Thomas Frank: "What is K Street's Project?" A must read. [View All]

[flpoljunkie]

Frank's article essentially makes the case for public financing of campaigns. We truly do not own our country any more--the "K Street" lobbyists do.

http://www.pekingduck.org/archives/004013.php#004013

Why does this pay-for-policy spectacle not bother us more? Perhaps because it's so easy to tell ourselves, well, both parties do it. Besides, K Street is sprawling and confusing, with squadrons of lawyers representing every industry's diverging interests and demands, many of these innocent and some of them even healthful.

But K Street is not neutral. From all its complex machinations emerges a discernible political project best described by Joseph Goulden in 'The Superlawers' back in 1972, when the lobbying business was so many acorns beside today's forest of towering oaks. The 'Washington lawyers,' Goulden wrote, had over the years 'directed a counterrevolution unique in world economic history. Their mission was not to destroy the New Deal, and its successor reform acts, but to conquer them, and to leave their structures intact so they could be transformed into instruments for the amassing of monopolistic corporate power.' (Goulden, by the way, is no radical: he is a former director at the very conservative press watchdog Accuracy in Media.)

K Street's bright young men fill the top posts at federal agencies; K Street's money keeps wages low and prescription drug costs high; K Street's 'superlawyers' fight to make our retirement insecure; K Street's deregulation gurus turn our electric utilities into the plaything of Wall Street. What K Street wants from government is often the opposite of what the public wants. And yet what K Street wants, far too frequently it gets - if not by the good offices of Bob Ney, then by the timely disappearance of the now useless Bob Ney.

Whether we are Republicans or Democrats, we are all aware of how much more power corporations hold over everyday life than they used to. 'Those who own the country should govern the country,' John Jay used to say, and thanks in large part to K Street they do.