David Sirota: Money plus secrecy equals trouble

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Money is not a bad thing. And secrecy doesn't have to be, either. But when the two mix, you can bet someone is going to get bilked. Look no further than Congress' corruption scandals and corporate America's excessive pay packages to know this is the case. Though the situations seem unrelated, they revolve around the confluence of money and secrecy. Lawmakers and executives are making out like bandits while taxpayers and company shareholders are getting ripped off. In Congress, corruption is emanating from the appropriations committees - the panels overseeing federal spending. Lawmakers there are responsible for "earmarking" federal dollars for specific projects.

That powerful privilege to earmark lately has been demonized as the problem. It's not. It's the secrecy that is causing the trouble. Appropriators are allowed to earmark taxpayer money anonymously, meaning they can direct spending without having to take public responsibility for their actions. Lobbyists, of course, know this, and thus lavish committee members with thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in order to get them to anonymously earmark taxpayer dollars to their corporate clients.

This is what former Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California was convicted of - taking bribes from contractors in exchange for using his position on the House Appropriations Committee to move federal dollars to those contractors. This is why committee members such as Republican Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, Democratic Rep. Alan B. Mollohan of West Virginia and Republican Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana are under federal investigation. They are accused of trying to quietly use their spending power to move taxpayer cash to campaign contributors and business associates. They may have gotten too careless.

But the problem is clear: Money mixed with secrecy is the real reason most of the pay-to-play scandals ravaging Capitol Hill are coming out of the appropriations committees. In the corporate world, it is the same thing. Recent headlines document how the CEO of UnitedHealth Group was given $1.6 billion in stock options, the CEO of Pfizer Inc. was given an $83 million pension and the CEO of ExxonMobil Corp. was granted a $400 million retirement package.

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