It's dizzying, really. There are so many corruption stories that are so brazen, so venal, it literally takes my breath away sometimes.
But I really have to hand it to the good folks in the Ohio GOP; they just about take the cake. How Ohio ever let itself get to this point, I have no idea. But, boy, howdy, their corruption is pure, unadulterated, high-proof stuff. And now the outlines of what many long suspected are becoming public.
It seems that members of the Ohio governor's office was actively involved in turning Ohio pension fund money into Bush campaign $$$$.
Now, while your normal MOS (man-on-the-street for you non-newsies) wouldn't know much about the Ohio Coin scandal, let's face it. Y'all aren't normal. So most of you know all about it. But, for those of you that need the refresher, let me just quote the
dKosopedia:
In 1998, the Ohio Workers' Compensation Bureau agreed to invest in a rare-coin fund that Noe controlled as a way to hedge its holdings in stocks and bonds, an investment that experts have called highly unorthodox.
According to Noe's lawyers, as much as $13 million of the state's $50 million investment in his funds cannot be accounted for. William C. Wilkinson, a lawyer for Noe, said his client was cooperating fully with the criminal investigations.
According to a Toledo Blade investigation "two coins worth $300,000 had been lost in 2003. Then state officials acknowledged that another 119 coins worth $93,000 were missing." It is unclear to Ohio officials if Noe had the legal authority to invest the state's money on collectibles or whether the state was even the rightful owner of those items. During his time as administrator of the fund Noe collected over $3 million in fees to the state.
Then Mr. Noe was indicted last October for violating campaign funds by illegally laundering the money through unnamed third parties. Well, just this past weekend, we found out who some of those parties were ... aides to both Governor Voinovich and Taft.
Mr. Talbott and Mr. Moormann, also aides to former Gov. George Voinovich, were convicted on ethics violations yesterday for failing to report money they were given from Mr. Noe. Documents released by prosecutors detailing their probe into the former aides -- although heavily redacted because of ongoing investigations -- provided new details about Mr. Noe's generosity toward public officials and his eagerness to curry favor with all levels of government.
Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said yesterday that Mr. Talbott's statements to investigators "shows that this scandal lies right at the steps of the White House." The President has returned $4,000 in contributions made directly from Mr. Noe and his wife, Bernadette, but he has resisted returning more than $100,000 that the coin dealer raised for Mr. Bush's campaign.
Now, let's put two and two together here. The Ohio executive gives $50 million or so to Mr. Noe to invest in rare coins, a decidedly unorthodox thing to do. Some millions of that are now unaccounted for. Mr. Noe later colludes with members of that executive branch to launder money into the campaign of George W. Bush, among other huge transfers to GOP office seekers and party apparatus.
Well, jeez louise, call me a conspiracy theorist but that just seems a wee bit fishy. I don't think it takes much imagination to see a coordinated plot there.
But, more than anything, it's what the national media would call a metaphor. Which I despise. I hate that term. This is not a "metaphor" for a system of government that takes as its guiding principle funneling public money to its supporters with the explicit goal of laundering some of that back to itself. It's that system in full throated glory.
Maybe the original plan went something like this, "Tom, my boy, we'll give you a bunch of money to invest in a hare-brained, hard-to-track scheme--you say you are in the rare-coins biz? Perfect--and then you'll skim a bunch of money off of that, keep some for yourself and pass some back to us. And we'll also participate in a scheme to launder some of that money to George W. Bush's campaigns. Got it? It's a win-win-win. Taxpayer money for you, for us, and for Mr. Bush. And that keeps us in power, so then we can continue the whole scheme!" But maybe not. Maybe they didn't map it out like that. It's almost irrelevant in real terms whether it was explicitly planned in such detail or not.
Because that's how the game is played with the party in power right now, and everyone knows it. It's strictly pay-to-play, and it's gone on long enough that the greed and brazenness has just gotten to levels that are hard to believe. They have been pushing so hard to keep themselves in power with an agenda that doesn't have majority support that they have been feeding an ever-increasing demand for cash, getting increasingly desperate, increasingly careless of the law.
Or increasingly brazen as they got away with things.
And it goes all the way to the top of the GOP, as we can see with the Abramoff affair and any number of corrupt defense deals.
I think Bob Taft and George Bush have more in common than just cratering polls ...