Obama reveals sweeping ethics reform plan

Presidential candidate Barack Obama unveiled the strongest ethics reform package yet during speech today at Manchester, New Hamphire.

When I am President, I will make it absolutely clear that working in an Obama Administration is not about serving your former employer, your future employer, or your bank account – it’s about serving your country, and that’s what comes first. When you walk into my administration, you will not be able to work on regulations or contracts directly related to your former employer for two years. And when you leave, you will not be able to lobby the Administration throughout the remainder of my term in office.

A lot of people have told me this is pretty tough, but I refuse to accept the Washington logic that you cannot find thousands of talented, patriotic Americans willing to devote a few years to their country without the promise of a lucrative lobbying job after they’re done. I know we can find them, and in my administration, we will.

When there is a bill that ends up on my desk as President, you will have five days to look online and find out what’s in it before I sign it. When there are meetings between lobbyists and a government agency, we won’t be going to the Supreme Court to keep it secret like Dick Cheney and his energy task force, we’ll be putting them up on the Internet for every American to watch. And instead of allowing lobbyists to slip big corporate tax breaks into bills during the dead of night, we will make sure every single tax break and earmark is available to every American online. This builds on the “Google for Government” law I passed in Congress, which already allows you to see every contract, every grant, every dime of federal spending online.