Roll Call tears into Burns' office, aides over lobbies

[kpete]

Roll Call tears into Burns' office, aides over lobbies
RAW STORY
Published: March 8, 2006


Roll Call today ripped into a network of former and current aides to Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT), who have aided technology interests in advancing their interests while earning $20 million in lobbying fees.

Excerpts from the unusually aggressive Roll Call piece follow:

#
For nearly a decade, a group of former top aides to Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) have successfully used personal and professional connections to Burns, Montana State University’s Burns Technology Center and other institutions associated with him to secure more than $20 million in lobbying fees for themselves, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research contracts, tax breaks and subsidies for their clients.

...

Although it often can take decades for major policy or spending bills to move through the Senate, the $20 million-plus investment these companies have made in Burns’ former aides appears to have paid off.

For instance, the satellite giant Intelsat has paid Scott and Brooke more than $1 million as part of its successful campaign to first become a private company in 2000 and then to stave off potentially crippling financial requirements that Congress had built into the original privatization bill that was championed in the Senate by Burns.

Other companies have secured plum Department of Defense, Energy and National Institutes of Health funding as a result of Burns-authored earmarks in spending bills, while still others have had their regulatory and spending priorities championed in the Senate by Burns.

http://rawstory.com/news/2006/Roll_Call_tears_into_Burns_office_0308.html

Read the full, registration-restricted article here:
http://www.rollcall.com/issues/51_93/news/12440-1.html?CMP=OTC-RSS

[mom cat]

1. They are all crooks.