Big Green Machine Rewards Democrats in Cash for Cash Deal

In The Inside Deal: Obama's Economic Program I wrote:

The Inside Deal is Democratic President Barack Obama's domestic economic program and is characterized by extensive government spending for politically connected groups within American society. It is aimed to reward those groups that supported Obama's campaign for the Presidency in 2010, such as labor unions, public employee unions, teachers unions, environmentalists, anti-war protesters, Wall Street, and big businesses. Some of the programs that were passed by the Democratic Congress at the time to reward these groups include the stimulus bill, the healthcare bill, and massive annual budgets. Increasingly during the height of the Inside Deal, there is a link between who receives taxpayer money from the federal government and their political connections. Called by some crony capitalism.

The Inside Deal continues to pay off for some groups and those companies and individuals and special interest groups recognize that in order for them to continue to be provided with political and economic support, they need to keep in power a group of politicians who will continue to steer money to them in spite of whether they deserve it or produce anything of value. That group of politicians in the Democratic Party, and so it is not surprising that the Inside Deal is creating a tight relationship between those groups that the Democrats steer money to and those groups rewarding Democratic politicians in the form of campaign finance.

One such group that has benefited from the Inside Deal is the Big Green Machine. Via theblogprof comes this story from the Washington Examiner did a little bit of journalism and reported on the suspected corruption between Democrats and Big Green Machine:

Officials of a dozen top Big Green environmental groups contributed more than $14.5 million to congressional and presidential candidates in 2008 and through the second quarter of 2010 with 96 percent of the total going to Democrats, according to an Examiner analysis of federal campaign data.


...Six of the dozen collectively received more than $160 million in federal grants and contracts, according to their 2008 or 2007 IRS tax returns, with the Nature Conservancy's $110.6 million being the highest, followed by the Trust for Public Land ($28 million), Audubon Society ($17.5 million), the Environmental Defense Fund (parent of the EDF Action Fund) with $3.6 million, Natural Resources Defense Council ($358,072) and Defenders of Wildlife ($205,021).

President Obama was the biggest recipient by far of contributions with a total of more than $2.4 million. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was Obama's main 2008 primary rival, got $86,500. ...Obama's biggest groups of environmental supporters came from the Sierra Club ($917,965) and Defenders of Wildlife ($905,375).

This is the definition of corruption- they give campaign money to candidates who then support their companies and interests with tax money for 'research' or 'oversight' or 'awareness' or some sort of garbage. The relationship is one that use my labor and your labor to strengthen relationships between politicians and those who are politically connected, and that is not what America was about. Republicans do it too, especially with Big Oil and Big Defense, but it appears to be worse under Democrats since they pass bigger spending budgets and spend more money on discretionary items and appear to be a little less ethical about it all. That means anyone with a "D" in front of their name this election should be thrown out- it'll lessen the corruption, although then we need to go after "R"'s that are corrupt too.