Joel D. Skene

One thing that all Americans, Tea Party or Occupy Wallstreet can agree on, is that our system is too corrupt. Specials interests are taken better care of than the working Americans, and we need to change something. Well, disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abromoff recently did an interview with 60 Minutes describing just how entrenched and vast the problem is. He’s even thinking of writing a book called “The Idiot’s Guide to Buying a Congressman.” If you don’t mind feeling rather upset, it’s well worth the 15 minutes.

If you don’t watch it, you should take away just how easy it is for lobbyist to get what they want for their clients. According to Abramoff, it’s as easy as offering a congressman a job…

 When we would become friendly with an office and they were important to us, and the chief of staff was a competent person, I would say or my staff would say to him or her at some point, ‘You know, when you’re done working on the Hill, we’d very much like you to consider coming to work for us.’ Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to ’em, that was it. We owned them. And what does that mean? Every request from our office, every request of our clients, everything that we want, they’re gonna do. And not only that, they’re gonna think of things we can’t think of to do.

And the results are real, as a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows, higher levels of corruption equal more special tax breaks for businesses.

But we’ve passed reforms, right? Haven’t things gotten better? According to Abramoff “The system hasn’t been cleaned up at all.” We all have a lot of work to do.