Body-scanner makers spent millions on lobbying

The Daily Caller ^ | Fredreka Schouten

[Justaham]

WASHINGTON — The companies with multimillion-dollar contracts to supply American airports with body-scanning machines more than doubled their spending on lobbying in the last five years and hired several high-profile former government officials to advance their causes in Washington, records show.

L-3 Communications, which has sold $39.7 million worth of the machines to the federal government, spent $4.3 million to influence Congress and federal agencies during the first nine months of this year, up from $2.1 million in 2005, lobbying data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show. Last year, the company spent $5.5 million on lobbying.

Its lobbyists include Linda Daschle, a prominent Democratic figure in Washington, who is a former Federal Aviation Administration official.

Rapiscan Systems, meanwhile, has spent $271,500 on lobbying so far this year, compared with $80,000 five years earlier. It has faced criticism for hiring Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, who has been a prominent proponent of using scanners to foil terrorism. Officials with Chertoff’s firm and Rapiscan say Chertoff was not paid to promote scanner technology. It spent $440,000 on lobbying in 2009.

The government has spent $41.2 million so far on Rapiscan’s machines.

[mississippi red-neck]

These people that are supposed to be guiding our country don't even really try to hide what they are doing. They care very little about what is happening to our country they just meet up there every year to grab as much taxpayer money as they can for them selves their families and the rich business men and big corporations before the collapse comes. They know what's coming they are counting on their on their God, the almighty dollar to see them through.

Our country has been and still is being sold out along with our freedom.

Every thing our congress does,every crisis, from hurricanes,oil spills,false shortages, every war is used as a front to convince us to give up our freedom and so they have a vehicle to funnel insane sums of our money and our children's money into their pockets, the pockets of both parties. and the pockets of the rich who own them all.

We are going to be the economic slaves on the Global Plantation run by hand picked leaders that serve giant corporations and their and our super rich masters.

[bvw]

Lobbying is a right. And corruption-wise as a nation the US is pretty honest. But that doesn't make bribery legal. Nor is it ethical, although it is legal, for congresspersons and their families to engage far more egregious forms of what Martha Stewart went to jail for.

Stewart was convicted on one charge of conspiracy, one charge of obstruction of justice and two charges of making false statements to investigators.

Stewart was convicted of selling almost 4,000 shares of ImClone Systems on Dec. 27, 2001, after being tipped that former ImClone CEO Sam Waksal was trying to dump his own shares in the company. Waksal is a friend of Stewart.

Prosecutors said Stewart and her former stock broker, Peter Bacanovic, then tried to cover up the reason for the trade.

I remembered you had mentioned you worked on some sort of scanners, sorry to confuse you with L3. Let me ask two more questions, feel free to not answer, of course.

Is your company minority-owned? What percentage of gross sales are to non-government (directly or indirectly via a subcontract) clients?

[centurion316]

The problem is bribery, not lobbying; together with extortion. Politicians will make it quite clear, usually through their staff that if someone wants access, then they better pony up. All but the stupid ones know how to stay within the boundaries of the rules that Congress wrote for itself, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that Congress gave themselves plenty of wiggle room to get a piece of the action.

Our clients are all government. But, we don’t have any minority status, we are not a small business for most purposes anymore, so we have to compete with the big boys. What keeps us going is by specializing in testing and evaluation, we can demonstrate that we have no conflicts of interest and since the government is getting much tougher on such things, we can compete for work that the big guys can no longer do. The government has finally put their foot down and said to folks like Lockheed Martin that they can’t make the thingy, test the thingy, and manage the development of the thingy. Fox in the chickencoop