Comments on Advance Indiana™: Lawmakers Cut Deal Secretly To Give $100 Million To Hulman Family Before Holding A Single Public Hearing

On that point, Pat, the news articles claim it onl...

2013-02-11T21:23:14.054-05:00

On that point, Pat, the news articles claim it only involves state sales and income tax revenues. When Amos Brown asked Miles about it during his interview, he couldn't say for certain what, if any, local taxes it included.

I'll be interested in how much Indy will lose ...

2013-02-11T20:54:25.136-05:00

I'll be interested in how much Indy will lose in local income taxes. It would be poetic justice if the amount matched the City's " take" from the CIB taxes they just passed.

WOW (in caps) is there any Corporate Welfare Plan ...

2013-02-11T19:00:57.876-05:00

WOW (in caps) is there any Corporate Welfare Plan our Elected Officials object to???

The Soviet Union had the nomenklatura which was according to WIKI, "An official in the party or government bureaucracy could not advance in the nomenklatura without the assistance of a patron. In return for this assistance in promoting his career, the client carried out the policies of the patron."

We have our own system of Crony-Capitalism. It is every bit as destructive to America as Crony Communism was to the Soviet Union.

We shall see if our New Governor is any different from his predecessors. After all Pence will have to sign on the dotted line.

Very few people get elected to public office in th...

2013-02-11T19:00:32.387-05:00

Very few people get elected to public office in this country today who aren't on the take. Believe me, I used to work as a lobbyist at the Indiana State House and for the Illinois House Staff. You will never meet a group of people who run around with their hands out expecting some sort of favor for anything they vote on than the people elected to that body. Free tickets to sporting events and concerts are at the top of their agenda. Some lobbyist hire pretty young interns who are simply used as free whores to satisfy their sexual urges. A number of young female staffers paid by taxpayer dollars are passed around like candy by the legislators as well. The State House Reporters all know it happens but won't report on it. When they're in session, they spend the day figuring out which lobbyist is going to buy their dinner and drinks that evening and make sure a lovely young lady will be accompanying them for dinner. They don't want to pay out of their own pockets for vacations so they create some official trip as a ruse for getting someone else to pay for their out-of-state trips to Florida, Hawaii, New Orleans, New York, etc. An average lawmaker propably pockets about $10,000-$12,000 a year in freebies, and that's a conservative estimate. Most of these freebies are never reported on their financial disclosure forms as gifts. Some use loopholes to avoid disclosure; others have agreements with sleazy lobbyists that the gift won't be reported. Of the 150 state lawmakers, there are probably fewer than two dozen who aren't on the take. The rest will sell out their constituents on any given day in consideration for a favor from a lobbyist or special interest group. With no federal prosecutor willing to prosecute the most rampant forms of public corruption, they know they can get by with it and they do. That's not counting lawmakers, including some attorneys and business owners, who blatantly use their position to make tens of thousands upwards into the millions. Look at what State Rep. Eric Turner has gotten by with. Many of them land new jobs once they are elected to the legislature that are explicitly a quid pro quo for their vote on by a certain industry or special interest group. They don't even have to show up for work regularly at those jobs to draw a full-time salary with benefits. There's no deterrent when they can engage in self-dealing in full public view and the media is so pathetic in this state that it won't put public pressure on prosecutors to do something about it.

It's bad enough that political forces are so w...

2013-02-11T18:46:37.795-05:00

It's bad enough that political forces are so willing to finance what's supposed to be private enterprise.

It's double offensive that Republicans are the driving force behind it.

Fiscal responsibility is clearly dead and forgotten.