Man Of The People
by digby
As autumn sets in, the progressive agenda on which Barack Obama rode to victory last November has stalled, even with Democrats controlling every branch of government. Key aspects of healthcare reform, like a public option, appear dead; climate change legislation, having narrowly passed the House in June, awaits an uncertain fate in the Senate; the Employee Free Choice Act and financial industry reforms have gone off the grid. Behind all these setbacks is a pattern: with little outright opposition, corporate interests have insinuated themselves into the legislative process to co-opt attempts at reform. As a result, the big-ticket items are rotting away, key provisions have been removed and bills are being weakened beyond recognition behind closed doors. Certainly there are still those in Congress willing to stand up to pressure from lobbyists–like Cummings, who, after meeting with Gephardt and the Goldman Sachs executives, sent his letter anyway, launching an investigation by TARP inspector general Neil Barofsky. But the broader momentum is with the corporate interests, thanks to players like Gephardt who have escorted them to the bargaining table. In a town where everyone seemingly has a price, Gephardt has distinguished himself, selling his reputation as a pro-labor, pro-universal healthcare, pro-environment expert and advocate to his new corporate masters, giving their efforts to kill and maim reforms a familiar, friendly face in the Democratic establishment. As a result, Gephardt has become a highly sought-after and very effective lobbyist. He has also betrayed nearly every principle he once claimed to hold. When Gephardt ran for president in 1988, his ads claimed he had “defeated the strongest lobbying effort in history,” and even in his waning Congressional years, he hardly seemed a defender of lobbying. “I’m running for president because I’ve had enough of the oil barons, the status-quo apologists, the special-interest lobbyists running amok,” he proclaimed in February 2003. By January, his run for the presidency was over; a year later, he gathered with friends in St. Louis for a retirement party. Many politicians and celebrities paid homage: via video, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter lavished praise on him, and sportscaster Bob Costas called him “the best president America never had.” When a reporter asked Gephardt about his plans for the future, he said he was going to spend some time with his family and consider a couple of employment opportunities. On January 1, 2005–before Gephardt’s term had even expired–the Congressman’s son-in-law signed papers to form a consultancy firm based in Delaware called Gephardt and Associates (now the Gephardt Group). But for most of 2005 it lay dormant as Gephardt joined corporate boards and advised a few big-name companies. Banned from lobbying Congress for a year, he soon discovered there were places outside Washington that needed influencing. Like California: when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger introduced legislation that would have opened the door to increased infrastructure privatization in January 2006, Democrats in the legislature balked. So Goldman Sachs, standing to benefit from these policies, sent Gephardt as an emissary to Sacramento, hoping to persuade the state to monetize infrastructure by levying tolls and then leasing roads to private investors for decades. “I’ve done some work with Goldman Sachs in their capacity as adviser to both the City of Chicago and now the State of Indiana,” Gephardt told California lawmakers at a February 14, 2006, hearing, before extolling the virtues of infrastructure privatization if “negotiated properly.”
(If you had any notion that Goldman Sachs is just another Wall Street firm, you haven’t read this.)
Dick “son of a milkman” Gephardt was once the great working class hope for the Democratic Party, believe it or not.
I’m not sure how you can control this. It seems unlikely that you can pass laws that make it impossible for former officials to work as lobbyists forever and even then much of this stuff is done unofficially anyway. It seems to me that the only thing that might work would be publicly financed campaigns and even then the class solidarity and future rewards for whoring for business would still exist. It’s a conundrum. Politicians in America all believe they deserve to be rich. Hell, everyone in America does.
One thing that should be done is that Democrats of all stripes should stop pretending that Democrats are anything more than slightly better than Republicans on these issues and only because they have to include unions and the working poor in their coalition in order to get elected. And even then it doesn’t keep them from quietly selling themselves to highest bidder while they’re still in office. Once they’re out, they immediately pull on a metaphorical micro-mini and start trolling K Street for Johns.
h/t to BC.