do I really have to say it???
Of course they are. Why else would they spend $1m dollars to get a job paying $100k?
Welcome to the club, I've been there for awhile. No matter who they are when they come to Washington, politics corrupts everybody and everything it touchs.
Please tell me they are not All Republicans!
I am damned near suicidal at this point with McQueeg and all!
Throw every incumbent out who has participated in earmarks. ALL OF THEM, Republican or Democrat. That would definitely include John Murtha. He would be tops on the list.
I hope they mention Obama’s wifes salary getting doubled after her hospital got a million in earmarks...
Term limits!!!!!!!!
And take the politics out of the Justice Dept.....
If we can track terrorists money flow...we can surely do so for 500 or so congresscritters...
Where was Chris Wallace on that one??? I'd venture to guess that the money through those deals is bigger than this story.
Why wasn't Obama part of the story, when he earmarked a grant that got his wife a tripling of her salary?
The “Keating”Group.
do I really have to say it??? Any Illinois pol, rat or pubbie, has a high likelihood of being corrupt. I found it interesting that the 'rats in congress excepted Hastert's leadership role (when the pubbies ruled) without much protest. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, was totally unacceptable. I attributed it to the fact Hastert was non confrontational and sort of an old shoe type of guy. Now I know the real reason, he was as corrupt as any of them, and they knew they could reveal him to be the low life pol he really is ... at a moments notice. In effect controlling Hastert.
LINE ITEM VETO HERE! LINE ITEM VETO NOW! AND SAVE THE TAX PAYERS BILLIONS!
What Mark Twain said......
Another Freeper came to his defense with "he's not been convicted, nor even charged, of anything."
When one must be convicted to even be labeled, nothing will ever come of exposes such as Fox's.
If public damnation is fruitless, at what point must we resort to pitchforks?
Everything in West Virginia is named after Sheets. I’m sure that he would be in the top two.
Cornerstone Technologies LLC, a research company owned by relatives of U.S. Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski and funded with $9.2 million in federal defense earmarks secured by the congressman, won’t pay a penny of the $1.34 million it owes to its creditors, a bankruptcy trustee said Thursday.
Cornerstone declared $14,100 in assets when it filed for bankruptcy in September 2006. A recent inventory of Cornerstone’s holdings by an appraiser working for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court showed “there’s no real assets to liquidate,” Trustee Robert P. Sheils Jr. said.
In its bankruptcy filing, Cornerstone listed the machines as having an unknown value, but noted they cost $100,000 to build. They were also listed as part of the collateral securing a $142,000 debt to another Kanjorski-family company, KOR Holdings. KOR Holdings, owned by Kanjorski’s daughter and four of his nephews, owned 60 percent of Cornerstone. One of the nephews, Cornerstone CEO Peter A. Kanjorski, personally owned another 20 percent of Cornerstone. The remaining 20 percent was owned by a former Cornerstone employee.
Cornerstone Technologies, a research company that received more than $9 million in federal grants and contracts, halted operations in 2003. The company, which was operated by U.S. Rep. Paul Kanjorski’s daughter and four of his nephews, promised to create hundreds of jobs and to turn the Wyoming Valley into a technology hotspot. Kanjorski, D-Nanticoke, earmarked several million dollars in federal spending toward the company and is the reason, according to one of the company’s former employees and a listed creditor, the company failed.
“The moment we had a greedy congressman trying to stuff his pockets with money, we were through,” said Bruce Conrad, of Weatherly, in March. Conrad owned 20 percent of the company. An additional 20 percent was owned by Peter Kanjorski, a Nanticoke attorney and a nephew of the congressman. The remaining 60 percent was owned by KOR Holdings, a partnership owned by the congressman’s daughter Nancy and nephews Peter, Paul Eric, Mark and Russell.
In an assessment of how the Kanjorski family handled the day-to-day operations, a former head of Penn State University’s Energy Institute was quoted as saying “It was like the Three Stooges meet anthracite”.
So it should come as no surprise that the Kanjorski clan squandered 9.2 million dollars of taxpayer money and after filing for bankruptcy is leaving creditors with no hope of regaining even a portion of the 1.34 million dollars in debt that this bunch left behind.
10.5 MILLION dollars and Cornerstone Technologies produced nothing of any practical value.
******
AVA Solar, a Fort Collins, Colorado based company has just been given a 3 million dollar federal grant.
The company promises to employ up to 500 people by next year.
I would advise anyone living in the Fort Collins area not to quit the job they have in the hopes of working at AVA.
I say that because the Director for Strategic Planning for the company is none other than Russell Kanjorski.
Yes, he is one of the Cornerstone Kanjorski’s that blew through the 9.2 million dollars that Uncle Paul got for them, produced nothing, and then left creditors on the hook for another 1.3 million.
If I were the suspicious type, I would be wondering if Congressman Kanjorski was involved with AVA Solar getting a 3 million dollar government grant.
And if it was conditional on his nephew Russell getting hired.
But the real irony of this saga is shown in a story about AVA Solar that appears in the Northern Colorado Business Report.
In the final line of the article, Russell Kanjorski is quoted as saying:
“It’s really time for us to stop talking and start doing”.
It’s just a shame that Russell and the rest of the Kanjorski clan feeding at the public trough couldn’t have figured that out 10 and a half million dollars ago.
When will this be on or did I miss it?
The Federal Elections Commission recently fined Citizens for Action, a political action committee associated with Congressman Kanjorski.
Two of Mr. Kanjorski’s nephews who are,(surprise surprise) on the Cittizens for Action payroll have received over $75,000 in “consulting” fees and “expense” reimbursements.
Another Kanjorski affiliate, Pennsylvanian’s for Kanjorski, paid K&K Real Estate $36,000 to rent a campaign office.
It appears that K&K made out like bandits, 36k for a campaign office is a tad steep.
Unless you consider the fact that Mr. Kanjorski and his brother Peter own K&K Real Estate.
Sept. 2007
The U.S. Navy wants a business owned by the family of Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski to hand over a piece of high-tech equipment bought with some of the $9.25 million in taxpayer funds Kanjorski steered to the company.
Except no one seems to know where to find the equipment — a high-pressure pump.
The mystery of the missing pump, combined with newly unearthed evidence that federal investigators probed Kanjorski’s connections to the company, Cornerstone Technologies, has given new life to a story that seems unlikely to go away.
Kanjorski, who along with his chief of staff was subpoenaed in one of the cases but never testified, said he’s storing some of Cornerstone’s property but can’t speak for the company.
“I have no relationship to the Cornerstone company and have had no involvement in the company’s legal proceedings, except I indicated my willingness to give a deposition,” he said in a statement to Politico. If Cornerstone owes the Navy something, he said, “that is a matter between the contracting parties.”
Cornerstone’s lawyer was unaware of the pump and said the Navy never mentioned it.
The company reported in its bankruptcy filing that it owed a debt of unknown value to the Navy for an “incomplete contract,” but the U.S. government has not filed a claim against Cornerstone.
Claim or not, the Navy wants the pump, which was part of a prototype water-jet mill taxpayers paid Cornerstone to develop, according to Ignacio Perez, the Navy program officer who oversaw Cornerstone’s work. “The Navy will collect only the pump when it finds it,” he said, but “it has not been located at this point.”
Kanjorski encouraged the creation of Cornerstone in the late 1990s to develop — and one day commercialize — the technology. It was formed by his nephew, Peter Kanjorski, and a scientist, Bruce Conrad, who were joined in the company by four of the congressman’s other nephews and his daughter.
In 1998, with the help of Rep. John P. Murtha, a fellow Pennsylvanian and the top Democrat on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Rep. Kanjorski earmarked $3.5 million for the research through the Navy.
Though Kanjorski has denied he actively steered taxpayer cash to Cornerstone, the Navy’s Perez said the company was the only applicant for the research contract. And a 1999 e-mail exchange suggests Kanjorski and Murtha pressured the Defense Department to release funds to Cornerstone.
The department was withholding at least part of the funds, a Navy official wrote to Conrad, “and the only way it will be … released [is] if Congress gets on their back.”
Conrad forwarded the message to Kanjorski’s chief of staff, Karen Feather. She responded that Kanjorski talked to Murtha’s appropriations staffer who “said this is an annual dance and ‘guaranteed’ us that our project would not be rescinded. But he promised to call over to make sure they knew the appropriators were watching over this project carefully.”