Honolulu Lite
So if anyone out there is really serious about stopping the practice once and for all and sending a bunch of people to jail, I'm going to tell them how to do it.
But first, I need to bring some of the uninformed up to speed on what is going on. Basically, in order to stop what amounted to legal bribery by rich individuals and companies seeking to curry favor with office-holders, the state limits individual contributions to $2,000. It's just a fact of political life that campaigns run on money. The more money a candidate has to spend, the more likely it is that person will be elected. It also is a fact of political life that those people or companies who give candidates large amounts of money do so because they expect something in return. (All right, maybe there are a few souls out there who simply fork over dough for philosophical reasons. All of these guys together wouldn't fill Yugo.)
What the contributors expect in return are jobs, appointments and juicy contracts. And they get them.
The ink on the campaign donation limit law wasn't dry before companies found a way around it. It was pretty easy. Basically, if the Wiki Wiki Widget Company wanted to give 20,000 smackers to someone running for mayor, the company's owner would have family members and company employees make $2,000 donations and later reimburse them.
Smart candidates will have some lackey campaign manager handle this stuff so he can have deniability. And since just about everyone is doing it, no one is real keen on blowing the whistle on anyone else.
It is no secret that this method of bundling donations has been standard operating procedure in Hawaii for years. Every election season the newspapers and television stations dutifully go down to the campaign spending commission, look up the major contributing companies and report to absolutely no one's amazement that companies and candidates are violating the law.
I'M not going to go easy on these guys and say that they technically aren't breaking the law or that they are only violating the spirit of the law. As far as I'm concerned, they are breaking the law. Period. Any company that deliberately makes a campaign contribution over the $2,000 limit by bundling contributions and reimbursing employees is guilty of conspiracy in my book.
Am I going to get sued? I doubt it. That would be the quickest route to the witness stand. The last thing these companies want is to have a bunch of their employees placed under oath.
And this is the heart of my solution to the problem.
The reason this system hasn't been busted is because law enforcement feels that it can't prove employees are being reimbursed or actually given money by their bosses to make campaign contributions. That's a crock. If the FBI or the state attorney general sees a company in which everyone from the boss to his cat has given $2,000 contributions, I think there is probable cause to believe something fishy is going on, just as if a suspected drug dealer makes multiple bank deposits of $9,999 in order stay under the $10,000 reporting limit.
That should be enough to put some of these employees under oath and ask them what's going on. There may be a few loyal workers out there, but I doubt that most would risk being charged with perjury just because their bosses used them as pawns to butter up a politician.
That's all you have to do. Problem solved. Will it happen? I doubt it. This is a can of worms that could bring a one-party state like Hawaii to its knees. And nobody but three or four Republicans and a couple of Libertarians want that.
