter just so visitation would be more convenient.133 How very considerate of him!
Menendez says that he is innocent of all accusations and that he is being labeled as “guilty by geography,” referring to the corrupt reputation of Hudson County, his home turf.134
Menendez is up to his old tricks in the Senate, where he ranks ninth in the amount of earmarks he got passed in 2010, to the tune of $239 million in 206 separate earmarks. But more important than what he gave is what he got. Menendez’s campaign benefited from $8.1 million of campaign donations from the lobbyists employed by those who got federal earmarks—that’s enough to fund an entire campaign! (Even allowing for ads to tell the voters how honest he is.)135
Here is a list of the 2010 earmark recipients who anted up campaign money for Senator Menendez.
* * *
ROBERT MENENDEZ: EARMARKS FOR CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS
Recipient: National Rural Water Assn.
Amount: $13,000,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 679,916
Recipient: Stevens Institute of Technology
Amount: $ 5,600,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 350,000
Recipient: New Jersey Institute of Technology
Amount: $ 4,500,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 2
50,000
Recipient: American Burn Assn.
Amount: $ 4,500,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 140,000
Recipient: Imperial Machine & Tool
Campaign Contribution: $ 130,000
Recipient: Dynamic Animation Systems
Amount: $ 3,500,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 360,000
Recipient: Ocean Power Technologies
Amount: $ 3,200,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 331,918
Recipient: Alliant Techsystems
Amount: $ 3,200,000
Campaign Contribution: $2,020,000
Recipient: Monmouth County
Amount: $ 750,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 80,000
Recipient: Drexel University
Amount: $3,040,000
Campaign Contribution: $242,614
Recipient: LGS Innovations
Amount: $4,000,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 90,000
Recipient: Robert Wood Johnson Univ. Hosp.
Amount: $2,400,000
Campaign Contribution: $130,000
Recipient: Hackensack Univ. Med. Center
Amount: $2,400,000
Campaign Contribution: $280,000
Recipient: Rutgers University
Amount: $2,000,000
Campaign Contribution: $280,000
Recipient: LifeCell Corp.
Amount: $2,000,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 70,000
Recipient: Hycrete Inc.
Amount: $1,680,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 80,000
Recipient: Drakontas LLC
Amount: $1,600,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 60,000
Recipient: Frontier Performance Polymers
Amount: $1,600,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 80,000
Recipient: II-VI Inc.
Amount: $1,600,000
Campaign Contribution: $350,000
Recipient: ID Systems
Amount: $1,600,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 60,000
Recipient: Englewood Hospital & Med. Center
Amount: $1,492,800
Campaign Contribution: $ 29,000
Recipient: Curtiss-Wright Corp.
Amount: $1,200,000
Campaign Contribution: $420,000
Recipient: Bergen County