[lbo-talk] New Yorker: Conflict of Interests, by Nicholas Lemann

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sun Sep 14 17:09:50 PDT 2008


``If politics worked the way Bentley thought it did, wouldn't the richer interest groups buy themselves disproportionate political power? To a lot of people, pluralism sounded like pessimism. It was during the nineteen-sixties, when reform was again in the air and impatience with traditional forms of politics was on the rise, that `The Process of Government' began to fall out of favor...''

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While it is a no-brainer that interest group politics and their lobbyists, are politics in the US, the interesting parts are the details and how it all works. And there is another aspect to this system that Bentley probably didn't write about. Don't know didn't read the book. Below is a follow-up to Dwayne's:

``I've long thought that the real issue wasn't that 'interest groups' existed -- because, well, of course they do -- but that a cluster of such groups, for ex. Pharma and energy, moving like money buttered gazelles, enjoy super influence while others get politely patted on the head, at best...''

The question then becomes how exactly does that money buttered gazelle work? Here are some examples and history, in case the list doesn't know all this already.

The excutive branch agencies, the House and Senate members, committees and their staffs do not have the time, expertise, or the budget to create policies in house to carry out their own `vision' thing. Instead they depend on the interest groups, lobby industry and think tanks to frame the issues, find the facts to support positions, and outline the policies and changes needed. The mass media do exactly the same thing. Notice that every association, lobby, and interest group has a press release packet available for download. Well, there you go. The media mouth the same words, facts, figure and so forth. You can read it in the paper, hear it on tv, or read the FDA press release or get the same thing off Bayer Pharma's website.

Very obviously the Iraq war was a great example of how well the interlocking and overlapping machinery works in foreign policy. In effect public officials in the Bush administration and Congress simply picked their favorite interest groups and lobbyists and worked with them. In the case of the Iraq war, the neoconservatives in the Pentagon and State department choose the allied industries of the Israel lobby for their frames, `facts', and other policy details, then double checked with the petro-energy monster, and volia, goodbye Saddam. Congress did the same thing with the same groups, so it was unanimous. The mass media using the same press packets as the administration, Congress, and the foriegn policy industries use, just repeated the same blather, sometimes leading, sometimes following. There's nothing mysterious or conspiratorial about the motives of the Israel lobby consortium, since Israel itself as been the centerpiece of US foriegn policy in the Middle East for decades.

I am pretty sure, Israel pays plenty for this privilage since their competition are the gulf oil states and these are pretty generous with their lobby money too.

Then there is the other side of the coin.

The ten years of background to the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act, 1990) was filled with several groups who did nothing but legal, social, and economic studies to figure out how to write a bill like the ADA. Their goal was to turn the limited Rehab act of 1974 that only applied to federally funded agencies and programs into a system of rights that applied to the entire political economy. (Marta Russell's Beyond Ramps provides a great critique, here) The group I knew and occasionally worked for, hooked up with Ted Kennedy and his staff. There were other senators and house members, but I don't remember them now, maybe Waxman...

Anyway I got a great insight into government through contact with this local group.

There are some interesting details at work. First, if you received a federal grant or program funding, you are not supposed to engage in `politics', meaning you are not allowed to lobby. As long as the local group was working under a DOJ training grant, they had to stay out of the political lobby business. Of course the minute that training grant ended, they switched over to foundation funding and maintained a one woman office in DC as a lobbyist.

Think on that. What it means is that most of the social reform efforts all need to be funded somehow and most go for some federal project grant to produce their studies, reports and suggested institutional changes. All well and good. But they can't try to work these reforms through the political process itself.

Since most of the changes in social policy on the left side of the aisle are usually hostile to the interests of the corporate state and involve reforms in the political economy, these groups are usually not going to get corporate funding. So, if they can't get federal money and they can't get corporate money, were do they get the money to carry on operations? They usually depend on their own NGOs, if they have one. But most NGOs depend on corporate foundation grants in one form or another. While these are not supposed to be political, of course they are. Their boards of directors are not stupid. The board members are charged with making sure their foundation money is spent `wisely' and follows the mission statement and guidelines. So the foundation money circuit exercises a great influence on what groups get funded and what don't.

To solve the money problem, the social conservative Right came up with the idea (taken directly from the civil rights movements) of tapping into the white Christianity collections circuit of the Bible belt and the West mega-churchs back in the Reagan era. So we now have a bunch of fundamentalist social policy wonks, a whole well funded cottage industry of them.

Meanwhile there is little or no progressive counterforce, except the more liberal minded elected officials and the occasional maverick foundation or endowment.

On issues of reproductive rights, for example, there are various groups like Planned Parenthood, NOW, and other groups, but their money circuit depends on individual contributions and foundations probably in nowhere near the volumn the fundies muster. Back in the 70s Family Planning clinics (originally a War on Poverty program) supplied contraception, abortion, and counseling to poor women. The services were paid for under various state level Medicaid programs. Of course that was soon thrown out by the Hyde amendment to Title X, that prohibited Medicaid from covering those services. This was part of the social conservative backlash over Roe v. Wade.

So, in a general way the back and forth between the all fired up Right and the splineless Liberals takes place between lobbies like the above Family Planning example. The Right has a dozen groups with all kinds of money to pursue their agendas (trace the Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed game of gaming the Indian Gaming lobbies...). Meanwhile the so-called liberals of the Democratic party get all their healthcare ideas from lobbies like the AMA, which rejected a single payer approach. Well, naturally. The AMA is one of the primary arms to health insurance industry.

Whatever the percentage of doctors, nurses and others who support single payer plans, groups like the PNHP and the CNA for example, can not out spend the likes of the AMA, AAHP, AHA and other giant healthcare trade associations. Just visit the web pages of this latter list of associations and read their positions. There you will find virtually all the Obama and Clinton rhetoric on healthcare that defly evades single payer plans, with a cloud of bullshit about `affortability', `portability', `universal access'.

Where do I come down on this interest group or lobby process of goverance? Our side needs more money. I worked for a community based legal organization and got to watch the internal debates on disability rights. I got to watch from a distance the whole background to the ADA. So I can definitely see how a coalition of local organizations get their political interest turned into law. Their model of how to do that work came from studying the NACCP, SCLC and other groups. That's how it should work.

On the other hand, obviously the lobby and interest group business was old news to vastly wealthy and vastly powerful capital and the power elites. The giant corporations invented trade associations exactly to influence government. They pretty much invented the whole interest-group system for their advantage, so in practical terms anybody not on the inside of this system, backed up with corporate wealth is prettty much excluded by default.

As a matter of historical note, Bentley was writing around the turn of the 20thC, 1900. This was the period when a great wave of social reformers along with trade unions and other groups formally started out hammering away at government, and simultaneous with those groups the big corporations formed their `trade associations' to do the same thing for their side. So the two poles of the political spectrum of these interest groups have co-evolved in tandem, ever since.

What's funny about the current election and why Jordan probably found Bentley so interesting (I suspect) is that both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama were virtually produced by this lobby based interest group system. Clinton wasn't an elected official in the Clinton administration so she helped coordinate and worked through the healthcare lobby system. Obama's community organizing amounted to working with foundations to coordinate local self-help community groups' funding.

BTW the latest single payer plan for California, just passed the Senate and Assemby and is headed to the governor's office, where he will routinely veto it:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/08/29/state/n193654D41.DTL&type=health

Maybe Jenny Brown or some else can comment on this plan. I haven't followed it and don't know the details, the loop holes, the fine print...

CG



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