Portrait, Bill Moyers. (photo: PBS)
30 April 13
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you want to see why the public approval rating of Congress is down in
the sub-arctic range - an icy 15 percent by last count - all you have to
do is take a quick look at how the House and Senate pay worship at the
altar of corporations, banks and other special interests at the expense
of public aspirations and need.
Traditionally, political scientists have taught their
students that there are two schools of thought about how a legislator
should get the job done. One is to vote yay or nay on a bill by
following the will of his or her constituency, doing what they say they
want. The other is to represent them as that legislator sees fit, acting
in the best interest of the voters - whether they like it or not.
But our current Congress - as cranky and inert as an
obnoxious old uncle who refuses to move from his easy chair - never went
to either of those schools. Its members rarely have the voter in mind
at all, unless, of course, that voter's a cash-laden heavy hitter with
the clout to keep an incumbent on the leash and comfortably in office.
How else to explain a Congress that still adamantly
refuses to do anything, despite some 90 percent of the American public
being in favor of background checks for gun purchases and a healthy
majority favoring other gun control measures? Last week, they ignored
the pleas of Newtown families and the siege of violence in Boston and
yielded once again to the fanatical rants of Wayne LaPierre and the
National Rifle Association. In just the first three months of this year,
as it shoved back against the renewed push for controls, the NRA spent a
record $800,000 keeping congressional members in line.
And how else to explain why corporate tax breaks have
more than doubled in the last 25 years? Or why the Senate and House
recently gutted the STOCK Act requiring disclosure of financial
transactions by White House staff and members of Congress and their
staffs and prohibiting them from insider trading? It was passed into law
and signed by President Obama last year - an election year - with great
self-congratulation from all involved. But fears allegedly arose that
there might be security risks for some in the executive branch if their
financial business was known.
That concern was examined by the Columbia Journalism
Review, which "consulted four cybersecurity experts from leading think
tanks and private security consultancies. Each came to the same
conclusion: that Congress's rationale for scrapping the financial
disclosure rules was bogus." Nonetheless, the House and Senate leapt at
the opportunity to eviscerate key sections of the STOCK Act when almost
no one was watching. And the president signed it.
Then there's the fertilizer plant in West, Texas,
where last week, fire and explosion killed at least 15 - 11 of them
first responders - and injured more than 200. The Reuters news service
reported that the factory "had last year been storing 1,350 times the
amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight
by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security." Why wasn't Homeland
Security on top of this? For one thing, the company was required to tell
the department - and didn't. For another, budget cuts demanded by
Congress mean there aren't enough personnel available for spot
inspections.
Same goes for the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration - OSHA. The plant hadn't been inspected in nearly thirty
years, and there are so few OSHA inspectors in Texas that it would take
98 years for them to take a look at each workplace in the state once.
According to the non-partisan reform group Public Campaign, "Already
only able to conduct 40,000 workplace inspections a year in a country
with seven million worksites, OSHA will see its budget cut by an
additional 8.2 percent this year on account of the sequester."
Twelve members of Congress want to make a bad
situation even worse, sponsoring the industry-backed General Duty
Clarification Act; its banal title hiding that, as reported by Tim
Murphy at Mother Jones magazine, "The bill is designed to sap the
Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to regulate safety and
security at major chemical sites, as prescribed by the Clean Air Act."
"'We call that the Koch brothers bill,' Greenpeace
legislative director Rick Hind says, because the bill's sponsor, GOP
Rep. Mike Pompeo, represents the conservative megadonors' home city of
Wichita, Kansas. (The sponsor of the sister legislation in the senate,
GOP Sen. Pat Roberts, represents the Kochs' home state of Kansas.) The
brothers have huge investments in fertilizer production, and Hind thinks
they'll ultimately get what they want, whether or not the bill becomes
law."
No coincidence, perhaps, that the sponsors of the
House bill and Senator Roberts, Public Campaign reports, "have
collectively taken over $670,000 from the chemical manufacturing
industry over their careers." Since 2011, the industry has spent $85.1
million lobbying.
Congress quietly acquiesces as the regulations meant
for our safety are whittled away. The progressive website ThinkProgress
notes that even though food related infections - which kill 3,000 and
sicken 48 million Americans each year - rose last year, congressional
and White House budget cuts may mean up to 600 fewer food inspectors at
meat and poultry plants, leaving it up to the industry to police itself.
That rot you're smelling isn't just some bad hamburger.
It's true that ninety-two percent of Americans say,
yes, reducing the deficit and spending cuts are important, but all on
their own the people have figured out cuts that make more sense than
anything Congress and its corporate puppeteers want to hear about.
Mattea Kramer, research director at the National Priorities Project,
says "a strong majority" - 73 percent of us - want a reduced reliance on
fossil fuels, and fifty percent want something done about climate
change. A carbon tax would help with both, and raise an estimated $125
billion every year. Response from Congress: crickets.
Fifty eight percent of the U.S., according to Gallup,
wants "major cuts in military and defense spending," the average
American favoring a reduction of 18 percent. Good luck - the Pentagon
and defense contractors already are bellowing about the puny 1.6 percent
reduction called for in the new White House budget.
Mattea Kramer writes that Americans for Tax Fairness, a
coalition of 280 organizations, has "identified 10-year budgetary
savings of $2.8 trillion simply by limiting or eliminating a plethora of
high-income and corporate tax loopholes." Congress is busily revising
the tax code as we speak but how many of those loopholes and other perks
like credits and deductions do you bet will go away?
Not many if the lobbying industry has anything to do
with it. The House Ways and Means Committee has eleven working groups
considering rewrites and according to the congressional newspaper The
Hill, they're quietly meeting with lobbyists and other interests – "deep
pocketed players" - all the time. Keep your eye on who's donating to
the re-election campaigns of each of those working group members as we
move toward the midterms next year.
Over on the Senate side, The New York Times recently
reported those seeking to cut taxes and hang onto their incentives as
the code is revised have found one strategy that seems to work – hire
firms that employ former aides to Democratic Senator Max Baucus,
chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The Times analyzed lobbying
files and found at least 28 of his ex-staffers "have lobbied on tax
issues during the Obama administration – more than any other current
member of Congress."
Reporter Eric Lipton writes, "… Many of those
lobbyists have already saved their clients millions - in some cases,
billions - of dollars after Mr. Baucus backed their requests to extend
certain corporate tax perks, provisions that were adopted as part of the
so-called fiscal cliff legislation in January."
Senator Baucus' spokesman was quick to say that his
boss regularly rejects requests as well, but the fact is, he added,
"Oftentimes good policy can indirectly benefit someone. That doesn't
mean it shouldn't be done."
Just so. Which is why, for example, Senator Mitch
McConnell, the Republican minority leader who likes to complain about
the current tax code's four million words of red tape - seven times the
length of War and Peace - will doubtless support tightening loopholes,
right? A January report from Public Campaign Action Fund, found that,
"Companies that lobbied against bringing jobs back to America and ending
tax breaks for offshoring have given McConnell one million dollars to
win his elections and look out for their interests." In other words:
don't hold your breath.
No wonder the biggest newspaper in his native Kentucky
said in a recent editorial that McConnell "has long ceased to serve the
state, instead serving the corporate interests he counts on for
contributions and leading obstruction that continues to plague
Congress."
Sadly, such is the way of Washington, home of the
scheme and the fraud, where the unbreakable chain between money and
governance weighs heavy and drags us ever deeper into a sinkhole of
inaction and mediocrity.
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