“Government is not for sale,” said Alice S. Fisher to the Washington Post some two and a half years ago. As head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, she was involved in the prosecution of Jack Abramoff, a household byword for government corruption and the unwholesome influence of lobbyists.
If she’s telling the truth, recent events beg the question of whether the government is merely a parrot. And if you’ve been doing your civics homework you’ll say, “Boy, I hope it’s a parrot! That’s why elected officials are called my representatives!” But these are dark times, and these are not good parrots. They are, it seems, colored by corruption and lies.
An estimated 42 congresspeople recently added to the Congressional Records the same statement, drafted by lobbyists of Genentech, a biotechnology giant, to express support for provisions of the health bill that would keep research jobs in the United States. A lobbyist of Genentech told the New York Times, “This happens all the time. There was nothing nefarious about it.” The Genentech-provided statements were, in the closest thing available to a validation of the lobbyist’s statement, not intended to change the bill. But far from legitimizing the recent event, the statements’ insignificance makes them a very useful warning. What could be more nefarious than the lawmakers of our country getting their information directly from corporations with an interest in the laws? As the New York Times explained, Representative Bill Pascel’s excuse for repeating the Genentech statement was that, “he got his statement from his staff and ‘did not know where they got the information from.”
And let’s not mince words about corporate interests. An earlier New York Times article documented a flood of lobbyist activity in late 2007 to cement certain regulations to which lobbyists believed a Democrat-controlled government would be unsympathetic. The worried-over regulations concerned whether or not chicken farmers should be responsible for reporting potentially polluting ammonia emissions, whether coal miners could dump rock and dirt into streams and valleys rather than haul the material away to waste sites, and whether automakers had to make roofs strong enough to survive a rollover.
I have no concrete figures to back up the assertion that the general public doesn’t want ammonia from chicken shit in their air or their valleys and streams clogged with coal dirt. Similarly, I haven’t studied whether or not people want to be able to survive rollover accidents, but I have some very significant hunches. Yet as apparently these aren’t the issues that the American people should get to decide, why am I even worried about it?
The institution of corporate lobbying speaks for itself. It shouldn’t be an over-generalization to say that any of the corporations so far listed have more resources immediately available than the overwhelming majority of individual American citizens. So while they can hire people to live in Washington D.C. and follow the activities of Congress, throwing money at alterations of policy where necessary, the average American citizen cannot. The average American citizen can contribute one three hundred millionth of a decision about the President, and thereby demonstrate a general support for trends in emerging American laws, but most people aren’t going to be minutely aware of every bill that passes through the House and Senate. Framing lobbying in this way raises the question of whether lobbyists working for particularly gargantuan corporations actually have more influence on Congressional activity than the American public. Since the only answer I have to that question is, “I don’t think so, but I really hope not,” I’m glad the real question is why they have any influence at all. The point of a democracy is to allow the masses to actually make decisions, not just choose which candidate concedes those decisions to lobbyists. And while certain steps against the caterpillar-esque process by which congresspeople emerge into beautiful lobbyists (aren’t you comforted to know that even people we choose not to re-elect to Congress get to maintain a healthy influence?) have been taken, there’s still something wrong in a system where health-care lobbyists outnumber congresspeople by six to one.
How to take action against lobbying is as big a dilemma as lobbying itself. If one biotechnology company managed to swindle forty congresspeople into repeating its expression of support for a bill, imagine the influence of all the lobbyists in the United State being given common cause by having their existence threatened. But revolutions are passé, and you can’t kill things that don’t have souls. Ultimately the only conclusion about lobbying to be made is that we are fucked.
Of course, if there are any of you who aren’t so mired in distraction, disillusion and apathy as to be practically immobile, this could maybe be a decent time to protest.