Friday, September 16, 2011

Okay, say Rick Perry can't be bought for $5,000. Can he be bought for $30,000?

How much money did Rick Perry take from Merck & Co., the makers of Gardasil, the HPV vaccine which, after donating to state legislators and other policy makers all over the country, they went out and pushed to have forced on middle school girls?
But wait! I didn't have the whole story. It turns out it was more like $30,000. 
And wait again! Over the past five years, it turns out that Merck gave over $350,000 to the Republican Governors Association, a period in which Perry was heavily involved with the group, and the RGA in turn gave $4 million to Rick Perry. 
And wait some more! Merck's lobbyist on the vaccine issue was Mike Toomey, Perry's former chief of staff. Toomey recently co-founded a super PAC that plans to raise over $50 million for Perry's campaign.
Read more here.

HT: The Atlantic Wire

3 comments:

One Brow said...

When you buyy a Republican, you can't go cheap! $5000 is just insulting.

Singring said...

Maybe one day, the US public will have the guts to stand up and demand campaign finance reform. It doesn't take a genius to fihure out that the only way to get at least some kind of handle on blatant, legal corruption (and this goes for GOP and Democrats) is for public campaign funding, banning of ads by anyone but the campaigns themselves and prohibiting of job transitions from politics to and from the private sector in which the politician had/will have responsibility.

It makes a complete mockery of the skimpy campaign finance laws that do exist when candidate X can only get X number of dollars directly from an interest group, but that unlimited funds can be allocated to a some 'PAC' that can then run as many ads as it wants in support of one particular candidate. The same goes for cushy arrangements in which someone like Dick Cheney can negotiate contracts with a corporation like Halliburton while he is defense secretary and then, when voted out, goes off to work for that same company. Likewise, Paulson, Geithner and pretty much everyone else who has had major influence on US fiscal policy has been employed by private investment firms and goes back to private investment firms when they are done. How on earth does anyone expect anything but rampant corruption and collusion in this kind fo situation? I find it mind-boggling that people are not on the barricades about this kind of stuff.

I'm glad you're on the bandwagon, Martin. The US needs radical campaign finance reform and a disentanglement of politics and corporations.

Art said...

I don't know if some of Perry's spin is along these lines, but wouldn't the price tag for a populist be low? What better candidate for the people than one who the man on the street can afford to buy?

I guess that would mean that Perry is not really for the "little guy", eh, since his price tag is bigger than a measly $5K.