Stevens is Corrupt

Ted Stevens protected $350 million for projects the Pentagon did not want, wasting taxpayer money on what would become dead-end ventures.
With the protection of Stevens and other Senators, one Mr. Cantrell, engineer for a defense department contractor became his own lobbyist for programs the Pentagon did not want. Eventually, he decided to work the system to benefit himself, keeping dozens of programs going, each one kicking back thousands of dollars between 2001-2007. Until he was indicted.
Mr. Cantrell had placed several friends as lobbyists or consultants working on his behalf with friendly contractors, allowing them to bill the government for the costs, even though federal law prohibits paying any expenses associated with lobbying.
As the Eric Lipton in the New York Times presents it: Corrupt individuals working networks of defense department contractors and willing Senators to keep unwanted programs alive simply to generate profits. Or was it Senator Stevens and others using men like Cantrell to keep projects and programs in the pipeline, keeping them real enough to generate home state funding?
Here is the meat of the matter- Uncle Ted Stevens, protecting giant useless Alaska projects, larding up the Pentagon budgets, while keeping up a steady drumbeat of fiscal conservatism, All this while attacking Democrats for being “tax and spend liberals,”
The whole project of missile defense could continue its wasteful ways because, with Republicans in control, there was no one to investigate. Even when the Pentagon itself tried to investigate, Stevens called them off.
This is the crony capitalism that Stevens has supported for forty years, while Alaskans keeps sending him back because we get our kickback too.
Pentagon officials tried to kill the project. “Stevens’s office called to insist that the Kodiak project proceed, Admiral West and Lt. Gen. Edward G. Anderson, then the head of Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said in interviews.”
The military men backed off, and the construction at Kodiak continued.
Mr. Cantrell said he knew that building a new launching facility in Kodiak was wasteful. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “The economics of it, they just don’t work.”