What would the U.S. look like if Jesus were president? Part 3: Bribery

If Jesus were president he would probably do everything in his power to make pork barreling and lobbying illegal. Pork barreling and lobbying are little more than legal methods of giving and receiving bribes. Deuteronomy 16:19 says “Do not pervert justice or show partiality. Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and twists the words of the righteous.”

First, let’s look at pork barreling. Dr. Paul M. Johnson defines porkbarrel legislation as “Appropriations of public funds by Congress (or other legislative assemblies) for projects that do not serve the interests of any large portion of the country’s citizenry but are nevertheless vigorously promoted by a small group of legislators because they will pump outside taxpayers’ money and resources into the local districts these legislators represent. Successful promotion of such pork-barrel legislation (often through skillful logrolling) is very likely to get the legislator re-elected by his constituents. Classic examples of such pork-barrel legislation include Federal appropriations bills for dams, river and harbor improvements, bridge and highway construction, and job-training centers, as well as legislation designed to prevent closure of obsolete or unneeded military installations, prisons, VA hospitals and the like.”

In short, politicians add extraneous items to a bill that will make their opponent’s constituents happy. By doing this they can get the bill’s opponent to vote for a bill that they would normally vote against.

And lobbying is even more blatant. Lobbyists contribute funds to politicians’ reelection coffers, take them on trips, wine and dine them, and in exchange the politicians vote the way the lobbyists encourage them to. So politicians listen to lobbyists, lobbyists listen to large corporations, and large corporations desire legislation that will help them to grow their business and keep their shareholders happy.

Some corporations spend millions of dollars each year lobbying for their own specific needs. Here is a breakdown of the top 20 industries and how much money they spent lobbying in 2011.

Let’s just take a look at a couple. Pharmaceuticals and health products, for example, spends over $182 million last year for lobbying politicians to do their bidding. Media such as TV, movies, and music spends $91 billion. Yes, that’s billion, with a B.

If they hadn’t spent so much money lobbying, the media industry could have been $91 billion more profitable. These corporations wouldn’t spend so much money if it wasn’t profitable to them.

So what are they lobbying against? One thing is the Internet. The RIAA estimates that the recording industry loses $12.5 billion annually to Internet Piracy. The DGA estimates that $25 billion is lost to Internet Piracy. So combined, they are losing $37.5 billion dollars per year… It seems to me that they’re losing more to lobbying than they are to piracy, but as they’re generally intelligent people, they must be getting more for their money than we know about.

If you were to add up those numbers like I just did, you would discover that the top 20 industries spent $1,548,328,089 on political bribes last year. That is $1.5 trillion last year alone. At the time this post was written our national deficit is 15,225,265,500,256 and climbing. The money that was spent on political bribes last year could have cut our national debt by 10%! Do you think Jesus would stand for that? How can anybody with a conscience stand for that kind of corruption?

With that kind of money flowing into politicians’ hands and distorting their judgment, what chance does the average American have of getting justice? Do you have billions of dollars to throw at different politicians? Do you even have a couple thousand extra dollars with which you could attempt to buy a politician? Even if you did, would you have the connections to make it happen?

As a man who upheld the law, I don’t believe that Jesus would stand for that. Ecclesiastes 7:7 says “Extortion turns a wise man into a fool, and a bribe corrupts the heart.”