Interesting data compiled by Congressional Quarterly’s Political Moneyline. As always, paper heir Jim Sensenbrenner is #1 in these goodies receiving $203,175 in travel over the past six years. David Obey escaped Wisconsin Winters a number of times, coming in 70th at $79,153. Tammy Baldwin was #147 @ $48,173 while Paul Ryan was #142 @ $48,866. Ryan and Baldwin both travelled to Israel and Jordan courtesy of the American Israel Education Foundation. Russ Feingold was #597 @ $1,078. Scot Paltrow has more.
Monthly Archives: October 2006
Political MoneyLine: Congressional & Senator’s Private Gifts of Travel
Interesting data compiled by Congressional Quarterly’s Political Moneyline. As always, paper heir Jim Sensenbrenner is #1 in these goodies receiving $203,175 in travel over the past six years. David Obey escaped Wisconsin Winters a number of times, coming in 70th at $79,153. Tammy Baldwin was #147 @ $48,173 while Paul Ryan was #142 @ $48,866. Ryan and Baldwin both travelled to Israel and Jordan courtesy of the American Israel Education Foundation. Russ Feingold was #597 @ $1,078.
Edgewood College first college accepted into Green Tier program
From a media release issued by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources:
MADISON – Edgewood College of Madison is now the first college or university in Wisconsin to be accepted into the Department of Natural Resources’ Green Tier program. Edgewood joins the statewide program that encourages institutions and businesses to go beyond current rules and regulations to reduce their impact on the environment. . . .
Recent environmental accomplishments at Edgewood include the renovation of the Mazzuchelli Biological Station, for which the contractor, J.H. Findorff & Son, was awarded the 2005 Environmental Excellence Award given by the Association of General Contractors (AGC) for their work. A new residence hall, currently under construction on the Edgewood campus, has been designed to achieve LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification as a Green Building. The campus also has several rain gardens designed to capture large volumes of runoff from the campus, largely from campus parking lots, and is active in numerous other environmental and conservation activities.
The Next Capitalism
When he died in 1848, John Jacob Astor was America’s richest man, leaving a fortune of $20 million that had been earned mainly from real estate and fur trading. Despite his riches, Astor’s business was mainly a one-man show. He employed only a handful of workers, most of them clerks. This was typical of his time, when the farmer, the craftsman, the small partnership and the independent merchant ruled the economy. Only 50 years later, almost everything had changed. Giant industrial enterprises — making steel, producing oil, refining sugar and much more — had come to dominate.
The rise of big business is one of the seminal events in American history, and if you want to think about it intelligently, you consult historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr., its pre-eminent chronicler. At 88, Chandler has retired from the Harvard Business School but is still churning out books and articles. It is an apt moment to revisit his ideas because the present upheavals in business are second only to those of a century ago.
Until Chandler, the emergence of big business was all about titans. The Rockefellers, Carnegies and Fords were either “robber barons” whose greed and ruthlessness allowed them to smother competitors and establish monopolistic empires. Or they were “captains of industry” whose genius and ambition laid the industrial foundations for modern prosperity. But when Chandler meticulously examined business records, he uncovered a more subtle story. New technologies (the railroad, telegraph and steam power) favored the creation of massive businesses that needed — and, in turn, gave rise to — superstructures of professional managers: engineers, accountants and supervisors.
Tammy Baldwin on Earmarks
I received an email recently from Tammy Baldwin regarding my post on the excesses of congressional earmarks – using our checkbooks:
Dear Mr. Zellmer,
Thank you for contacting me regarding earmark reform. It is good
to hear from you, and I apologize for the delay in my response.Like you, I am concerned about unnecessary government spending.
In recent years, government spending has increased dramatically,
creating unprecedented national debt. Continued, large-scale
deficit spending is unquestionably poor public policy. Many have
suggested that one of the ways to cut spending is to reform the
practice of “earmarks”, which are appropriation amendments that
fund specific projects. In the current climate of excessive
spending, reforming this amendment process will not go far
enough. The government is spending billions of dollars a day on
the Iraq War while simultaneously lowering tax revenue by cutting
taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals. This shifts the
burden onto the middle and lower-income earners who are unable
to support such extensive spending.At the current rate, the United States is adding one trillion dollars
to our national debt every eighteen months. According to the
Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if the President’s current tax
and spending polices are continued over the next ten years, the
yearly deficit will increase to $439 billion as soon as 2014. The
national debt will skyrocket to $14.5 trillion, almost double today’s
level. Clearly, this course of fiscal irresponsibility cannot be
sustained. I believe Congress must return to fiscal discipline, such
as in the late 1990s when we turned annual federal deficits into
surpluses. Rest assured that I will keep your views in mind
regarding earmark reform as the debate over fiscal responsibility
and the federal budget continues.Again, thank you for sharing your views. Your opinion matters to
me. If I can be of service to you in any other way, please do not
hesitate to let me know. As a result of the anthrax incidents, all
mail sent to Congress is first irradiated. This process causes
significant delays. To ensure the fastest response, I encourage all
constituents who have access to the internet to contact me through
my website at http://tammybaldwin.house.gov.Sincerely,
Tammy Baldwin
Member of Congress
I appreciate the email. Baldwin gets points (or her office) for emailing responses whereas our Senators continue to send dead tree responses to electronic inquiries. Tammy’s House & Campaign websites. Her opponent in this falls race is Dave Magnum.
Fall
Sunset
Still Built on the Homefront
While many U.S. manufacturers are decamping to greener, and cheaper, pastures overseas, Bobcat, a division of Ingersoll-Rand Co. Ltd., has found advantages sticking close to its North Dakota roots to build the little machines that, among other things, are used to clean barns, dig dirt and plow snow. Bobcat has exploited its location to keep a finger on the pulse of its core market of small landscaping and construction contractors, helping it quickly develop and ship products. Also, the company’s rural setting, executives say, has bred the kind of culture where problems are solved with the can-do, make-do ethos of the farm.
“There are a lot of barriers any foreign producer has to overcome to give us a real challenge,” says Richard F. Pedtke, the president of Ingersoll-Rand’s compact vehicle division.
For example, the company usually can deliver any of the hundreds of attachments it sells for its machines to a customer within four days, a feat almost impossible and certainly costly for any company with long supply lines stretching overseas. And by keeping manufacturing, engineering, and marketing closely linked, with people in those roles sometimes living across the street from each other, the company is better able to anticipate how markets are shifting and find new applications for its machines, says Mr. Pedtke.
Cisco’s New Videoconferencing System
One industry analyst described Cisco’s system — which the company calls “telepresence” — as far superior to other video conferencing products, typically accessed or run over the Internet.
Chambers has touted the new technology as so lifelike that it could replace corporate travel, saying that Cisco will cut $100 million in expenses by reducing travel 20 percent in the next 12 months.The system uses software the company created and runs on a network powered by the company’s own routers and switches. The pictures are displayed on a 60-inch plasma screen with 1,080-pixel screen resolution, which is four times better than the standard television and two times better than a high-definition television.
The increaasing unpleasantness associated with air travel makes these products compelling – along with software only tools like Skype with video.
Find Out of Congress is a Family Business
The ever useful Sunlight Foundation:
Rep. Richard Pombo ☼ did it with his wife and his brother. In his 2004 presidential campaign, Sen. Joseph Lieberman ☼ did it with his children. Former Majority Leader Tom DeLay did it with his wife and daughter. All have hired relatives to work on their campaigns, paying them salaries out of special interest contributions. Our system of campaign finance is often called “legalized bribery,” in which special interests donate tens of thousands of dollars to a member’s campaign committee in the hopes of advancing their own issues. Some members of Congress, by hiring their spouses, in effect use their campaign treasury to supplement their own bank accounts. The practice is legal, disclosed in obscure corners of campaign finance reports, and rarely mentioned by those who cover campaigns. And now citizen journalists can investigate it!
I’m proud to announce that the Sunlight Foundation is launching a new distributed research and reporting project that will enable citizen journalists to find out how many members of the House of Representatives have their spouses on the payroll. Our simple, user-friendly six step tool (developed by our ultra-cool Sunlight Labs division) lets users investigate and record their results in just three minutes.