Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA A well-oiled influence machine
By Andy Kroll
In fact, Wall Street's lobbying battle against increased financial regulation
has been so powerful and smothering that, one year after the financial crisis
began, plenty of experts already foresee future crises like the one in our
not-so-distant past. Of the mega banks on Wall Street, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology professor and former International Monetary Fund chief economist
Simon Johnson said, "They will run up big risks, they will fail again, they
will hit us for a big check."
On the Waxman-Markey climate bill, the first in US history to tackle global
warming, opponents have thrown everything but the classic kitchen sink at
lawmakers to persuade them to drop their support. One of the heaviest hitters,
the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy (ACCCE), an umbrella advocacy
group
representing mining, coal, manufacturers, and other energy interests, has spent
nearly $12 million since 2008 lobbying against climate change efforts. But the
2,800 lobbyists weighing in on the Waxman-Markey bill in Washington - more than
75% representing industry interests - are only the tip of a rapidly melting
iceberg.
The American Energy Alliance, headed by oil lobbyist Thomas Pyle, has hit the
road with its "American Energy Express" bus tour visiting county fairs, horse
shows, and baseball games in coal-friendly Midwestern and Appalachian states,
claiming that Waxman-Markey is actually a national energy tax that would
eliminate jobs. The ACCCE has also hired a firm specializing in astroturfing -
that is, in creating or funding phony grassroots organizations or networks - to
put together "America's Power Army," a 225,000-strong volunteer network to
spread misinformation at the town-hall meetings of congressional
representatives and other forums.
The anti-Waxman-Markey warfare reached a new low when one sleazy DC lobbying
firm, showing the lengths to which opponents will go, fabricated letters
opposing the bill and sent them to members of Congress. A Congressional
investigation found that Bonner and Associates, a specialist in
grassroots/astroturf campaigns working for ACCCE, forged more than a dozen
separate letters and sent them to Representative Tom Perriello (Democrat -
Virginia) and several other congressmen. The purported authors of the phony
letters ranged from an American veterans' organization and the American
Association of University Women to a Hispanic advocacy group, Creciendo Juntos,
and the NAACP. But their message was the same: Fight Waxman-Markey, it will
cost us jobs.
The F-22's false promise
In April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates signaled the Obama administration's
new philosophy on military spending by announcing an array of notable budget
cuts intended to curtail or eliminate some of the unsuccessful or unnecessary
weapons systems that litter the Pentagon's bloated budget and reflect the
previous administration's military excesses. "We must reform how and what we
buy," Gates explained, "meaning a fundamental overhaul of our approach to
procurement, acquisition and contracting."
In Gates' crosshairs were projects like the F-22 Raptor jet fighter, a Cold War
relic that's run wildly over-budget and never flown a mission in Iraq or
Afghanistan; the VH-71 presidential helicopter, which Obama specifically
insisted he didn't want or need; the C-17, a transport plane Gates said the
country already had enough of; and the Army's lackluster Future Combat Systems
modernization program, the brainchild of former defense secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. After years of excessive military spending, Gates's plan to trim
these wasteful projects (though, sadly, not the defense budget in toto)
potentially presented a stark change of fortune to defense contractors and
corporations accustomed to the beneficence of Washington's lawmakers.
In response, the defense industry and its lobbyists mobilized. Six months
later, as new defense legislation staggers through Congress, just over 1,000
defense-related lobbyists are hard at work. This year $62 million has been
spent on Pentagon lobbying efforts. In particular, Lockheed Martin, the F-22's
main manufacturer, has sunk almost $7 million into lobbying in 2009, in part
through a campaign targeting lawmakers with F-22 manufacturing sites in their
states, while extolling the number of jobs an F-22 program would create.
Lockheed even launched a faux-grassroots website, PreserveRaptorJobs.com, to
drum up public support for the plane. (It has since been taken down.)
Obama, however, stood firm. Even after House lawmakers tried to restore F-22
funding, the president insisted that he'd veto any bill with more of the planes
in it. This was made crystal clear in a "Statement of Administration Policy"
(SAP) on the House defense appropriations bill. The plane's loyal supporters
like Senator Saxby Chambliss (Republican - Georgia) and Representative John
Murtha (Democrat - Pennsylvania) got the message and left the F-22 on the
cutting-room floor.
But the question remains: How Pyrrhic was the administration's F-22 "victory"?
Gates has, as a start, agreed to order four more of the useless F-22s at a cost
of $351 million a pop - they are included in the 2009 supplemental defense bill
- and he plans to more than double the future run of F-35 Joint Strike
Fighters, a cumbersome, accident-prone, prohibitively expensive plane like the
F-22. It will surprise no one that the F-35 is also made by Lockheed - and it
is easy to imagine that the F-35 commitment could, in fact, have been a
corporate trade-off for the lost F-22, which Lockheed still hopes to sell
abroad with the Senate's help.
And what about those other projects eyed by Gates: the VH-71 helicopter or the
C-17 transport? The Obama administration, by all evidence, seems to be wilting
in its defense of their termination. (That the second most powerful Pentagon
official, William Lynn, is a former lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon
undoubtedly doesn't help.) The same SAP with the F-22 veto is noticeably softer
on the VH-71, saying only that "the president's senior advisors would recommend
that he veto the bill," but stopping short of insisting that the helicopter
must go. As for the C-17, any kind of administration recommendation is MIA in
the SAP.
"Gates and Obama got tough on the F-22, and in Congress the porkers backed off,
and Murtha even took the F-22s he had in his bill out," Winslow Wheeler,
director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense
Information and a former Capitol Hill staffer for three decades, told
TomDispatch. "But in the same bill, Murtha also packed in more C-17s, more
presidential helicopters, more F-35 engines, challenging Gates and Obama. They
need to understand that they need to put up a fight."
If not Obama, then who?
Rahm Emanuel knew back in April that the administration was entering the ring,
but how ready have Obama and his team been to duke it out on all fronts? On
paper, Obama has appeared ready enough. In his moving address to Congress last
week, for instance, he not only emphasized the need for a public option in
health-care reform, but directly debunked the "bogus claims" being used to
attack his health-care reform vision.
His actions, though, have been less reassuring. While committing his
administration to the Afghan War, the President has appeared unwilling to fight
defense boondoggles down the line, as he did in the case of the F-22, and he's
been less than forceful in defending sorely needed financial reforms - like
those for the $592 billion over-the-counter derivatives market - in the face of
Wall Street's lobbying clout.
Once again, this isn't entirely surprising: For all the talk of the flood of
small, individual donations to Obama's historic 2008 election campaign, its
coffers overflowed with money from financial powerhouses like Goldman Sachs and
JPMorgan Chase and corporations like General Electric, Google, and Microsoft.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Obama still ranks near the top
among all recipients when it comes to contributions from the health, defense,
financial, and energy industries.
The same goes for Obama's staff. In an interview with Politico.com, Bill Moyers
put it vividly. "I think Rahm Emanuel, who is a clever politician, understands
that the money for Obama's re-election would come primarily from the health
industry, the drug industry and Wall Street, and so he is a corporate Democrat
who is destined, determined that there would be something in this legislation,"
Moyers asserted, that will appease those powerful interests.
If the president's sprawling agenda has revealed anything, it's the extent to
which private industries and their foot soldiers on K Street and Capitol Hill
influence - and in some cases dictate - American policymaking. Right now, about
12,500 federally registered lobbyists make their trade in Washington, but
believe it or not, they're only a small slice of the pie. James Thurber,
director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American
University, tells TomDispatch that the number of people in the political
advocacy business who aren't registered - the astroturfers, public relations
firms, and strategy groups, among others - number anywhere from 90,000 to
120,000. Conservatively speaking, that adds up to 168 influence peddlers for
every member of Congress.
Now you know the players. The teams, uneven as they may be, are on the field.
So take out that scorecard. Beating the Washington influence machine, flush
with cash, amply staffed and relentless in its mission, will be no small feat
for Obama's team. And if they fail, then it will be possible to say that no
matter who's voted in, it's the influence machine that rules Washington.
Andy Kroll is a writer and a staffer at Mother Jones magazine in San
Francisco. His pieces have appeared at Salon, the Nation, CNN.com, and
AlterNet, among others. He can be reached at his website, andykroll.com.
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