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N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , MARPRIL 2006
I want to point out here that I believe in equal opportunity
muckraking. When I left Washington for journalism I did not leave
behind my conviction that government should see to it that we
have a more level playing field with one set of rules for everyone,
but I did leave behind my partisan affections. Anyone who saw
the documentary my team and I produced a few years ago on
the illegal fund raising for Bill Clinton's re-election, knows I am
no fan of the Democratic money machine that helped tear the
party away from whatever roots it once had in the daily lives
and struggles of working people, turning it into a junior partner
of the Chamber of Commerce. I mean people like California's
Congressman Tony Coelho, who in the 1980s realized that
Congressional Democrats could milk the business community
for money if they promised to “pay for play." I mean people
like Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee
Chairman, who gave Bill Clinton the idea of renting the Lincoln
bedroom out to donors, and who did such a good job raising big
money for the Democrats that by the end of his reign, Democrats
had fewer small donors than the Republicans and more fat cats
writing them million dollar checks.
But let's be realistic here. When the notorious
Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he answered,
“Because that's where the money is." If I seem to be singling
out Republicans, it’s for one reason: that’s where the power is.
They own the government lock, stock, and barrel. Once they
gained control of the House of Representatives in 1994, their
self-proclaimed revolution has gone into overdrive with their
taking of the White House in 2000 and the Senate in 2002. Their
revolution soon became a cash cow and Washington a one-party
state ruled by money.
Look back at the bulk of legislation passed by Congress
in the past decade: an energy bill which gave oil companies
huge tax breaks at the same time that Exxon Mobil just posted
$36 billion in profits in 2005 and our gasoline and home heating
bills are at an all-time high; a bankruptcy “reform” bill written by
credit card companies to make it harder for poor debtors to
escape the burdens of divorce or medical catastrophe; the
deregulation of the banking, securities and insurance sectors
which led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the
destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors;
the deregulation of the telecommunications sector which led to
cable industry price gouging and an undermining of news cover
age; protection for rampant overpricing of pharmaceutical drugs;
and the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent American
corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual
taxes by operating a P.O. Box in an offshore haven like Bermuda
or the Cayman Islands.
In every case the pursuit of this legislation was driven by
big money. Our public representatives, the holders of our trust,
need huge sums to finance their campaigns, especially to pay for
television advertising, and men and women who have mastered
the money game have taken advantage of that weakness in our
democracy to systematically sell it off to the highest bidders.
Let's start with the “K Street Project.” K Street is the
Wall Street of lobbying, the address of many of Washington’s
biggest lobbying firms. The K Street Project was the brainchild
of Tom DeLay and Grover Norquist, a rightwing strategist who
famously said his goal is to shrink government so that it can be
“drowned in a bathtub." This, of course, would render it impotent
to defend ordinary people against the large economic forces—
the so-called “free market" — that Norquist and his pals believe
should be running America.
Tom DeLay, meanwhile, was a small businessman
from Sugar Land, Texas, who ran a pest extermination business
before he entered politics. He hated the government regulators
who dared tell him that some of the pesticides he used were
dangerous — as, in fact, they were. He got himself elected to the
Texas legislature at a time the Republicans were becoming the
majority in the once-solid Democratic South, and his reputation
for joining in the wild parties around the state capitol in Austin
earned him the nickname of “Hot Tub Tom.” But early in his
political career, and with exquisite timing and the help of some
videos from the rightwing political evangelist, James Dobson,
Tom DeLay found Jesus and became a full-fledged born again
Christian. He would later humbly acknowledge that God had
chosen him to restore America to its biblical worldview. “God,”
said Tom DeLay, “has been walking me through an incredible
journey...God is using me, all the time, everywhere...God is
training me. God is working with me..."
Yes, indeed: God does work in mysterious ways.
In addition to finding Jesus, Tom DeLay also discovered
a secular ally to serve his ambitions. He found out the power of
money to power his career. “Money is not the root of all evil in
politics,” DeLay once said. “In fact, money is the lifeblood of
politics." By raising more than $2 million from lobbyists and busi
ness groups and distributing the money to dozens of Republican
candidates in 1994, the year of the Republican breakthrough
in the House, DeLay bought the loyalty of many freshman legis
lators and got himself elected Majority Whip, the number three
man in Newt Gingrich’s “Gang of Seven" who ran the House.
Here's how they ran it: On the day before the Republi
cans formally took control of Congress on January 3, 1995,
DeLay met in his office with a coterie of lobbyists from some
of the biggest companies in America. The journalists Michael
*Among those successfully strongarmed to change his
vote was Oregon Democrat David Wu.
**Gale Norton has resigned as Interior Secretary.
THOMAS NAST
Weisskopf and David Maraniss report that “the session inaugur
ated an unambiguous collaboration of political and commercial
interests, certainly not uncommon in Washington but remarkable
this time for the ease and eagerness with which these allies
combined.”
DeLay virtually invited them to write the Republican
agenda. What they wanted first was “Project Relief’ — a wide-
ranging moratorium on regulations that had originally been put
in place for the health and safety of the public. For starters, they
wanted “relief" from labor standards that protected workers from
the physical injuries of repetitive work. They wanted “re lie f from
tougher rules on meat inspection. And they wanted “re lie f from
effective monitoring of hazardous air pollutants. Scores of
companies were soon gorging on Tom DeLay’s generosity,
adding one juicy and expensive tidbit after another to the bill.
According to Weisskopf and Maraniss, on the eve of the debate,
20 major corporate groups advised lawmakers that “this was
a key vote, one that would be considered in future campaign
contributions.” On the day of the vote, lobbyists on Capitol Hill
were still writing amendments on their laptops and forwarding
them to House leaders.
The Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, famously told
the lobbyists: “If you are going to play in our revolution, you have
to live by our rules." Tom DeLay became his enforcer.
The rules were simple and blunt. Contribute to Republi
cans only. Hire Republicans only. When the electronics industry
ignored the warning and chose a Democrat member of Congress
to run its trade association, DeLay played so rough— pulling from
the calendar a bill the industry had worked on two years, aimed
at bringing most of the world in alignment with U.S. copyright law
— that even the House Ethics Committee, the watchdog that
seldom barks and rarely bites, stirred itself to rebuke him —
privately, of course.
DeLay wasn’t fazed. Not only did he continue to make
sure the lobbying jobs went to Republicans, he also saw to it
that his own people got a lion's share of the best jobs. At least
29 of his former employees landed major lobbying positions —
the most of any Congressional office. The journalist John Judis
found that together ex-DeLay people represent around 350 firms,
including 13 of the biggest trade associations, most of the energy
companies, the giants in finance and technology, the airlines,
auto makers, tobacco companies, and the largest health care
and pharmaceutical companies. When tobacco companies
wanted to block the FDA from regulating cigarettes, they hired
DeLay's man. When the pharmaceutical companies — Big
Pharma — wanted to make sure companies wouldn’t be forced
to negotiate cheaper prices for drugs, they hired six of Tom
DeLay’s team, including his former chief of staff. The machine
became a blitzkrieg, oiled by campaign contributions that poured
in like a gusher.
Watching as DeLay, with approval of the House leader
ship, became the virtual dictator of Capitol Hill, I was reminded
of the card shark in Texas who said to his prey, "Now play the
cards fair, Reuben, I know wha, I dealt you." Tom DeLay and his
cronies were stacking the deck.
They centralized in their own hands the power to write
legislation. Drastic revisions to major bills were often written at
night, with lobbyists hovering over them, then rushed through as
“emergency measures,” giving members as little as half an hour
to consider what they may be voting on.
The Democratic minority was locked out of conference
committees where the House and Senate are supposed to iron
out their differences with both parties in the loop The Republican
bosses even took upon themselves the power to rewrite a bill in
secrecy and move it directly to a vote without any other hearings
or public review.
Sometimes this meant overruling what the majority of
House members really wanted. Consider what happened with
the bill to provide Medicare prescription drug coverage,analyzed
by Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect As the measure
was coming to a vote a majority of the House was sympathetic
to allowing cheaper imports from Canada and to giving the
government the power to negotiate wholesale drug prices for
Medicare beneficiaries But DeLay and his cronies were working
on behalf of the big pharmaceutical companies and would have
none of it. So they made sure there would be no amendments on
the floor. They held off the final roll call a full three hours — well
after midnight — in order to strongarm members who wanted to
vote against the bill.* *
It was not a pretty sight out there on the floor of the
House. At one point DeLay marched over to one Republican
— Representative Nick Smith, who opposed the Medicare bill —
and attempted to change his mind. Smith, serving his final term
in office, later alleged he was offered a bribe, $100,000 for his
son's campaign to succeed him.When he subsequently retracted
his accusation, the House Ethics Committee looked into the
charges and counter-charges and wound up admonishing both
Smith and DeLay, who admitted that he had offered to endorse
Smith’s son in exchange for Smith’s support but that no money
or bribe were involved. Timothy Noah of Slate.com has mused
about what DeLay’s endorsement would nonetheless have
meant in later campaign contributions if Smith had gone along
While the report of the Ethics Committee never did find out the
true story, Noah asks: “Who did whisper ‘$100,000’ in Smith’s
ear? The report is full of plausible suspects, including DeLay
himself, but it lacks any evidence on this crucial finding. You get
the feeling the authors would prefer to forget this mystery ever
existed."
There are no victimless crimes in politics. The price of
corruption is passed on to you. What came of all these shenan
igans was a bill that gave industry what it wanted and gave
taxpayers the shaft. The bill covers only a small share of drug
expenses. It has a major gap in coverage — the so-called “donut
hole.” It explicitly forbids beneficiaries from purchasing private
coverage to fill in the gap and explicitly forbids the federal
government from bargaining for lower drug prices. More than
one consumer organization has estimated that most seniors
could end up paying even more for prescription drugs than
before the bill passed.
Furthermore, despite these large flaws the cost of the
bill is horrendous — between $500 billion and $1 trillion in its first
10 years. The chief actuary for Medicare calculated a realistic
estimate of what the bill would cost, but he later testified before
Congress that he was forbidden from releasing the information
by his boss, Thomas Scully, head of the Center for Medicare &
Medicaid Services, who was then negotiating for a lucrative job
with the health care industry. Sure enough, hardly had the
prescription bill become law than Scully went to work for the
largest private equity investor in health care and at a powerful
law firm focusing on health care and regulatory matters.
One is reminded of Senator Bois Penrose. Back in
the first Gilded Age, Penrose was a United States Senator from
Pennsylvania who had been put and kept in office by the railroad
tycoons and oil barons. He assured the moguls: “I believe in the
division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass laws under
which you make money . . . and out of your profits you further
contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass
more laws to enable you to make more money."
Gilded Ages, then and now, have one thing in common:
audacious and shameless people for whom the very idea of the
public trust is a cynical joke.
Tom DeLay was elected to Congress by the ordinary
people of Sugar Land, Texas.They had the right to expect him to
represent them. This expectation is the very soul of democracy.
We can’t all govern — not even tiny, homogenous Switzerland
practices pure democracy. So we Americans came to believe
our best chance of responsible government lies in obtaining the
considered judgments of those we elect to represent us. Having
cast our ballots in the sanctity of the voting booth with its assur
ance of political equality, we go about our daily lives expecting
the people we put in office to weigh the competing interests and
decide to the best of their ability what is right. Instead, they have
given the American people reason to believe the conservative
journalist P.J. O'Rourke was right when he described Congress
as “a parliament of whores.”
A recent CBS News/A/ew York Times poll found 70%
of Americans believe lobbyists bribing members of Congress is
the way things work: 57% think at least half of the members of
Congress accept bribes or gifts that affect their votes. A Fox
News poll reported that 65% believe most elected officials in
Washington make policy decisions or take actions on the basis
of campaign contributions. Findings like these underscore the
fact that ordinary people believe their bonds with democracy are
not only stretched but sundered.
A l l ia n c e
CONTINUED O N PAGE 6
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D emocracy
""T™ he Alliance for Democracy is a new movement
I that seeks to end the domination of our economy,
I our government, our culture, our media and the
1 environment by large corporations.
We have united to examine the ways in which various eco
nomic interests either enhance or harm the health of de
mocracy and we focus on creating basic change.
I
End
corporate
rule;
revive
democracy.
Piecemeal reform has been rendered ineffective. We seek
deep systemic alterations to establish economic and politi
cal democracy.
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