The Queen of Pork

Here's how earmarks work: Each year, Congress allocates trillions of dollars, with most of it doled out to federal agencies, which in turn spend their budgets according to their own established — and usually competitive and merit-based — criteria. But in a small percentage of cases, members of Congress can direct the agencies in question to award their monies to specific organizations or companies, which are almost always located in that member's home state. In an unsurprisingly high number of cases, the money is given to a company whose executives just happen to have donated heavily to the member of Congress in question. That's what an earmark is. Some are legit and go to worthy causes, but on the whole they are sleazy enough to have moved the Democrats to pass earmark-reform legislation after they took control of Congress in 2006. The reform forced members of Congress to attach their names to the earmarks in question, and Democrats pledged to cut the number and cost of earmarks in half.

They blew it. This past year, in fact, members of Congress jammed more than $17 billion of earmarks into the budget — a thirty percent increase from the previous year. In March, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi abandoned plans to impose a one-year moratorium on earmarks — a reform that was also rejected by the Democrat-controlled Senate.

"The Democrats studiously refuse to do anything serious about pork — for the simple reason that they are every bit as addicted to it as the Republicans and have no intention whatsoever of lessening a system of self-aggrandizement that they believe gives them political success, nay permanence," says Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate aide who worked on defense earmarks before being forced into retirement for complaining about it publicly. "They will find — hopefully sooner than they think — that the permanence they crave is undermined by their self-directed behavior."

Hillary's $1.5 million gift to Calvin Butts came from three of her earmarks in the fiscal year 2008. She had a lot of them. In fact, between 2002 and 2006, Clinton secured more than $2.2 billion in earmarks, many of them attached to defense-spending bills, where she has unusual influence as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Hillary succeeded in securing twenty-six earmarks to the 2008 defense bill worth a total of $148 million — a number that dwarfed that of any Democrat except committee chairman Carl Levin. Barack Obama, by contrast, had only one request attached to the defense bill.

Hillary's defense earmarks benefited some of the world's largest weapons producers, many of which have factories in New York. Among the most prominent include Northrop Grumman, which Hillary singled out for $6 million to develop a new radar system; Plug Power, for whom Hillary secured $3 million for a backup power system for Pentagon operations; and Telephonics, which Hillary gave $5 million for an intercom system for Black Hawk helicopters.

Her biggest coup of all was a multi-billion-dollar contract she helped to secure for Lockheed Martin to build the Marine One presidential helicopter — a project derided by insiders as a typical example of Pentagon waste. "Oh, the presidential-helicopter thing is a classic boondoggle," says one congressional source. "They could have taken any old Black Hawk helicopter, put a nice interior in it and a decal on it, and it would've been OK. Instead, we got this thing that costs four times as much. It's nuts."

Indeed, the Pentagon confirmed in March that the helicopter Hillary made sure would be built at Lockheed's plant in Owego, New York, would, in fact, cost $400 million per unit — more than the modified Boeing 747 used as Air Force One. You heard right: $400 million for a single fucking helicopter.

With most of her earmarks, Clinton makes sure to get a return on her investment of taxpayer money. Lockheed donated $10,000 to Hillary's Senate campaign in 2006 and provided her with plenty of free rides on its planes. Plug Power officials have reportedly donated some $7,100 to her campaigns since 2003, and several Northrop executives gave the max to her presidential campaign. In that light it seems odd that Hillary was critical of a deal to award a refueling tanker project to Northrop — except that she has also received maximum contributions from executives at the rival bidder, Boeing. Meanwhile, employees from Corning, for whom Hillary secured a $1 million earmark, donated $133,000 to her presidential campaign. The list goes on and on.

But Hillary's most brazen earmark this presidential-election season had nothing to do with defense. It had to do, oddly enough, with rock music. Back in June 2007, Hillary attempted to write a $1 million earmark for a museum commemorating the Woodstock festival in Bethel, New York. Not that anyone should have anything against Woodstock, but it seems weird to ask taxpayers to pay for it — especially when the project is principally funded by one of America's richest men, a media mogul named Alan Gerry.

Listed as number 297 on the annual Forbes list of wealthy Americans, Gerry reportedly has a net worth of $1.6 billion. Beyond the fact that he hardly needs the money, there is this to consider: On June 30th of last year, exactly three days after the earmark was officially inserted into an appropriations bill, Gerry and his wife both made maximum donations to Hillary's presidential campaign, totaling $9,200.

The deal stank, even by congressional standards. When Republican opponents introduced an amendment to kill the earmark, the measure passed easily. "Most of our amendments fail by fifty or sixty votes," says John Hart, a spokesman for Sen. Tom Coburn, an anti-earmark crusader who introduced the amendment to kill the handout. "But this one passed with no problem. It was so over-the-top."