Mark Kirk's Votes for the Industries that Fund His Campaign and How Lobbyists Took Over Our Country

Over the past year, Kirk has touted among his accomplishments Medicare D. That is the failed prescription drug plan for seniors that penalizes seniors and enriches the pharmaceutical companies. However, it no longer appears on his candidate website. Wonder why?

Well, it could be that the bills for next year are out and they contain higher copays and they raise the amount you need to get to spend before obtaining catastrophic coverage. So the donut gets smaller and the donut hole gets larger. If you are a senior and feel it's time to make a better batch of donuts, think about this: the law that brought you Medicare D was part of the Bob Ney/Tom Delay/Jack Abramoff network of legislative favors and disgraced lobbyists:

It’s well known that in his crusade to pass the bill, DeLay drew on more than 800 pharmaceutical-industry lobbyists, millions of dollars in campaign contributions, and the efforts of numerous business and healthcare groups. But this grossly flawed legislation could never have passed without the help of the same players who were central to Abramoff’s lobbying operation: Tony Rudy and Ed Buckham. Using a nest of nonprofits flush with corporate cash, the discredited lobbyists played a vital, albeit hidden, role in whittling down congressional opposition to the bill for more than a year before the final vote.

You should also remember that the Medicare bill was one of the bills that passed in the middle of the night after the voting time was illegally extended.

Well Abramoff and Delay are politically ruined, in legal trouble and out of government once and for all (we hope), but their system of handing over the country to lobbyists and running it for profit is not. A Kirk apologist commenting on this site recently bragged about the amount of campaign dollars Kirk has to run his racist ads against Seals. Those campaign dollars are nothing to brag about if you care about good government.

Kirk obtains most of that money from industry PACs. As Dan Seals pointed out in in the debate last Thursday, Kirk gets most of his campaign money from 3 industries: energy, pharmaceutical and insurance. A look of Kirk's voting record for subsidizing big oil and diluting environmental laws to benefit energy companies, Medicare D and ending all dialogue on providing reasonable health care for the 46 million uninsured Americans is testament to the control these industries has over his votes.

Kirk's next big idea is to avoid a real dialogue on the health care for the uninsured is to extend COBRA. That is nothing more than another way to further enrich the insurance industry at the expenses of vulnerable folks who have lost their jobs. Lifetime COBRA, at 150% the already high cost of coverage, is not much help to someone who has lost their job and cannot find another one.

A vote for Mark Kirk is a vote for the system of lobbyists that enriched guys like Ney, Delay and Abramoff. A vote for Dan Seals is a vote for an independent voice that will answer to the district.