A
fundamental disconnect of the Congress with its constituents is that it is currently
not reflective of America’s population, with fewer women and minorities than
proportional to the real population, and
little reflection of differing socio-economic backgrounds. Professionally it’s
also not diverse: 1/3 of Congress is currently comprised of individuals with a
legal background. Working-class Americans in office may have a very different
perspective on how to get things done from the 47% – just under half of the
Congress – that are millionaires (as of 2011). It is no surprise that, in an income
bracket defined as the 1% of America, they represent moneyed interests with few
pangs of conscience.
If we
want to take back the Legislative branch we have to get ourselves into office
and change the rules to end the plutocracy which has been on the rise for
nearly forty years, and has in recent years swollen disproportionately in the
favor of the wealthy. To do this will require tackling the lobbyists and corporation control of Washington.
For a
good example of how Congressional representatives no longer are beholden to
their constituents, and are instead beholden to lobbyists, look at the case of
Bob Dole. “Senator Robert Dole (R-Kan.) worked hard for a billion-dollar
tobacco subsidy, and received generous contributions from the tobacco industry.
But tobacco is virtually an unknown crop in Kansas, the state that elected him,
so whom was he representing?”[1]
Our
view of lobbyists is generally people skulking around the halls of Capitol Hill,
but this need not be the case. “Americans for Tax Reform, a non-partisan
sounding, tax-exempt nonprofit organization, received a total of $4.6 million
from the Republican National Committee, which it used to send out 19 million
pieces of mail and make four million phone calls urging voters to support the
GOP’s campaign against Medicare”[2] in
the 1990s. These grassroots lobbyists, non-profits that are just tools of the
existing parties, can then be seen to hold tremendous sway as well. Rather than
traditional Washington lobbyists who get the ear of the Representative or
Senator directly, grassroots goes to one of the critical sources of their
power, their constituents, and tricks them into supporting bills and signing
petitions they don’t really understand. A recent example was the SOPA/PIPA
debacle, in which petitioners asked for help to “keep the Internet free” by the
grassroots lobbyists who actually supported
the new restrictions.
Here’s
another nice example, from the January 2011 issue of the New Internationalist: “In the United States – where statistically one in three
people are obese – the US Food and Drug Administration announced
in 2009 that it would be issuing new front-of-pack labeling guidance. But
industry appears to have stepped in first, with the Grocery Manufacturers
Association (GMA) and the Food Marketing Institute launching a voluntary
front-of-pack labeling scheme in October 2010 to ‘fight against obesity’. Just
how manufacturers like Cadbury, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo (all members of
the GMA) plan to fight obesity without ditching the products on which their
brands were built is unclear.” The GMA is officially a trade association, run
out of Washington, and in 2006, for example, spent $1.4 million on lobbying – half
to lobbying firms and half to in-house lobbying.
Americans
are losing confidence in democracy.[3]
Lobbyists
have been steadily on the rise in D.C. since the 1970s, then spiking in 1997
and climbing from about 11,000 to 33,000 in under a decade.[4] An
example of this era’s explosion can be seen in Wal-Mart. Robert Reich, former
Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, explains the case:
“Wal-Mart
had no full-time representative in Washington before 1999, and only a tiny
political action committee, which contributed just $148,250 in 1998…Then came
Wal-Mart’s equivalent of Microsoft’s anti-trust shock. Wal-Mart had long wanted
to get into the banking business, figuring its millions of consumers would
welcome the convenience of banking at Wal-Mart, and the company could make lots
of money from banking fees. Wal-Mart hoped to use a loophole in a federal law
that generally barred commercial companies from owning banks but exempted
stand-alone savings and loans. In 1999 Wal-Mart found a savings and loan in
Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, that seemed the perfect vehicle. But the banking
industry had been following Wal-Mart’s moves carefully. When Wal-Mart sought to
buy the bank, the industry unleashed a team of lobbyists on Congress, and
Congress abruptly pulled the loophole closed.”[5]
Reich
tells of how Wal-Mart responded. $2.2 million was contributed in 2004, and it
became one of the largest PACs in the nation. Another such massive lobbying
campaign battle took place in 2006, this time with a Wal-Mart that knew how to
play the game.[6]
Individual
lobbying battles can cost vast amounts. In 2006 one such between the phone
companies and internet firms, over net neutrality, cost $50 million in lobbying
and advertising.[7]
Pet issues can be deeply invested in. “In 1998 Exxon embarked on a campaign to
give ‘logistical and moral support’ to any dissenter from scientific findings
documenting global climate change, ‘thereby raising questions and undercutting
the “prevailing scientific wisdom”’” and four years later they gave $225
million to Stanford so as to create the illusion of debate.[8]
Exxon, while more of a friend to the Bush administration, has still spent over
$50 million during the Obama administration so far. To put that in perspective, $50,000,000 is
equal to the salary of the entire Senate, The President and Vice-President, the
nine Supreme Court Justices, and all of California, New York, Texas, Illinois,
Arizona, Wisconsin and Florida’s Representatives in Congress, with money to
spare.
Paul
Ryan (R) and Ron Kind (D) are both from Wisconsin and both sit on the House Ways and
Means committee, which has control over corporate tax loopholes. Is it any
surprise that, according to the Wisconsin
Public Interest Research Group in March of this year, they’ve each “received more than a 100 thousand
dollars in campaign contributions over the past two election cycles from corporations
that are using such loopholes”?
This is how campaign finance reform and lobbying
are interconnected. The lobbyists aren’t just trying to get favorable bills
passed through fancy dinners and campaigns for lucrative government contracts.
They make sure key Representatives get hefty campaign contributions. For the
Representative struggling to make $10,000 a week such contributions help ensure
you get reelected, and are a very persuasive way to ensure favorable
legislation for your patron. Unless you are independently wealthy (such as the
late Ted Kennedy, who gave his Congressional salary to charity each year), you
will probably have to find a corporate patron to support your political career. Combined with grass-roots lobbying as a de facto arm of party and corporate interests we have in place a ridiculous feedback loop: corporations give money to parties and Representatives, who give contributions to grass-roots action committees and lobbyist organizations, who tell voters what to vote for, who, being misled, vote for corporate interests, sometimes over their own welfare. The Representative is then reelected, or the bill is passed, and the corporations and lobbyist firms begin a new parasitic cycle.
Contributions from lobbyists to campaigns are now
virtually unlimited. Individuals can spend up to $2,500 – but corporations can basically spend whatever they want. In other words, through lobbying and campaign
contributions, corporations are edging Americans out of the decision-making
process. The ramifications and reasons will be seen in the next section,
focusing on the scandalous Citizen’s
United decision.
No comments:
Post a Comment