by @BarryRafkind in Government Reform, Investigative Reports
Posted on April 11, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Last Modified on August 2, 2009 at 3:31 pm
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As the following pie chart shows, nearly 60% of Rep. Capuano’s 2010 earmark requests (totaling almost $80 million of tax-payer money) are for military research programs out of a total of close to $136 million in pet projects:
Pie Chart of Rep. Capuano’s 2010 Earmark Requests
Total earmarks : $135,957,263.00 or nearly $136 million.
[Note: the earmarks were categorized by my own judgements based on the descriptions. Link to my data (webpage) including a spreadsheet of the earmarks. Link to Capuano's official list.]
This is an outrage on many levels! First of all, I don’t think it’s appropriate for Congresspeople to be making earmarks for pet projects at all, so I certainly don’t want my representative doing that. These are essentially a mix of no-bid contracts and pet projects designed to satisfy special interests. Earmarks are not democratic (they receive little debate), not accountable (not tracked), and not a good way to spend tax-payer money. Apparently, he sees no problem with earmarks (Lobbyists under scrutiny linked to Capuano donors on Boston.com):
“I think earmarks are perfectly appropriate as long as they are transparent,” he said. “All mine are. I think every one speaks for itself.”
If by “transparent”, former Somerville mayor Michael E. Capuano means that the earmarks are merely listed on his website, then that is not real transparency. Transparency would involve knowing how those earmarks were chosen, how closely the money is spent compared with the intended purpose, and how effective the given program is at meeting its goals.
Furthermore, as one of his constituents in the 8th District in Somerville, these earmarks do not reflect my priorities and I seriously doubt they reflect those of our district or our country. It is quite unfathomable how so much tax-payer money could be diverted from real priorities like public education, single-payer universal health care, and public transportation. Even President Obama has pledged to Cut Pork Barrel Spending although he has so far fallen short of that promise.
I am certain we will not see an end to war until we break the cycle of military earmarks and corrupt lobbying firms like the PMA Group. As long as there are handsome profits to be made in the war business, war will continue and the Military-Industrial complex will grow ever bigger.
A short note on the categories… by “military programs”, I am referring to both “military / health” and “military / tech”. I have used these categories for earmarks whose purpose was for military systems or that focused on treating soldiers or veterans. Of course, most research for military programs are “dual use” with civilian applications. In such research, it is often hard to tell which technologies are designed for defense v. offense. Notice that “military / health” is the largest category, and this reflects the reality that war comes with a heavy toll on the health of our service personnel.
Full disclosure: I used to work for BBN Technologies, which Capuano earkmarked for $2 million towards the “Acoustic Gun Detection System for Tracked Combat Vehicles”. Interestingly, in the description for this item, it says “Initial prototype integration proved promising however, funding has not been allocated to allow for formal, fieldable integration.” I wonder why the “formal, fiedable integration” was not approved? Anyway, I no longer work for any of the intended recipients of earmark money.
Check out my compilation of the earmarks and the official list of Capuano’s 2010 earmarks with their descriptions. There are some rather odd pet projects in there, like one for “Precision Airdrop Resupply Technologies”, a “Soldier Situational Awareness Wrist Band”, anti-reflective coatings for missile seeker optics, and my favorite : the “Clean Lightweight Area Weapon” which is billed as “an affordable, highly effective, unexploded ordnance-safe replacement for legacy cluster weapons” (just what we need!).
By the way, if you’re free on Thurs, April 23, you can discuss Capuano’s earmarks (and anything else on your mind) with a member of his staff at city hall, according to the Somerville Journal in Capuano staffer visits Somerville April 23.
I want an investigation into how these earmarks were chosen. He claims he didn’t know about the political contributions he received from the PMA Group lobbying firm, but he should have checked into it before earmarking millions of dollars for its members! We need to send Capuano a strong signal that we’re watching him and we won’t tolerate his earmarks! And if he doesn’t stop, then we will work to find his replacement! Are you with me?
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You really ought to know a little more about the appropriations and contracting system before a ballistic attack on “earmarks” makes you sound an awful lot more like John McCain than a Democrat after eight years of Bush administration discrimination.
I know of at least four programs that were only available through earmarks – and those through this particular Congressman – after the Bush administration redlined Massachusetts in education, transportation, and labor – three of our primary colors, as it were. While it’s true that such a process is less critical now, it’s not at all true that Obama priorities for transparency are well understood by the bureaucracy he and we have inherited from Bush-Cheyney.
As one example, a program in Chelsea was denied funding when the Department of Education’s software vendors changed management on the weekend their proposal was due. It bounced 17 times, arrived 11 minutes late, and 500 Chelsea kids were kept from college. Capuano helped and the program survives, but only through direct action.
Another program, this one in Boston, is now in serious jeopardy because the public health bureaucracy refuses to let it shift managers to a position which is only 30% time in any case, and threatens to suspend that agency from any federal bidding. Since it’s one of the few Latino programs dealing with a critical public health problems, and in his district, the Congressman is critical to it’s survival, and the survival of its 500 or so clients.
Finally, your quips about transparency only show how little you know about the kind of “transparency” Capuano’s reforms have cured. The famous “Bridge to Nowhere,” for example, never mentioned Stevens nor any of the developers on his famous target island for that bridge; the notorious Murtha earmarks have made a Pennsylvania backwater a critical destination for biotech investors, but only rarely with a name associated with the decision. And the birth of earmarks – under Cassidy & Company – were a few to Dartmouth and Tufts, well before Capuano’s tenure, representing the most creative funding of serious R&D. While I agree that most university earmarks today ought to be competitively bid, getting HRSA and DOE to be more genuinely open in their bidding is largely the effect of earmarks and lobbying, and hardly an idea close to the heart of bureaucrats who still prefer abstinence for HIV education in both theory and practice.
I think it takes a little more research than Mike’s web page to get a “fair and balanced” view of the earmark process, and yours sure seems a spray of bullets from the hip.
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And a second thought: how sure are you that the DOD earmarks are purely military? Since most biotech and much other tech R&D, particularly in this region with MIT, et.al., often begins with a military spin, a blanket anti-war budgetary slant can obscure many, many critical and otherwise ignored innovations. Your passing nod to truth notwithstanding, military and health categories more often reflect R&D in this district than they do to veterans affairs or the health of the military.
Finally, I’ve not heard you on either of Mike’s phone conference meetings with constituents in the past few weeks. I would have thought, given the intensity of your pique, you might have done more original research than last week’s Globe, which was a kind of generic attack on PMA lobbying. For that matter, if you had bothered checking the PMA reports (http://tinyurl.com/denebq) you would have found that, at less than $240,000, the “bad guys” are pretty small spenders along the K Street corridor, and that Mike isn’t even in their top tier of targets.
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Joe,
Let’s focus on the issues instead of how much you think I know. Indeed, I did more research than just look at Capuano’s webpage, as evidenced by my links to other articles on the matter. I’ll gladly challenge you on your points:
First, it doesn’t matter whether the PMA Group was a large lobbying firm compared with other such firms, or whether Capuano was high on their list of recipients. What matters is how much they gave to Capuano compared to his other contributions. In fact, according to the Center for Responsive Politics at OpenSecrets.org, between 1998-2008, only people working for the City of Somerville have given more ($57,340) to Capuano than the PMA Group and related individuals ($53,500). That means that the PMA Group bought a LOT of influence with the congressman and that’s what I’m concerned about.
You claim that earmarks were necessary tools of funding Democrat-supported programs during the Republican majority. So, why have the earmarks continued and grown now that Democrats are back in power?
You argue that earmarks are vital sources of support for critical community programs. However, these amount to no-bid contracts which means there was no public competition between providers to offer the desired services. It also means that the money is given without rules that keep the recipients accountable for end results. This isn’t how tax-dollars should be spent and there are much bigger issues that our representatives in Congress should be spending their time on instead of micro-managing community programs.
It’s *nice* that Capuano’s earmarks helped 500 students go to college, but he should really be focusing on delivering universal higher education so everyone can afford college.
Perhaps there are valid reasons why the public health bureaucracy put those rules on the Latino program in Boston (can you provide more info?). If that situation is unfair, then it should be addressed through the proper channels, but I don’t think a handout from Capuano is any sort of solution.
The cynical view is that the longer list of small community earmarks are used to hide the shorter group of large earmarks to special interests and the two sets are interspersed for obfuscation while the former provides cover for the latter.
Can you point to the reforms you claim Capuano is responsible for helping pass? He has a quote on his website supporting the passage of a resolution to establish an Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) that was recommended by the Ethics Task Force chaired by himself. That’s a good step towards better investigations AFTER complaints are filed. But complaints won’t be filed unless the public knows what’s going on. Sadly, he was one of four Democrats who helped defeat what could have been a landmark ethics and lobbying law in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2006. Link to an article on MyDD about that.
Please explain how earmarks have made lobbying and bidding more transparent, because that just seems hard to believe.
You mentioned what I already referred to as the “dual use” concept where research done for military purposes can be applied to other purposes. It’s my understanding that research done for the DOD can be made classified if they choose to do that, so that means not all the findings will be dual use. I’d like to see the merits of the research for civilian purposes debated along with all the rest of society’s priorities, but I don’t think we should allocate so much military research above other programs. Just think how much good could be done with the $5 million of taxpayer money if it wasn’t earmarked for the Clean Lightweight Area Weapon!
If good research results from an earmarked program, do the ends justify the means? No, because that money wasn’t appropriated through a process of public debate as it should have. For every such success, there are probably many more complete duds that waste our money and we’ll never know about it. We’ll never know how our money could have been better spent.
I wish I could have participated in the phone conferences but I was busy caring for my newborn. Besides, even if I was on the call, I wouldn’t necessarily be given a chance to speak since there are usually many people wanting to ask questions.
I disagree with your characterization of the Globe piece as “a kind of generic attack on PMA lobbying” which sounds like you think the Globe was spinning the facts untruthfully. Why do you think that?
I am surprised that you are defending the corrupt system of earmarks.
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Barry,
In spite of your breathless comments, if you look at Capuano’s list (which IS exceptional – try comparing Lynch’s (http://tinyurl.com/cezo5s ) or Barney’s (http://tinyurl.com/df3me2 ) if you want to compare “transparency”), most of the individual appropriations were sans contributions, and all you can say about PMA is that they PAID a lot for influence, not that they got their money’s worth. And I’d be interested to know how far you think Obama’s appointments have penetrated 8 years of Republicans (and 8 years of Clinton’s less than courageous predecessors), particularly regarding spending decisions. As someone monitoring health and education stimulus money, I can tell you that there are still loads of federalists in charge of key spending decisions, and that thousands of the funding rules the Bushies installed remain to be challenged or revised. It’s only been three months, after all, and the current wave of earmarks is largely last year’s delayed appropriations bill – which itself was only about 3% earmarked.
I’m much more interested in how you’ve chosen this very McCain case to build. While I don’t prefer earmarks to competitive bids, as Capuano doesn’t prefer this system, it’s surely a lot less regressive than themes like “abstinence only,” “no child left behind,” and the DOE regulation that opened higher ed financing to private, for profit colleges (which eventually undid former Governor Weld, as in http://tinyurl.com/djlenb ). Eventually, after Obama has a full cabinet, for example (http://tinyurl.com/cmwk3c ), earmarks can decline. Until then, however, I’d much, much rather rely on Capuano than on Bush carry-overs. And I won’t give you more detail on the health earmark issue precisely because that bureaucracy has an axe to grind and has already seriously endangered thousands of Latinos with English only prevention literature.
Your case is, I’m sure, well intentioned, but as an advisor to high school kids, I’d give it a good “B” for effort and much less for substance. As of now. In about two years, it’s worth returning to this as a benchmark. At that point, if (a) there is election reform that guts the need for lobbyist money, (b) there is still so little penetration of key bureaucracies, (c) there is still the redlining of this and other districts in the Northeast, and (d) you can track earmark money to contributions on a ratio higher than today, you might be right. Until then, however, you ought to talk with Mike himself (http://tinyurl.com/cepmk8 ). You know he discussed earmarks at some length two years ago with the City Democratic Committee, or was that a meeting you didn’t attend?
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Joe,
You claim that earmarks are necessary to by-pass funding deficiencies in education, health care, and human services due to Bush hold-overs, but Capuano’s earmarks for big military contracts look more like Bush’s agenda than yours (with small exceptions, as you’ve mentioned). Even if the minority of these earmarks did address the funding gaps you cite, would that justify the huge sums given over for military research? No, it’s not ok to rob the bank even if you give a handful of it away to charity!
I don’t doubt that there are still many Bush hold-overs making budgetary decisions,
but that means Congress and the president should act faster to make those appointments
instead of relying on the earmark ATM machine.
Even assuming that’s true, which I don’t know, it’s the amount of money that matters, not the number of earmarks.
Actually, I would say they did get their money’s worth!
I assume you referenced the McCain label due to his outspokenness against earmarks, not his hypocrisy on the issue.
I wrote this article after seeing the announcement in the SJ about Capuano’s upcoming staff office hours. I then went to Capuano’s website to see if the announcement was listed there (I didn’t see it) but I then noticed his list of 2010 appropriation requests and decided to investigate. Simple as pie (chart).
I’m way ahead of you, Joe. After I wrote this article, I sent a link to Capuano through his website contact form and asked for his response.
What makes you think Capuano prefers competitive bidding to earmarks? See the quote of his about earmarks in the article above.
Do you have any sources to back up your claim about “the redlining of this and other districts in the Northeast”?
How do you know the extent of new Obama appointments in “key” bureaucracies? What makes a bureaucracy “key”?
How can election reform take away the motivation behind lobbying donations?
Why do you think Capuano’s earmark list is more transparent than Lynch or Frank’s?
What does it matter whether I attended a meeting two years ago? Since you obviously attended it, what did Capuano say back then about earmarks?
What do you mean about the bureaucracy having an “axe to grind”? What are you afraid of?
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Barry,
Since you seem to be dedicated to getting the last word in, this will be my last word:
Two years ago Mike Capuano discussed earmarks extensively with the City Democratic committee, explaining how his office was in virtual siege due to the Administration’s management of competitive bids and that it is critical to both the district and the nation for Congress to intervene. Further, that, as long as that intervention was transparent – i.e., as it is on his website and (in more cursory form) on the others’ – earmarks reflect congressional priorities not met by the administration.
If you’d gone, you woulda known. And if you’re so far ahead, you’d still be even.
My sources about the redlining of this and other districts comes from 40 years of fund raising and development work, tracking grants and contracts awarded both competitively and by earmark. And by noting the cuts – often severe and acute and almost random – in some of the critical expenses in this region. For just one example, both Talent Search and Upward Bound – which, ironically and not at all coincidentally are critical to “Dropout Prevention,” which you saw fit to keep from this list, and which has generated a dramatic jump in bilingual dropout rates since those cuts – occurred in the past three years. Aspira and other Latino organizations were cut, contested the cuts, and could not even get through with earmarks from national (let alone local) leaders. The national bilingual dropout rate shot up 20%.
One of those key bureaucracies, which you would have known had you used the link, is Secretary of Commerce, which is still unfilled. As of today there is ONLY the Attorney General who has been nominated and confirmed in the Justice Department. It takes Congress and the President a little while to make the 5,000 or so appointments, even when they begin screening in November.
Elections have been sorely undermined by huge amounts needed and spent, primarily on television. It was not so long ago that the FCC policed an “equal time” rule that required access to these licensed media be equal among at least the major parties, and, in some states, all parties. That disappeared even before Bush, and election costs escalated dramatically. There have been several major initiatives to require parity in coverage, reflecting the licensed requirements of access to the airwaves, but they have largely been killed by the Republicans – and by the wealthiest of the Democrats, made so by lobbyists. See, for just one of many, many sources, here http://tinyurl.com/ctkxrd. In this league, Capuano is not even in the top half, although his influence is well beyond that median.
If you’d bother looking you’d find that Lynch just publishes a list; that Barney publishes something closer to Michael’s, but still in much less detail; and that most congressional earmark lists are (a) quite new and (b) cursory, unlike his.
If you had any political experience, you’d know what a bureaucratic axe can do to a program or an agency. Embarrassed, a bureaucrat can unilaterally prohibit an agency from any further federal proposals or grants. Of course that can be appealed in court, but it would take about 3 years and about $500,000 to make a successful appeal, during which time anything less than Harvard would probably close.
And that is enough for a neophyte to extract from an old pol. You have a tendency toward tendentious questioning, as this batch has begun to demonstrate. Do more homework and think longer before shooting from the hip. Earmarks are not a nicety and have serious flaws, but so do most other means of getting tax money to those who most need the services those taxes are intended to support. Earmarks are one of those messy sausage-like exercises of government that a good congressional or state official can use to mitigate the worst excesses of bureaucratic malfeasance. And, if you don’t think bureaucrats are ever mistaken in the degree to which they exercise their powers, you haven’t lived long enough, in any jurisdiction.
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Joe,
You missed my point (see first para of my last comment) about how Capuano’s earmark priorities are out of line with yours. It makes it very hard to believe that he is not using the earmarks mostly for political paybacks.
Capuano’s reasoning doesn’t hold water because his excuse about a lack of funding for his district can always be invoked no matter which administration is in power. It’s basically an open-ended justification for earmarks.
I appreciate that he listed his earmarks on his website, but that’s not real transparency, as I described above. He should include an ethics report showing how many donations he received from each recipient. We still don’t know what process was used to choose the programs – and it should have been a process involving public input. And there’s no accountability in how the money is spent!
I’m not sure what you mean about me keeping “Dropout Prevention” from the list. I believe I grouped that in with education.
I’ll withhold my probing questions so we can avoid going too far off on tangents.
I hope that wasn’t your last comment, but if it was, then thanks for engaging me. I hope others will join this conversation!
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After reading the exchange of views between Barry and Joe, I comment with some apprehension. I’ll just say this: for me, the most important issue here is the Congressman’s priorities. I don’t object to funding the health needs of military personnel but I think we need to be moving away from a war economy, not nurturing and expanding it. And that goes for military research as well as weapons. Rep. Capuano’s earmark choices appear to reflect a different view, although I would like to hear what he has to say about that. I hope he will respond to Barry’s article.
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When I worked in admin. at MIT, the researchers were frank about twisting their findings to get some military application so they could obtain a DARPA grant. Their hearts lay in “pure science” but the money was in militaristic applications. That’s a shame, but I’d rather they do get the money, and that society enjoys peacetime applications. I don’t know if Capuano’s earmarks cover that sector, but it sounds more like him.
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Thanks for your comments, Kate and Linda! I have some experience with the big role of DARPA grants in science research from my days as a grad student in the EE dept at Columbia. It is an awful shame when pure science must whore itself to the military for funding. It would be really interesting to know how wide-spread this phenomenon is.
As bad as that is, at least those researchers had to apply through a competitive grant program which helps keep some standards and accountability in the work. With earmarks, there’s very little accountability, and we should be holding Capuano accountable for that.
Yes, Capuano earmarks non-military programs, albeit with a substantially smaller amount of money. I’d rather that non-military programs get their funding, but by bidding on contracts, not with questionable handouts from Congress.
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I’m not an expert on earmarks, but I appreciate Barry’s raising questions about the process and the priorities reflected in Rep. Capuano’s choices. I’m very disturbed by the high percentage dedicated to military programs. This is $$ that should be spent on education, health care, housing, job creation – and programs devoted to diplomacy and peace-building, several of which can be found right here in Mass – the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the program/chair of Peace and Reconciliation at UMass Boston, that Padraig O’Malley occupies, Peace Games, and AFSC. Let’s get Rep. Capuano to focus on those programs!
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Abby,
I think our Congressman anticipates your excellent point. You’ve probably heard and read Moyers’ report on lobbyists and earmarks, a few months ago on his Journal (http://tinyurl.com/c529xy), but you may not have gone or registered that the FIRST and breakthrough lobbied earmark in this district was, ironically and not coincidentally, at Tufts – not for Fletcher, but, rather, for the Nutrition School. When Jean Mayer went to Cassidy (http://tinyurl.com/cd7njj) to finance that school’s construction, it was the beginning of the K Street we’ve all come to know.
One doesn’t lobby for a general idea, but, rather, for a specific program, initiative, building, or capacity to improve, create or defend. Earmarks are almost universally for those things that fall between the lines of federal or state initiatives, either because of adversarial politics (eg., Bush’s anti-Latino, anti-gay, or anti-anything screeds) or because a program has yet to make enough impact to earn broader legislation – like the Tufts’ initiative. And earmarks are at least as critical to progressive causes as they are to regressive ones. Check out Michael’s list (http://tinyurl.com/d3cn82) before you jump to Barry’s conclusion. Recognizing that so much R&D begins with the military, particularly in this district, I think you’ll find Barry considerably off target.
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Only by the standards of the rest of our Massachusetts Congressional Delegation, or the rest of the United State Congress, can a comparison make Mike Capuano look like a decent representative in government. The point isn’t that he’s more transparent than Lynch or Frank. The point is that he’s OUR congressman, and we desperately need to raise our expectations for what we can get out of OUR congressman. If this is the best that representative government can offer, then I want direct democracy!
I don’t understand all the excuse-making, for Capuano, for Obama, for the systemic anti-democratic nature of US government… I think Barry’s critique sounds a lot more like a Left or Green or People’s critique than a right-wing critique. If only more people were digging into the badly obfuscated facts rather than giving these proven fools the benefit of the doubt!
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Catching up on a few weeks worth of emails in my inbox. Barry, I appreciate your research and your outrage. However, as a pragmatist and a progressive, I have the following reactions: (a) I can’t expect Capuano to make a unilateral move to abandon earmarks when all his colleagues are doing it. Although it would be a noble step, it would deny “equal opportunity” to access federal funding to all the worthwhile organizations in his/our District. (b) I have a hard time equating the production of military hardware with the conduct of military-related health care research. Once they’ve gotten themselves injured on our behalf — even if we don’t support the war they were asked to fight — veterans deserve the best medical care our country can offer. (c) I am disappointed in the magnitude of earmarks for military hardware R&D, and have a hard time believing that they are unrelated to the PMA lobbying and campaign contributions, notwithstanding our Representative’s protestations. (d) At the same time we should hold our Representative accountable for his actions, they have to be put in context. It is, indeed, a sad statement that his earmarks, and his explication of those earmarks on his website, look good by comparison to the efforts of his colleagues in Mass. and the rest of the Congress. But if that is the case, I would temper my judgement, rather than holding him to a standard that few, if any other Congressmen can meet.
Just my two cents.
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I entirely agree with the comments from empowerment and Abby, but I can’t understand all the excuse-making by Joe B. and fberman.
fberman, to your points:
a) First, I’m not sure that all other congressmen really use earmarks, or that they do at a comparable level to Capuano. But even if that were true, I don’t buy the “everybody else is doing it, so we can do it, too” argument.
And earmarks are almost certainly not an equal opportunity process, as you concede in point (c) as in the case of the PMA lobbying group.
b) Yes, veterans deserve the best health care, but the percentage of spending on this research seems out-of-proportion to the other categories and doesn’t seem to me to reflect the priorities of constituents or of the country. There’s also the “dual use” concern I raised in the article.
c) I totally agree with you that the PMA lobbying group seems to have bought influence with Capuano. This illustrates how corrupt the process really is.
d) I disagree that we should lower our expectations and temper our judgements. I think we owe it to ourselves, our country, and our children to demand the best representation and the highest levels of transparency and accountability from our elected officials.
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It’s remarkable that nobody’s bothered with the Cassidy commentary on Moyers, yet the entire issue of earmarks reflects the failure – not of congress, but rather of the executive. In the days before direct lobbying of Congress for money, the bureaucracy was more transparent and more neutral. After Reagan, during which O’Neill and others still had huge influence on the bureaucrats directly, the accumulated battles between the parties squeezed the bureaucrats into reactions unprecedented since the days of Tammany. In response, mini-Tammany earmarking gradually displaced the putative neutrality of NIH, DOE, etc. You don’t need earmarks when the bureaucrats don’t discriminate against choice, against gays, against ideologies independent of religion and cant.
And to pretend that Obama, in less than 4 months, has transformed the entire bureaucracy is patently absurd. His appointments process will take at least a year before he can be held reasonably accountable for an independent bureaucracy.
In the meantime, I have clients who suffer from overt racism in federal funding; overt discrimination against multilingual poor people; overt and remarkably nasty micromanagement of sometimes critical services. Without appeal to an engaged legislator, it is ridiculous to presume that the miracles of competitive bids for federally initiated requests are either open, fair or equitable in any absolute sense.
Barry & his friends ought to talk beyond his circle of friends to explore how racism, classism, conservatism, and ideology inhibit federal – or state, for that matter – program and policy making. This is not to say I favor Alexander (PMA) and the potentates of proprietary largess. But when the bureaucracy is less transparent than a legislator, it’s hardly reasonable to build a case on such a soft foundation.
Finally, Barry’s case might make more sense if he actually interviewed some people – some of the winners and some of the losers, of both the earmarks and the competitive process. Shooting from the hip is a lot lower than most people respect.
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Barry is correct that it certainly looks like Capuano is feathering his own political nest with these earmarks. The question is whether we allow him to continue or call him on this.
If Capuano refuses to knuckle under to our demands then we need to demostrate, yell. kick other otherwise throw a hissyfit. That way we can throw all of our support (all 5 of us!) behind someone who only grab money for our progressive pet projects!!!!
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Go Get ‘em Harry, I’m sure that will work very well! And you five guys can determine the future of congress. Of course, one might wonder WHAT congress, but that’s for later.
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