A CULTURE OF
CORRUPTION
Let's Save Our
Democracy by Getting Money Out of Politics
By Bill Moyers |
April 1, 2006
oney
is choking our democracy to death. Our elections are bought out from
under us and
our public officials are doing the bidding of mercenaries. So powerful
is the hold of wealth on politics that we cannot say America is working
for all Americans. The majority may support such broad social goals as
affordable medical coverage for all, decent wages for working people,
safe working conditions, a secure retirement, and clean air and water,
but there is no government "of, by, and for the people" to deliver on
those aspirations.
Our system of privately financed
campaigns has shut regular
people out of any meaningful participation in democracy. Less than
one-half of one percent of all Americans made a political contribution
of $200 or more to a federal candidate in 2004. When the average cost
of winning a seat in the House of Representatives has topped $1
million, we can no longer refer to that chamber as "The People's
House." Congress belongs to the highest bidder.
At the same time that the cost of
getting elected is exploding
beyond the reach of ordinary people, the business of influencing our
elected representatives has become a growth industry. Since President
Bush was elected the number of registered lobbyists in Washington has
more than doubled. That's 16,342 lobbyists in 2000 and 34,785 last
year: 65 lobbyists for every member of Congress. The total spent per
month by special interests wining, dining, and seducing federal
officials is now nearly $200 million. Per month.
Numbers don't tell the whole story.
With pro-corporate officials
running both the executive and legislative branches, lobbying that was
once reactive has sallied forth to buy huge chunks of public policy.
One example: In 2004 the computer maker Hewlett-Packard sought
Republican-backed legislation that would enable it to bring back to the
United States, at a dramatically lowered tax rate, as much as $14.5
billion in profits from foreign subsidiaries. The company nearly
doubled its budget for contract lobbyists and took on an elite lobbying
firm as its Washington arm. Presto! The legislation passed. The
company's director of government affairs was quite candid: "We're
trying to take advantage of the fact that Republicans control the
House, the Senate, and the White House."
GREED WITHOUT APOLOGIES—I am an
equal opportunity muckraker.
Anyone who saw the documentary my team and I produced on the illegal
fund-raising for Bill Clinton's re-election knows I am no fan of the
Democratic money-machine that helped tear away the party from whatever
roots it had in the struggles of working people. But today the
Republicans own the government lock, stock, and barrel. And they have
turned their self-proclaimed revolution into a cash cow.
Look back at the bulk of legislation
passed by Congress in the
past decade: an energy bill that gives oil companies huge tax breaks at
the same time that ExxonMobil has just posted $36.13 billion in profits
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 brought on 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 coverage; 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 opening a P.O. box in an
off-shore tax haven like the Cayman Islands.
In every case the results were
produced by rivers of cash
flowing to favored politicians from interests whose return on their
investment put Wall Street equities to shame. This happens because our
public representatives need huge sums to finance their campaigns,
especially to pay for television advertising. The masters of the money
game have taken advantage of that weakness in our democracy to turn our
elections into auctions.
A WALK DOWN K STREET—It's the
Wall Street of lobbying, the
address of many of Washington's biggest lobbying firms. The "K Street
Project"—the most successful shakedown operation since the first Gilded
Age—was the brainchild of Representative Tom DeLay and Grover Norquist,
the right-wing strategist who famously said that his goal is to shrink
government so that it can be "drowned in a bathtub" (when, finally, it
will be too impotent to protect democracy from plunder and powerless
citizens from the rapacity of corporate power). For his part, Tom DeLay
ran a pest exterminating business in Sugar Land, Texas, where he hated
government regulators who dared to tell him that some of the pesticides
he used were dangerous. He got himself elected to the Texas legislature
at a time when the Republicans were becoming the majority in the
once-solid Democratic South, and early in his new career "Hot Tub Tom,"
as he was known in Austin, became a born-again Christian.
In addition to finding Jesus, Tom
DeLay discovered the power of money
to drive his career. By raising more than $2 million from lobbyists and
business groups and distributing it to dozens of Republican candidates
in 1994, the year of the Republican breakthrough in the House, DeLay
bought the loyalty of many freshmen legislators who helped elect him
Majority Whip, the House's number three man.
He wasted no time in inviting
lobbyists to write the Republican
agenda. Their first priority was "Project Relief"—"relief" from labor
standards that protected workers from the physical injuries of
repetitive work, "relief" from tougher rules on meat inspection,
"relief" from effective monitoring of hazardous air pollutants. Scores
of companies were soon adding one juicy and expensive tidbit after
another. On the eve of the debate, according to Michael Weisskopf and
David Maraniss of the Washington Post,
20 major corporate groups advised lawmakers that "this was a key vote,
one that would be considered in future campaign contributions."
The Machine was off and running. As
then-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." The rules were simple
enough. Contribute to Republicans only. Hire only Republicans as
lobbyists (priority preference: DeLay's own staff). Centralize the
power to write legislation in the hands of the party bosses (assisted
by hovering lobbyists). Allow no amendments. Produce bills in secret.
Permit members no time to read them. Pass important bills late at
night. Avoid compromise by banning Democrats from conference
committees. Give lobbyists and campaign contributors what they want.
While examples abound of how the rules
stacked the deck,
consider one: the Medicare prescription coverage bill. Enacted after
midnight, its hundreds and hundreds of pages unintelligible to anyone
but lobbyists, the legislation enriched the pharmaceutical and
insurance companies while giving senior citizens and taxpayers the
shaft.
THE MONEY MAN—DeLay, who had
announced that God had chosen him
to return American to a "biblical worldview," needed help to sustain
the cash flow necessary for spreading the Gospel of Greed. He found it
in a fellow right-wing ideologue named Jack Abramoff, who personified
the K-Street money-machine of which DeLay, with the blessing of his
party's leaders, was the major-domo. It was Abramoff who helped DeLay
raise those millions of dollars from campaign donors to create the base
for an empire of corruption.
Abramoff has now pleaded guilty to
fraud, tax evasion, and
conspiracy to bribe public officials. It's a spectacular fall for a man
whose rise to power began in his school days with his election as
chairman of the College Republicans. Despite its innocuous name, the
organization became a political attack machine for the far right and a
launching pad for younger conservatives on the make.
"Our job," Abramoff, then 22 years
old, wrote after his first
visit to the Reagan White House, "is to remove liberals from power
permanently. . . ." (He would later acknowledge that his agenda also
included moving K Street closer to the Republican Party.) Karl Rove had
once held the same job as chairman. So did Grover Norquist, who ran
Abramoff's campaign. A youthful $200-a-month intern named Ralph Reed
was at their side. These were the rising young stars of the
conservative movement who came to town to lead a revolution and stayed
to run a racket.
CASINO ROYALE—Abramoff made his
name, so to speak, representing
Indian tribes and their gambling interests. As his partner he hired a
DeLay crony named Michael Scanlon. Together they would bilk half a
dozen tribes who hired them to protect their gambling interests from
competition. What the two men had to offer, of course, was their
connections to the Republican power structure, including members of
Congress, friends at the White House (Abramoff's personal assistant
became the personal assistant of Karl Rove), Christian Right activists
like Reed, and right-wing ideologues like Norquist. The network hummed
smoothly for its inside traders—as, for example, when two lobbying
clients of Abramoff paid $25,000 to Norquist's organization, Americans
for Tax Reform, for lunch at the White House and a meeting with
President Bush in May 2001, according to the Texas Observer.
In a scheme they called "Gimme Five."
Abramoff would refer tribes to
Scanlon for grassroots public-relations work, and Scanlon would then
kick back about 50 percent to Abramoff, all without the tribes'
knowledge. Before it was over, the tribes had paid the two lobbyists
$82 million, much of it going directly into Abramoff's and Scanlon's
pockets. And that doesn't count the thousands more that Abramoff
directed the tribes to pay out in campaign contributions.
Some of the money found its way into an outfit called the
Council of Republicans for Environment Advocacy, founded by Gale Norton
before she was appointed to run the Department of the Interior,
which—surprise! surprise!—is the agency most responsible for Indian
gaming rights. Some went to so-called charities, set up by Abramoff and
DeLay, that filtered money for lavish trips for members of Congress and
their staffs, as well as salaries for Congressional family members and
DeLay's pet projects
And some of the money found its way to the Holy High Rollers of the
Christian Right. Ralph Reed, for one, had his hand out. Reed had become
the religious right's poster boy against gambling ("We believe gambling
is a cancer on the American body politic," he had said). Now Abramoff
and Scanlon would pay Reed some $4 million to help them protect their
own gaming interests. His assignment was to whip up Christian
opposition to gambling initiatives that could cut into the profits of
Abramoff's clients.
Reed enlisted some of the brightest
stars in the Christian
firmament in a ruse conducted on Abramoff's behalf: they would oppose
gambling on religious and moral grounds in strategic places at decisive
moments when competition threatened Abramoff's clients. Bogus Christian
groups were part of the strategy. A gaggle of influential Baptist
preachers in Texas danced to Reed's fiddling. Folks in Louisiana heard
the voice of God on the radio—performed by Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson—thundering against a riverboat gambling scheme that Abramoff
feared would jeopardize the profits of a client. Reed even got James
Dobson, whose nationwide radio "ministry" reaches millions of people
(and whose videos helped Tom DeLay find Jesus) to deluge the Interior
Department and White House with telephone calls from indignant
Christians.
Abramoff arranged for the Mississippi
Choctaws, who were trying
to stave off competition from other tribes, to contribute over $1
million to Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, which then passed the
money along to the Alabama Christian Coalition and to another
anti-gambling group Reed had duped into aiding the cause. It is unclear
how much these Christian soldiers knew about the true purpose of their
crusade, but Reed knew all along that his money was coming from
Abramoff. The e-mails between the two men read like a modern version of
Elmer Gantry.
As reported by the Washington Post
and National Journal,
some of Abramoff's money from lobbying went to start a non-profit
organization called the U.S. Family Network, founded with the help of a
top aide to Tom DeLay while he was still in DeLay's employ (his salary
at the time paid by—you guessed it—taxpayers). DeLay even wrote a
fundraising letter in its behalf. The group announced that its purpose
was to promote policies favorable for "families, the economic
prosperity, social improvement, moral fitness, and general well being
of the United States," and its fund-raising screeds warned that the
American family "is being attacked from all sides: crime, drugs,
pornography . . . and gambling." But its first donation came from the
Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, followed by other Abramoff clients
who couldn't care less about the professed moral agenda.
The U.S. Family Network turns out to
be another scam in the
Abramoff-DeLay money laundering machine. Its money paid for attack ads
on Democrats, bought a townhouse three blocks from DeLay's
Congressional quarters, providing him with free office space where he
could go to raise funds for the Machine, and awarded DeLay's wife a
sizable salary.
But that's the least of it. Working
with Abramoff through a now
defunct law firm in London and an obscure offshore company in the
Bahamas, oil and gas executives from Russia used the U.S. Family
Network to funnel money to influence Tom DeLay, then-majority leader of
the House of Representatives. A Christian pastor recruited to serve as
the titular president of the organization was told by DeLay's sidekick
that $1 million was passed through from sources in Russia who wanted
DeLay's support for legislation enabling the International Monetary
Fund to bail out the faltering Russian economy without demanding new
taxes on the country's energy industry. Lo and behold, there was Tom
Delay, appearing on an obliging Fox News television show, arguing the
Russian position. The rueful pastor who was the organization's nominal
head said he was told, "This is the way things work in Washington."
"REFORM" TALK FIZZLES—The
Republican leaders would have us
believe this is just a "lobbying scandal." They assume that if they
pass a few minor reforms to put a little distance between the
politician and the lobbyist, we will think everything is okay and they
can go back to business as usual. Just look at Congressman John
Boehner, elected to replace Tom DeLay as House Majority Leader. He's
been a full player in the K Street Project and DeLay's money machine.
The top lobbyists in town frequent his office. He thinks nothing of
cruising with them in the Caribbean or of hopping on corporate jets
arranged by them. This is the man who ten years ago moved around the
floor of the House—the "People's House"—handing out checks from tobacco
executives.
As for Tom Delay? He is under
indictment in Texas for money
laundering and had to resign as Majority Leader. But just the other day
the party bosses gave him a seat on the powerful House Appropriations
Committee, where big contributors get their rewards. And—are you ready
for this?—they put him on the subcommittee overseeing the budget of the
Justice Department, which is investigating the Abramoff scandal,
including Abramoff's connections to DeLay. I'm not making this up. It's
business as usual. Rotten business as usual.
I have touched on only a few of the
astonishing details pouring
out about the sacking of Washington. The corrupting power of money in
politics is an old story. This time is different, because in a
one-party government the opposition is impotent and the corporate
media, with a few notable exceptions, have bought into the notion that
this is "just the way Washington works." Already the calls for reform
are fading away.
CLEAN ELECTIONS—You may say,
"What can we do about it? These
forces are too rich, too powerful, too entrenched to be defeated."
Maybe. But if others had given up before us, blacks would still be
three-fifths of a person, women wouldn't have the vote, workers
couldn't organize, and children would still be working in the mines.
It's time to fight again. These people in Washington have no right to
be doing what they are doing. It's not their government, it's your
government. They work for you, and if they let you down and sell you
out, they should be fired. That goes for everyone, from the lowliest
bureaucrat in town to the senior leaders of Congress on up to the
president of the United States. The stakes are too high for us to give
up.
Fortunately, there is something we can
do. A movement is
gathering across the country that could restore democracy to a country
run by money. It's the "clean money" campaign for the public funding of
our elections. Maine led the way in 2000. Arizona followed suit. So
have several municipalities, including Portland, Oregon, and
Albuquerque, New Mexico. Races are more competitive and attract a more
diverse group of candidates.
No sooner had Janet Napolitano been
elected governor of Arizona
under the state's public financing program than she instituted reforms
establishing low-cost prescription drug subsidies for seniors. There
have also been advances in Maine in providing low-cost prescription
drugs for residents. Why? Because the politicians write the
legislation, not the lobbyists.
Look what happened in Connecticut last
year, a state rocked by
multiple political scandals. People decided to break the link between
big donors and public officials. By December the legislature had passed
clean-money reform, banning campaign contributions from lobbyists and
state contractors. Connecticut is the first state where the legislature
and governor have approved full public funding for their own races. In
thirty other states clean-money campaigns are also forming. (You can
find out more about the movement at the website of Public Campaign.)
While public funding won't solve all
the problems—the Abramoffs and
DeLays of the world will always find ways to abuse the public trust—it
would go a long way toward restoring the hope of government "of, by,
and for the people." Even some business lobbyists are having second
thoughts. Business Week
recently quoted one of them as saying: "As a conservative, I've always
opposed government involvement. But it seems to me the real answer is
federal financing of Congressional elections."
Just think: For about $10 per
taxpayer, per year, we, the
people, could buy back our politicians in Congress and the White House
with full public funding. But time is running out. Unless we offer
qualified candidates a different source of campaign funding with clean,
disinterested and accountable public money, the selling of America will
go on, and we will wake up one day in a country we no longer recognize.
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