January 18, 2006
Wrong Frame, Wrong Solution
Looks like the long-running scandal of Washington--the selling of access, influence, legislative favors, regulatory interventions and straightforward raids on the U.S. Treasury by public representatives to wealthy private bidders--is being mis-framed as a "lobbying scandal" and thus is about to get us some band-aid measures called "ethics reform." That's because what's going on here isn't so much the "Looting of Washington" by private interests as it is the "Selling of Washington" by public representatives.
Leaders of both parties in Congress are now falling all over each other to propose new measures to require greater disclosure by lobbyists, to clamp down on outside groups paying for Congressional travel, to restrict or ban gifts to Members or their staffs. While it would be good to have greater disclosure from lobbyists about their contacts with Congress, this approach is hardly going to change the underlying condition that leads to so much corruption in Washington.
That's because lobbyists and the wealthy special interests they represent would have very little of the kind of power deployed by fixers like Jack Abramoff if Members of Congress weren't so desperate for the one thing they provide: Big Money to finance their campaigns. If you don't change that, even the best-intentioned Members of Congress will find themselves altering their behavior to suit the needs of Big Money.
Sure, it would be great if Members were required to disclose what "earmarks" they have inserted into bills on behalf of particular interests, and if Senators had to disclose when they place a "hold" on a bill, since these are both common practices they now use to show their value to Big Money contributors. But until we offer qualified candidates a different source of funding for their campaigns--"clean," disinterested, public money--we aren't going to see a real decrease in the Selling of Washington.
I see that pundits like Andrew Ferguson and Glenn Reynolds are happily using the mis-framed "lobbying scandal" to sneer--with some justification--at reformers' efforts to write ever more stringent rules defining what is a "gift" to a Member, and to embrace the libertarian argument that the real source of Washington's corruption is the sheer size of government and all the special pleading that inevitably results when government claims so much power to regulate our lives.
"Congress is fixing the wrong problem," Reynolds sniffs. "It's not a coincidence that while the lobbying community roughly doubled in size, the federal government's budget grew by nearly two-thirds," Ferguson claims. (In fact, while total federal spending has grown by 33% since 1995, the total number of lobbyists swarming Washington doubled since 2000--could it be that the election of George W. Bush and the ascension of a brazen and unchecked class of Republican pigs like Tom DeLay had more to do with the explosion of the lobbying community?)
While I agree that there may be some unintended and perverse consequences of some of the proposed lobbying reforms (Ferguson points out that banning all outside financing of Congressional travel will likely produce an even more provincial group of Members than we currently have), neither Reynolds nor Ferguson are proposing any kind of serious way to get to the smaller, more rational government they seek.
Well, consider this, my pundit pals. If Members of Congress were no longer beholden to wealthy private interests to finance their campaigns, do you think they would keep voting for hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies and boondoggles? Would they vote for tobacco subsidies at the same time that they vote for anti-smoking education? Would they vote for weapons systems the Pentagon says it doesn't even want while shortchanging troops on vital body armor and salaries? Would they vote to artificially prop up the price of commodities like sugar and peanuts, and to keep semi-monopolists like the cable industry and the pharmaceutical industry from dealing with lower-priced competition?
You want a smaller government that wastes less of our tax dollars? Maybe you should get behind public financing of campaigns, instead of taking lazy potshots at a Big Government that mainly does the bidding of Big Money.
Wrong Frame, Wrong Solution
Looks like the long-running scandal of Washington--the selling of access, influence, legislative favors, regulatory interventions and straightforward raids on the U.S. Treasury by public representatives to wealthy private bidders--is being mis-framed as a "lobbying scandal" and thus is about to get us some band-aid measures called "ethics reform." That's because what's going on here isn't so much the "Looting of Washington" by private interests as it is the "Selling of Washington" by public representatives.
Leaders of both parties in Congress are now falling all over each other to propose new measures to require greater disclosure by lobbyists, to clamp down on outside groups paying for Congressional travel, to restrict or ban gifts to Members or their staffs. While it would be good to have greater disclosure from lobbyists about their contacts with Congress, this approach is hardly going to change the underlying condition that leads to so much corruption in Washington.
That's because lobbyists and the wealthy special interests they represent would have very little of the kind of power deployed by fixers like Jack Abramoff if Members of Congress weren't so desperate for the one thing they provide: Big Money to finance their campaigns. If you don't change that, even the best-intentioned Members of Congress will find themselves altering their behavior to suit the needs of Big Money.
Sure, it would be great if Members were required to disclose what "earmarks" they have inserted into bills on behalf of particular interests, and if Senators had to disclose when they place a "hold" on a bill, since these are both common practices they now use to show their value to Big Money contributors. But until we offer qualified candidates a different source of funding for their campaigns--"clean," disinterested, public money--we aren't going to see a real decrease in the Selling of Washington.
I see that pundits like Andrew Ferguson and Glenn Reynolds are happily using the mis-framed "lobbying scandal" to sneer--with some justification--at reformers' efforts to write ever more stringent rules defining what is a "gift" to a Member, and to embrace the libertarian argument that the real source of Washington's corruption is the sheer size of government and all the special pleading that inevitably results when government claims so much power to regulate our lives.
"Congress is fixing the wrong problem," Reynolds sniffs. "It's not a coincidence that while the lobbying community roughly doubled in size, the federal government's budget grew by nearly two-thirds," Ferguson claims. (In fact, while total federal spending has grown by 33% since 1995, the total number of lobbyists swarming Washington doubled since 2000--could it be that the election of George W. Bush and the ascension of a brazen and unchecked class of Republican pigs like Tom DeLay had more to do with the explosion of the lobbying community?)
While I agree that there may be some unintended and perverse consequences of some of the proposed lobbying reforms (Ferguson points out that banning all outside financing of Congressional travel will likely produce an even more provincial group of Members than we currently have), neither Reynolds nor Ferguson are proposing any kind of serious way to get to the smaller, more rational government they seek.
Well, consider this, my pundit pals. If Members of Congress were no longer beholden to wealthy private interests to finance their campaigns, do you think they would keep voting for hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies and boondoggles? Would they vote for tobacco subsidies at the same time that they vote for anti-smoking education? Would they vote for weapons systems the Pentagon says it doesn't even want while shortchanging troops on vital body armor and salaries? Would they vote to artificially prop up the price of commodities like sugar and peanuts, and to keep semi-monopolists like the cable industry and the pharmaceutical industry from dealing with lower-priced competition?
You want a smaller government that wastes less of our tax dollars? Maybe you should get behind public financing of campaigns, instead of taking lazy potshots at a Big Government that mainly does the bidding of Big Money.
January 10, 2006
Shooting Fish in a Barrel
Today, I went on NPR's "To the Point" show, hosted by Warren Olney. The topic was lobbying reform and the Washington scandals. The other guests were Rep. David Dreier (the House Rules Chairman who has been tapped by Speaker Hastert to manage the House Republican leadership's reform proposal), Jan Baran (former counsel to the RNC), and Larry Noble (executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, and former counsel to the FEC).
It was fun to go on after Rep. Dreier. He had just sweet-talked his way through ten minutes of how he was taking his task very seriously, getting input from all sorts of people, including John McCain and Democrat Steny Hoyer, and while he wouldn't give details of the Republican reform proposal, he promised "bold changes," and mooted such proposals as a ban on campaign contributions from lobbyists, a ban on all gifts to Members of Congress and all privately-paid travel (all of which are supported by a majority of the public, according to a new Washington Post poll).
Yeah, right, I thought. Waiting to go live on the radio, I instant-messaged Josh Marshall and asked him if he remembered where Dreier stood on the vote on the DeLay Rule. That was back in late 2004, when the Republican majority in the House moved to protect then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay from being forced to step down from his leadership post if he was indicted. Sure enough, Dreier had written a constituent, explaining why he had backed DeLay in that secret vote. His rationale was that "a local political operative could remove a Congressional leader at a key or sensitive time by bringing an indictment against him or her for political purposes," a reference to Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle, who the Republicans were then trying to demonize as being on a partisan witch-hunt against DeLay.
Well, now DeLay is no longer Majority Leader (though he has placed himself in Duke Cunningham's old seat on the House Appropriations Committee, a power seat to have), prosecutors in the Justice Department, who no one can accuse of partisanship, are on his tail, and who does Speaker Hastert put in to draft the Republican reform package? A DeLay loyalist, Dreier.
Don't forget, Speaker Hastert, who somehow still has this grandfatherly image, was behind the removal this past February of three relatively independent Republicans on the House Ethics Committee, punishing them for their mild rebuke of DeLay's ethics.
The fish rots from the head down, someone once said.
January 08, 2006
Try to Stop This Meme
With "Go Ahead, Try to Stop K Street," Todd Purdum in the Sunday Times Week in Review today kicks off one of the press's favorite memes whenever Washington's endemic pay-for-play corruption hits the front pages: "But will things really change?" he asks, and then answers his own cynical question with a series of familiar tropes, all designed to lead the reader to embrace the reporter's world-weary resignation about the possibility of positive social change.
It's moments like these when you really see the corporate media reinforcing some very conservative assumptions about the role of government, and those of us who believe in government as a tool for good have to push back hard.
Trope #1: There's Nothing New Under the Sun. Purdum starts by dragging out a historical parallel to corruption past, both to say, "you see, this has been going on forever," and to argue that even bigger scandals led to little change. Thus, he gives us a reference to "the rampant influence peddling of Ulysses S. Grant's administration," which led to calls for reform and even a intra-party challenge, but didn't prevent Grant's re-election. (I'm not a historian, but I'm sure the historical arc of corruption/reform didn't end with Grant's re-election.) This is the first part of the meme that we must stop, that corruption in Washington is like the cherry blossoms blooming in spring.
Trope #2: It's Human Nature. To bolster this point, Purdum trots out a hoary old Washington hand for more world-weariness. In this case it's Democracy 21's Fred Wertheimer, who is the press's Mr. Rent-a-quote on ethics and campaign reform. I suspect Fred had plenty of other better lines that he gave to Todd, but the one printed conveys this notion that corruption has been going on since the beginning of civilization. In other words, no need for the public to get too outraged by present-day selling of the public commonwealth to private high-bidders. Move along, folks, move along...
Trope #3: Big Government is the Real Problem. Then Purdum moves to his central point, climbing in bed with the anti-government crowd at the Cato Institute, who have long argued that the real problem isn't private interests feasting at the public trough, but Big Government itself, which supposedly creates the need for intense lobbying. Making this point for him is the media's amazing new darling of ethics reform, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose 1994 Contract With America was written by business lobbyists, who misused tax-exempt education groups to build his political operation and paid a $300,000 fine for misleading a Congressional investigation into his practices.
Gingrich rolls out the Big Lie, the second half of this meme we must kill: "There is $2.6 trillion spent in Washington, with the authority to regulate everything in your life," he said. "Guess what? People will spend unheard-of amounts of money to influence that. The underlying problems are big government and big money." If we don't shrink government, we won't shrink the influence-peddling business.
This seems logical, until you examine the underpinnings. Purdum cites a lot of compelling statistics showing how the influence industry has exploded. "Between the early 1970's and the mid-1980's, the number of trade associations doubled; in the first half of the 1980's alone, the number of registered lobbyists quadrupled, according to The Washington Monthly." This, he says, is "a growth that has tracked the growth of the federal government itself. The rise of government regulation - first in the New Deal and then in the 1960's and 70's - spawned a parallel rise in the private sector's efforts to master the new system."
But government spending and regulation didn't double between the early 1970s and mid-1980s; nor did it quadruple in the first half of the 1980s. What did happen then was the organization of a massive business backlash against the social and economic reform movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which did seek to extend government's benevolent role to do such things as make sure black Americans got an equal chance in life, insure Americans clean air and clean water, treat women equally to men, improve worker health and safety, and make sure business paid its taxes and played by the rules. It's not a coincidence, I think, that the number of registered lobbyists jumped just as the business backlash took power with Reagan and "Gucci Gulch" opened to make sure every fatcat and Fortune 500 company got a juicy tax break or subsidy.
Furthermore, it's not true that a shrunken role for government would lessen the efforts of private interests to seek favors from Uncle Sam. In the election of 1896, when the regulatory government that Gingrich so wants to kill was almost non-existent, businessman and RNC chairman Marc Hanna raised about $7 million in direct contributions from banks, insurance companies, railroads and other corporations to support William McKinley against the Democrat/Populist William Jennings Bryan, who raised one-tenth as much. In today's that would be about $155 million, which may seem low until you recall that only 14 million votes were cast in that election. And, another problem for the anti-government trope--political corruption was rampant then too.
Business (organized money) invests in controlling government because it fears the power of organized people. The problem isn't "big government"--the problem is private greed.
Trope #4: Lobbyists are Useful Since Congressmembers are Dumb. It's hard to argue with the latter half of that statement, and Purdum rolls out a funny example of one Member in a meeting on high-definition TV standards who had barely ever even flown on an airplane before being elected to Congress. His point: lobbyists often "educate" Members on specialized subjects they don't have the time or resources to track closely.
But no one is arguing that lobbying itself be outlawed. The issue is actually whether much legislation is skewed to the benefit of those who can afford lobbyists, to the detriment of the rest of us.
Cast your mind back over the bulk of legislation passed by Congress in the past two decades of Big Money running Washington and the question answers itself: bankruptcy "reform" written by credit card companies to screw poor debtors; deregulation of the banking, securities and insurance sectors that led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors; deregulation of the telecom sector producing media conglomeration and cable industry price gouging; rampant overpricing of pharmaceutical drugs and the creation of false scarcity (i.e. no reimports from Canada) to keep those prices high; blocking of any increase in the minimum wage (except for one larded with billions in subsidies to big business), etcetera, etcetera.
Trope #5: They'll Always Find a Loophole. This is the final nail in the coffin of change, from Purdum's perspective. He writes, "Of course, the record suggests that for every loophole any new law might close, lobbyists will find a way to open another. The ban on so-called 'soft money' contributions to political parties led to the rise of new special-interest spending groups, for example. Entrenched industries - and entrenched incumbents of both parties - can be expected to resist change that would threaten the way they know how to do business."
So, what to do?
With the Abramoff-DeLay scandal spreading and government investigators on the trail of misbehavior by several Congressional offices, we can be sure that the corruption story is going to continue to stay on the front-burner, even as other fights, like the Alito confirmation hearings, take precedence. And with that, we have to be on the watch for this corrosive meme, that nothing can really be done about the theft of the public good by private interests.
The same argument, that it was always thus, was made by opponents of the abolition of slavery, by opponents of women's suffrage, of labor rights, of environmental protection, of greater openness in government, and so on. It is a reactionary and fundamentally anti-democratic sentiment to suggest that we cannot strive to perfect democracy in each generation. It's not easy, it's not perfect, but it is possible.
Just look at states like Arizona and Connecticut--big scandals involving the selling of government favors to the highest bidders have led to fundamental reforms ending candidates' dependence on private donors to finance their campaigns, by providing full public financing for their races. That reform, more than any other change in lobbyist behavior, has got to be our gold standard for real change, in my humble opinion.
This doesn't mean that we can legislate away political venality, any more than passing laws to stop child abuse will abolish that practice. We should still pass those laws. And we can make it possible for the many good people who do want to go into public service to do their jobs without having to spend hours every day raising money and turning to well-heeled lobbyists to host fundraisers and pay their bills. And we mustn't led the cynics in the corporate media tell us otherwise.
January 06, 2006
Architects of Disaster
Ever hear that joke about Kennedy School of Government at Harvard being the place for "war criminals on their way up and war criminals on their way down"?
That's how I felt about this picture in the paper today.
President Bush Thursday with present and former secretaries of state and defense. From left: Harold Brown, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, James A. Baker III, Colin L. Powell, James R. Schlesinger, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, George P. Shultz, Melvin R. Laird, Robert S. McNamara, Madeleine K. Albright, Alexander M. Haig Jr., Frank C. Carlucci, William J. Perry and William S. Cohen.
Some people are complaining that the Democrats who were invited to the meeting, which was supposedly to offer Bush advice on how to better handle U.S. foreign policy, especially in Iraq, didn't offer much criticism.
Duh.
Robert McNamara?! The man who sent thousands of American soldiers to fight an unwinnable, unjust war of his own?
Madeleine Albright?! The woman who as Secretary of State was confronted on national television by the human cost of the US sanctions on Iraq--"a half million children have died"--told interviewer Leslie Stahl, "We think the price is worth it."
January 05, 2006
Smite This Man
Here's further proof of the theory of "Incompetent Design," as there clearly is no connection between Pat Robertson's brain and his mouth. Today, he claimed that God punished Ariel Sharon for "dividing God's land." Oy vey.
January 03, 2006
Iraq War (Reader) revisited
Three years ago, right around this time, I got a phone call from my old pal Chris Cerf. The folks at Simon & Schuster were wondering if we were interested in creating an updated version of our Gulf War Reader. In particular, Trish Todd, the editor-in-chief of Touchstone Books, and a friend of Chris's, was feeling strongly that they should raise their voices about the impending invasion of Iraq.
So, with little more than a hastily drafted outline, we went in for a meeting with Trish and her staff and came out with a book deal to create The Iraq War Reader. Our deadline was mere weeks away.
Chris and I both dropped everything else we were doing and started calling everyone we knew and reading everything we could get our hands on. Our goal was the same as with our first anthology: to cover the history of America's entanglements in the Persian Gulf, to include the critical documents that any reader would need to study the issues (UN Resolutions, key speeches), and offer the widest possible range of opinions from commentators at home and abroad.
With the help of many trusted guides, and the Internet (which made things easier and harder at the same time, since it put so much more great writing at our fingertips), we pulled together some 700 pages of what we thought was the most valuable history, documents and opinions we could find.
But while we always operated with the view that we wanted readers to decide for themselves what they thought of the issues, both of us believed then that Bush's War was going to be a horrible mistake, and we took care to include, where possible given our deadline pressure, critical facts that suggested the Administration's case for war was flimsy at best.
Thus, on pages 194-5, you can find a detailed "editors' postscript" to an article about Iraq's purported nuclear weapons program that raises questions about the Niger-Iraq uranium story and the aluminum tubes story, both of which were touted repeatedly by President Bush and other Administration officials as proof of Iraq's WMD program.
We quoted one U.S. official who reviewed the Niger documents as saying "We fell for it," and noted that Senator Jay Rockefeller had asked the FBI to investigate whether the fabrication of those documents were "part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq."
Likewise, we included a prescient essay from Middle East Report Online that debunked fears of Iraq's retaining a chemical or biological weapons program.
We put the book "to bed" just days after the war began, on March 27, 2003. When it came out two months later, President Bush had already declared "Mission Accomplished" and the nation was swooning over its military prowess. I remember sending the book out to each contributor with an inscription arguing that the debate over the war was hardly settled, and it would be interesting to return to it in ten years and see who was right.
Right now, I feel like we were. And while most of the time I just stay quiet about this, and to some degrees numb, every now and then I boil up in fury at the wasted lives, the arrogance of the politicians who got us into this mess, and their ignorance. One of those moments of anger was triggered yesterday when I read this powerful oped in the Washington Post.
It was titled "A Life, Wasted." It's written by Paul Schroeder, the managing director of a trade development firm in Cleveland. And it's about his son, Edward "Augie" Schroeder II, who was one of fourteen Marines killed August 3 in Haditha. Schroeder writes, "Since August we have witnessed growing opposition to the Iraq war, but it is often whispered, hands covering mouths, as if it is dangerous to speak too loudly." To his credit, Schroeder doesn't whisper, he roars.
Though it hurts, I believe that his death -- and that of the other Americans who have died in Iraq -- was a waste. They were wasted in a belief that democracy would grow simply by removing a dictator -- a careless misunderstanding of what democracy requires. They were wasted by not sending enough troops to do the job needed in the resulting occupation -- a careless disregard for professional military counsel.
But their deaths will not be in vain if Americans stop hiding behind flag-draped hero masks and stop whispering their opposition to this war. Until then, the lives of other sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers and mothers may be wasted as well.
This is very painful to acknowledge, and I have to live with it. So does President Bush.
So do we all. Enough already!