“The Disease Of American Democracy”: The Monied Interests Are Doing What They Do Best – Making Money
Americans are sick of politics. Only 13 percent approve of the job Congress is doing, a near record low. The President’s approval ratings are also in the basement.
A large portion of the public doesn’t even bother voting. Only 57.5 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in the 2012 presidential election.
Put simply, most Americans feel powerless, and assume the political game is fixed. So why bother?
A new study scheduled to be published in this fall by Princeton’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern University’s Benjamin Page confirms our worst suspicions.
Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens.
Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Instead, lawmakers respond to the policy demands of wealthy individuals and monied business interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.
Before you’re tempted to say “duh,” wait a moment. Gilens’ and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002. This was before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in “Citizens United,” prior to SuperPACs, and before the Wall Street bailout.
So it’s likely to be even worse now.
But did the average citizen ever have much power? The eminent journalist and commentator Walter Lippman argued in his 1922 book “Public Opinion” that the broad public didn’t know or care about public policy. Its consent was “manufactured” by an elite that manipulated it. “It is no longer possible … to believe in the original dogma of democracy,” Lippman concluded.
Yet American democracy seemed robust compared to other nations that in the first half of the twentieth century succumbed to communism or totalitarianism.
Political scientists after World War II hypothesized that even though the voices of individual Americans counted for little, most people belonged to a variety of interest groups and membership organizations – clubs, associations, political parties, unions – to which politicians were responsive.
“Interest-group pluralism,” as it was called, thereby channeled the views of individual citizens, and made American democracy function.
What’s more, the political power of big corporations and Wall Street was offset by the power of labor unions, farm cooperatives, retailers, and smaller banks.
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith approvingly dubbed it “countervailing power.” These alternative power centers ensured that America’s vast middle and working classes received a significant share of the gains from economic growth.
Starting in 1980, something profoundly changed. It wasn’t just that big corporations and wealthy individuals became more politically potent, as Gilens and Page document. It was also that other interest groups began to wither.
Grass-roots membership organizations shrank because Americans had less time for them. As wages stagnated, most people had to devote more time to work in order to makes ends meet. That included the time of wives and mothers who began streaming into the paid workforce to prop up family incomes.
At the same time, union membership plunged because corporations began sending jobs abroad and fighting attempts to unionize. (Ronald Reagan helped legitimized these moves when he fired striking air traffic controllers.)
Other centers of countervailing power – retailers, farm cooperatives, and local and regional banks – also lost ground to national discount chains, big agribusiness, and Wall Street. Deregulation sealed their fates.
Meanwhile, political parties stopped representing the views of most constituents. As the costs of campaigns escalated, parties morphing from state and local membership organizations into national fund-raising machines.
We entered a vicious cycle in which political power became more concentrated in monied interests that used the power to their advantage – getting tax cuts, expanding tax loopholes, benefiting from corporate welfare and free-trade agreements, slicing safety nets, enacting anti-union legislation, and reducing public investments.
These moves further concentrated economic gains at the top, while leaving out most of the rest of America.
No wonder Americans feel powerless. No surprise we’re sick of politics, and many of us aren’t even voting.
But if we give up on politics, we’re done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
The only way back toward a democracy and economy that work for the majority is for most of us to get politically active once again, becoming organized and mobilized.
We have to establish a new countervailing power.
The monied interests are doing what they do best – making money. The rest of us need to do what we can do best – use our voices, our vigor, and our votes.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, August 18, 2014
“Work And Worth”: What Someone Is Paid Has Little Or No Relationship To What Their Work Is Worth To Society
What someone is paid has little or no relationship to what their work is worth to society.
Does anyone seriously believe hedge-fund mogul Steven A. Cohen is worth the $2.3 billion he raked in last year, despite being slapped with a $1.8 billion fine after his firm pleaded guilty to insider trading?
On the other hand, what’s the worth to society of social workers who put in long and difficult hours dealing with patients suffering from mental illness or substance abuse? Probably higher than their average pay of $18.14 an hour, which translates into less than $38,000 a year.
How much does society gain from personal-care aides who assist the elderly, convalescents, and persons with disabilities? Likely more than their average pay of $9.67 an hour, or just over $20,000 a year.
What’s the social worth of hospital orderlies who feed, bathe, dress, and move patients, and empty their ben pans? Surely higher than their median wage of $11.63 an hour, or $24,190 a year.
Or of child care workers, who get $10.33 an hour, $21.490 a year? And preschool teachers, who earn $13.26 an hour, $27,570 a year?
Yet what would the rest of us do without these dedicated people?
Or consider kindergarten teachers, who make an average of $53,590 a year.
That may sound generous but a good kindergarten teacher is worth his or her weight in gold, almost.
One study found that children with outstanding kindergarten teachers are more likely to go to college and less likely to become single parents than a random set of children similar to them in every way other than being assigned a superb teacher.
And what of writers, actors, painters, and poets? Only a tiny fraction ever become rich and famous. Most barely make enough to live on (many don’t, and are forced to take paying jobs to pursue their art). But society is surely all the richer for their efforts.
At the other extreme are hedge-fund and private-equity managers, investment bankers, corporate lawyers, management consultants, high-frequency traders, and top Washington lobbyists.
They’re getting paid vast sums for their labors. Yet it seems doubtful that society is really that much better off because of what they do.
I don’t mean to sound unduly harsh, but I’ve never heard of a hedge-fund manager whose jobs entails attending to basic human needs (unless you consider having more money as basic human need) or enriching our culture (except through the myriad novels, exposes, and movies made about greedy hedge-fund managers and investment bankers).
They don’t even build the economy.
Most financiers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants are competing with other financiers, lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants in zero-sum games that take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another.
They’re paid gigantic amounts because winning these games can generate far bigger sums, while losing them can be extremely costly.
It’s said that by moving money to where it can make more money, these games make the economy more efficient.
In fact, the games amount to a mammoth waste of societal resources.
They demand ever more cunning innovations but they create no social value. High-frequency traders who win by a thousandth of a second can reap a fortune, but society as a whole is no better off.
Meanwhile, the games consume the energies of loads of talented people who might otherwise be making real contributions to society — if not by tending to human needs or enriching our culture then by curing diseases or devising new technological breakthroughs, or helping solve some of our most intractable social problems.
In 2010 (the most recent date for which we have data) close to 36 percent of Princeton graduates went into finance (down from the pre-financial crisis high of 46 percent in 2006). Add in management consulting, and it was close to 60 percent.
Graduates of Harvard and other Ivy League universities are also more likely to enter finance and consulting than any other career.
The hefty endowments of such elite institutions are swollen with tax-subsidized donations from wealthy alumni, many of whom are seeking to guarantee their own kids’ admissions so they too can become enormously rich financiers and management consultants.
But I can think of a better way for taxpayers to subsidize occupations with more social merit: Forgive the student debts of graduates who choose social work, child care, elder care, nursing, and teaching.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, August 2, 2014
“For The Love Of Money”: How The Gas Lobby Is Using The Crimea Crisis To Push Bad Policy And Make More Money
A small group of pundits and politicians with close ties to the fossil fuel industry are using the crisis in Crimea to demand that the United States promote natural gas exports as a quick fix for the volatile situation. But such a solution, experts say, would cost billions of dollars, require years of development, and would not significantly impact the international price of gas or Russia’s role as a major supplier for the region. Rather, the move would simply increase gas prices for American consumers while enriching companies involved in the liquified natural gas (LNG) trade.
On Capitol Hill, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Representative Fred Upton (R-MI) was among the first to use the crisis in Ukraine to demand that the Department of Energy speed up the approval process for new LNG terminals. “Now is the time to send the signal to our global allies that US natural gas will be an available and viable alternative to their energy needs,” said Upton in a statement. As we’ve reported, Upton’s committee is managed in part by Tom Hassenboehler, a former lobbyist who joined Upton’s staff last year after working for America’s Natural Gas Alliance, the primary trade group pushing to expand natural gas development and LNG exports.
Paul Bledsoe, in an opinion column for Reuters, wrote that the United States should expedite natural gas exports to “bolster transatlantic solidarity and help to form a united US-EU response to Russian intervention in Crimea.” He was identified in the piece as a member of the “White House Climate Change Task Force under President Clinton.” What wasn’t disclosed, however, is that Bledsoe is an official with a pro–fossil fuels think tank called the Bipartisan Policy Center, which is funded by the American Gas Association and energy companies with a financial stake in promoting the natural gas industry. (Although he’s not listed on the website, a representative with BPC told Republic Report that Bledsoe continues to work there.)
Groups created and funded by Charles Koch, chief executive of Koch Industries, have also demanded that America should respond to the crisis in Crimea with LNG exports. “A serious President would also fast-forward permits on new liquefied natural gas terminals that could ship to Europe,” claims a column posted by Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-run advocacy group. A similar argument is advanced by the Koch-founded Cato Institute.
What’s left undisclosed, however, is the huge financial stake in the debate for Koch Industries. A brochure for the company shows that Koch has deeply expanded its footprint into the natural gas market, and is now actively engaged in shipping, sourcing and marketing LNG, in addition to becoming a leader in developing financial instruments related to natural gas. “To complement existing North American activities from Houston and to optimize their global portfolio, KS&T companies are expanding a Europe-wide natural gas business from Geneva and an LNG trading business from offices in Houston and London,” reads the document. Further, Koch federal lobbying disclosures show that the firm has pushed a bill to expedite LNG exports from America to NATO countries.
In perhaps the most ironic twist of this public debate around how to respond to Russia’s incursion into Crimea, American lobbyists with ties to Russia are calling for a solution that would not only shield Russian gas oligarchs, but enrich them. The National Association of Manufacturers has opposed tough sanctions on Russia. Instead, NAM has used the crisis in Ukraine to “urge speedier approval of liquified natural gas exports, arguing that the move would weaken Vladimir Putin’s control over Europe’s energy supply.” NAM’s chief lobbyist Jay Timmons told Politico that an LNG-export response would “send a strong signal to the Russian Federation, our NATO allies, our trading partners and the rest of the world that energy exports matter and are a critical tool of American foreign policy.”
What Timmons did not mention is that ExxonMobil is a leading member of his trade association, and that ExxonMobil has extensive ties to Russian gas giants, including partnerships to develop natural gas in the United States and around the world. (For more on the business ties, see Kert Davies and Steve Horn’s recent reporting on the Putin-sanctioned alliance between ExxonMobil and Russian state–owned oil and gas giant Rosneft.) In short, Timmons’s strong signal to Russia would help Russian gas businesses.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, March 20, 2014; Originally Published at RepublicReport.org
“A Cudgel For The Oil Industry”: Chevron’s Lobbyist Now Runs The Congressional Science Committee
For Chevron, the second-largest oil company in the country with $26.2 billion in annual profits, it helps to have friends in high places. With little fanfare, one of Chevron’s top lobbyists, Stephen Sayle, has become a senior staff member of the House Committee on Science, the standing congressional committee charged with “maintaining our scientific and technical leadership in the world.”
Throughout much of 2013, Sayle was the chief executive officer of Dow Lohnes Government Strategies, a lobbying firm retained by Chevron to influence Congress. For fees that total $320,000 a year, Sayle and his team lobbied on a range of energy-related issues, including implementation of EPA rules under the Clean Air Act, regulation of ozone standards, as well as “Congressional and agency oversight related to offshore oil, natural gas development and oil spills.”
Sayle’s ethics disclosure, obtained by Republic Report, shows that he was paid $500,000 by Chevron’s lobbying firm before taking his current gig atop the Science Committee.
In recent months, the House Science Committee has become a cudgel for the oil industry, issuing subpoenas and holding hearings to demonize efforts to improve the environment. Some of the work by the committee reflect the lobbying priorities of Chevron.
In December, the Science Committee, now chaired by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), held yet another hearing to try to discredit manmade global warming. In August, the committee issued the first subpoena in twenty-one years, demanding “all the raw data from a number of federally funded studies linking air pollution to disease.”
Though Chevron has gone to great lengths to advertise a lofty environmental record, the company continues to break air pollution laws while quietly backpedalling on its prior commitments to renewable energy. A Bloomberg News investigation reported that Chevron estimated that its biofuel investments would return only 5 percent in profits, a far cry from the 15 percent to which the oil giant is accustomed, and quietly moved to shelve renewable fuel units of the company. In California, Chevron is battling the newly created cap-and-trade system for carbon pollution. And in states across the country, Chevron has lobbied and provided financial support to a range of right-wing nonprofits dedicated to repealing carbon-cutting regulations, including the low-carbon fuel standard.
Earlier this year, Dow Lohnes’ lobbying practice merged with Levick, a public affairs firm.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, February 21, 2014: This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org
“No Conflicts Here”: How Lawmakers Skirt The Law To Keep Their Next Jobs Secret
When then-Sen. Jim DeMint said he would leave Congress to head the Heritage Foundation 13 months ago, he waited until just 24 hours before the announcement to file an official notice with the Senate that he was negotiating for the new job.
But at least DeMint gave some public notice before accepting the post.
On the day Rep. Dennis Cardoza’s midterm resignation took effect in 2012, Washington law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips announced it had already hired him—and the job negotiations were never made public. Nor were any official disclosures regarding job negotiations released prior to the announcement that Rep. Health Shuler accepted a job at Duke Energy when his term expired, or when Rep. Mike Ross was hired by the Southwest Power Pool.
That is not how it was supposed to work. A law designed to prevent conflicts of interest and shed light on lawmakers who negotiate for post-Capitol Hill work while still in office has failed, worn thin by a series of administrative rulings and narrow interpretations.
The result is that lawmakers themselves now determine when a potential conflict exists and when disclosures should be released publicly. Moreover, because the law has yielded almost none of the public information it was designed to provide, it remains largely unknown whom lawmakers negotiate with—and whether their official duties present any conflicts with those employers.
The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act required lawmakers to file public disclosures when they negotiate for work and when conflicts arise. Yet only seven disclosures have been made public in the House since the law was passed in 2007—even though more than 200 lawmakers during that time have resigned, were defeated in a primary, or announced their retirement. Only six disclosures have been made public in the Senate, despite 39 lawmakers leaving between 2008 and 2012.
In this midterm-election year, many more lawmakers will be making decisions about jobs and disclosure in coming months. It is still early, but no public filings have been made by any of the 16 sitting House members who have announced they are leaving Congress at the end of 2014.
In addition to those 16, three other House members have already resigned this session, and all three had outside jobs waiting. But only one of them filed a notice of job negotiations before leaving. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, a Missouri Republican, officially resigned on Jan. 22 of last year to become CEO and president of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. Her disclosure of her job talks is dated Nov. 23, 2012, and reports that negotiations for that job commenced four days earlier.
The two other lawmakers were not required to make their employment negotiations public because of yet another wrinkle in the law that exempts those seeking new jobs in the public sector. Former Rep. Jo Bonner left Congress to take a job in the University of Alabama system, and former Rep. Rodney Alexander left to accept an appointment as secretary of the Louisiana Veterans Affairs Department.
Ethics Issues
There is nothing illegal or unethical about departing lawmakers looking for work while they serve out their terms. But the law was put in place as a transparency measure after former Rep. Billy Tauzin caused a stir by leaving the House in 2003 to take a $2-million-a-year job in the pharmaceutical industry, just months after playing a lead role in drafting legislation to introduce a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.
But the law’s rules apply differently today than they did when was it was passed. For example, in the House, the government panel in charge of the filings was changed from the Clerk’s Office to the Ethics Committee, which is extremely selective about what it makes public. In the Senate, the secretary of the Senate, rather than the Ethics Committee, handles most of these filings, with far different results. A higher percentage of lawmakers there have filed disclosures, and those forms were swiftly made public.
Staffers and lawmakers with direct knowledge of how the House Ethics Committee oversees the law say it is being interpreted so narrowly by officials and lawmakers as to render it ineffective.
They say lawmakers are essentially told they must file notices only when they have an actual job offer and compensation is discussed. And those notices do not have to be made public—they can be kept private by the Ethics Committee—unless lawmakers themselves determine there is a specific conflict and decide they must file a follow-up disclosure or notice recusing themselves.
The upshot is that when lawmakers do file disclosures, those filings often do not go beyond the Ethics Committee. Such apparently was the case for Cardoza, Shuler, and Ross, whose disclosures have never been released. Even the committee itself is sometimes taken by surprise by word that a lawmaker has landed a job.
“I saw a newspaper account that a lawmaker had taken a job—and my jaw dropped, and I wondered, ‘How is it that even I did not know that?’ ” said one former House Ethics official, speaking on the condition of not being identified by name.
Former Rep. John Shadegg took a job as a partner with Steptoe & Johnson in March 2011 but says he had some preliminary contact with the firm before he officially left office. Shadegg said he never filed a notice of negotiations, because the guidance he received from the Ethics Committee did not indicate he had to do so until he was on the verge of being hired, talking details about salary.
Another former lawmaker, who asked not to be identified by name, explained the Ethics Committee guidance he received this way: “I was told that, for instance, if IBM wants to hire you for $1 million, you are not required to report that legally. But the minute I say, ‘I want $1 million and one dollar,’ the law kicks in.”
Asked if he thought it odd that so few disclosures of subsequent potential conflicts have been made public, Cardoza said, “The rules are in place. I am sure there are people who have violated them; and I am sure there are people who have complied with them, and I am one.”
But he also said that there are good reasons that talks that do not result in a job should be kept private. “If you do not take an offer, it hurts your political career—it telegraphs to people you are leaving,” Cardoza said.
Questions of Conflict
Still, the current system can leave lingering questions. Take, for instance, Ross, the Arkansas Democrat who announced in July 2011 that he would not seek reelection in 2012. Ross later announced he would take a job after Congress as Senior Vice President for Government Affairs and Public Relations for the Southwest Power Pool, a non-profit which represented several coal-driven power companies.
That announcement prompted at least one publication, the nonprofit Republic Report, to raise questions about Ross’s earlier cosponsorship of an amendment to delay the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing the Cross State Air Pollution rule, a rule the Power Pool had pushed to have relaxed.
Republic Report wrote that the situation “raises the possibility that Ross’s legislative activity had been unduly influenced by the prospect of a high-paying job.”
In response, a Ross spokesman told the publication that the lawmaker had begun job negotiations months after his EPA rule-delaying legislation passed the House, and that he would be recusing himself on any issues that provide targeted benefits to his future employer.
The spokesman went on to tell Republic Report, “He properly filed all forms required by the House Ethics Committee. And while the Ethics Committee does not make the form available to the public, in an effort to be transparent, Congressman Ross went above and beyond in announcing who he would be working for when his term in Congress ends.”
Today, Ross is running for governor of Arkansas—and his disclosures still remain unavailable for public viewing.
Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, says the ethics law is being interpreted so narrowly that “it is simply not meaningful.”
“Swiss cheese,” is how McGehee described the current system, while Craig Holman, a legislative representative for the government watchdog group Public Citizen, said the intent of the law was to “let the public know.”
“That was the entire intent,” Holman said.
By: Billy House, The National Journal, January 21, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 