Unstoppable (8 page)

Hands Reach Across the Aisle, Though Often Slapped Back by Wily Corporatists

Hands Across the Great Divide

The frequency of liberal/conservative cosponsorship of legislation on Capitol Hill is greater than most people realize. Few of these alliances go anywhere, but it's a start for breaking the ice. The far more visible battles between intransigent leaders of the two parties give the impression of top-down, complete polarization—a word used with numbing repetition in recent years. But on any day one can check the pending legislation in Congress and find many bills with the conservative/liberal imprimatur. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is probably the most attracted to finding a Republican or two and putting bills into this bipartisan hopper. For these efforts he receives some publicity—as with his bipartisan health insurance plan—unlike other lawmakers, whose placements are mostly ignored. In 2013, Senator Wyden teamed up with Republican senator Rand Paul to introduce legislation that would legalize industrial hemp grown in the United States, and he united with Republican senator Lisa Murkowski to require disclosure of donors
giving over $1,000 to any organization engaged in federal political activity.

These major Left-Right initiatives cover lots of territory, but few reach the committee hearing stage, still fewer ever reach the House or Senate floor, and almost none are enacted as free-standing legislation, in contrast to minor amendments (or earmarks) inserted in “must-pass” larger bills, such as appropriations for the military budget.

One rare major success was the campaign finance bill passed in 2003, which is called the McCain-Feingold Act after Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI). In his 2000 presidential campaign, Senator McCain repeatedly tore into big money in politics. The LC sponsorship was essential to the bill's success, helping the sponsors negotiate the grueling process of fending off business lobbyists and also key in amending the bill on its way to passage.

At the outset, it should be noted that many bills pass with bipartisan support of varying degrees, especially on the final vote prior to passage. These include the major appropriation bills for the departments, such as Defense, Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, and the like. More controversial bills also have passed this way, including the periodic giant allocations of taxpayer dollars to the Iraq and Afghan wars. Also in this category of bipartisan support are appropriations for the International Monetary Fund and, recently, for the renewal of the Export-Import Bank, which finances foreign purchases of US exports such as Boeing's aircraft. Bipartisanship tends to jell repeatedly when business interests make clear their demands, backing them up by the usual campaign donations and other lobbying techniques.

Why These Hands Seldom Clasp Victory

Apart from those powerful unifying bonds and moments of coalition, convergent legislation passing simply because it's the right
thing to do is not very likely. One obstacle is that the leadership in the House and Senate tend to lock horns over contentious issues—often historical or ideological ones—that are primed to hold their base and garner election-time advantage. If the legislators are in the midst of fighting over Obamacare, renewals of the Bush tax cuts, Social Security changes, abortion rights, and environmental regulations, they are not in any frame of mind to make each other look good through collaborative support of other bills that may well bring advantages to the public but may also lead to congressional or White House complications or unhappy consequences down the road. This is the case even with relatively straightforward efforts to reassert the constitutional or institutional role of Congress in foreign and military affairs vis-à-vis the White House.

Here's a case in point. In 2011, Democrat Dennis Kucinich and Republican Walter Jones introduced legislation to amend the War Powers Act to strengthen congressional oversight. It was directed at an increasing executive branch overreach in using military force that was a common hallmark of both the Bush and the Obama administrations. As such, the proposed law strove to restore some of the checks and balances of our federal system. The bill received no public hearings, even though its thrust would have received broad support in any private poll of members of Congress.

In a similar move in 2012, Jones and James McGovern, a strong progressive Massachusetts Democrat, teamed up for H.C. Res. 107, declaring it to be the sense of Congress that a president who initiates war without the express authorization of Congress is involved in “high crimes and misdemeanors” within the meaning of Article 2, section 4, of the Constitution.
¹
This resolution is not a minor one for a Congress that needs to be reminded about the Constitution's Article 1, section 8—that the war-declaration authority is reserved exclusively for Congress. The last war Congress declared was in December 1941 against Japan and Germany.
²
There have been numerous undeclared wars of choice by the United States since then.

Both the legislation and the resolution have been completely ignored by the leadership of the two parties who gave strong signals to their flocks to remain silent. Why risk giving the other party any chips? Why pile more issues on busy desks? Why raise and rally public awareness of congressional abdication, which might well lead to citizens calling on legislators to assume more constitutional responsibility for military and foreign policies, practices, and mishaps? Let “mum” be the word.

Further, there are no outside pressure groups on these issues, as there are with the corporate-connected neocons, who have pushed Congress and the White House for military aggressiveness by a unilaterally deciding presidency. Just the opposite is the case. Jones, McGovern, and Kucinich were unable to call on much of an organized outside support structure, which would have the requisite muscle to get things moving on Capitol Hill. Bereft of any news coverage and unable to obtain any mass media access, let alone any commentary whatsoever from the presidential bully pulpit, they could not expect many people back home to mobilize behind their case, of which most were unaware.

Establishing Laws Against Corporate Welfare Where Hands Should Have Joined But Didn't

This stagnant environment blocks even more vibrant causes from acquiring any momentum. In 1998, the time seemed finally ripe to push the legislative envelope and demand some curtailment of the massive bustling bazaar of accounts receivables, government tax breaks, and payouts to businesses, which years earlier I labeled “corporate welfare.” Just about every large company was on the government dole—including foreign firms operating in the United States. After all, there were hundreds of such giveaways. Signs indicated that the potential for such legislation met the preliminary criteria for convergence. Condemned in reports by such influential
right-of-center think tanks as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute as well as by the Progressive Policy Institute, Common Cause, and Public Citizen, “corporate welfare” and, its right-wing name, “crony capitalism” became dirty words. Numerous exposés by CBS's
Sixty Minutes
, ABC's
It's Your Money
, the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, the
Wall Street Journal
,
Time
magazine and the Associated Press year after year began to seep into the political consciousness and even put the dirty words in the vernacular of more and more of the public. Scandals and greed regarding corporate subsidies, giveaways of the public's natural resources and technology transfers, abuse of eminent domain to benefit large companies, and ever larger bailouts angered both conservatives and liberals—for both similar and different reasons.

Conservatives believed it was unfair to taxpayers that crony capitalism distorted free markets, picking winners as industrial policy, rather than as a result of market forces; hurt small business; and corrupted the arm's-length relationship they viewed as proper between business and government. Liberals saw corporate welfare as giving away taxpayer money and the commons on the public lands—minerals, forests—in favor of big oil and coal over renewable and conserving energy technologies; hurting the small farmer; weakening regulatory policies; and generally giving away valuable public assets, such as government research and development findings, for free without any payment or conditions in the public interest. There was also a genuine overlap of concurrence between each side's rationales.

It was clear that some powerful members of Congress, though not at the top leadership level, were using conservative doctrine to attack corporatist positions that favored the myriad corporate welfare programs—so numerous, in fact, there was no comprehensive compilation of them anywhere in the federal government. One of these legislators was the current Ohio governor, Republican John Kasich, then chair of the House Budget Committee and a close
ally of Newt Gingrich in the latter's rise to the Speakership. In 1999, I proposed to Kasich that he hold the first public hearing on corporate welfare in American history—looking at not just one program but going across the whole continuum. I would recommend to him a number of substantial witnesses on both sides of the ideological divide, naming Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Robert McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice as examples. After some weeks, during which he probably was testing the permissible waters—already he had made rare waves in Republican circles by declaring the military budget to be bloated and suitable for cutting—he gave the green light.

The Budget Committee hearing took the better part of the day (June 30, 1999) and should have created a minor sensation. However, the media generally ignored or downplayed it, in part because, while the corporate lobbyists kept an eye on the proceedings, they stayed quiet, holding back on any opposition until they saw signs that an actual piece of legislation might come out of the deliberations from Kasich. Lobbyists have sensitive antennae when it comes to gauging just how committed a committee chair is to pushing his or her hearing toward action. They read Kasich as wanting to display his principled stand as a conservative and going no further. His opening statement, while courteous and receptive, gave as his major concern the unfair competition that corporate welfare, usually wrung from the government by Big Business, inflicts on small business. Kasich also knew that Heritage, Cato, and others were doing the same thing—burnishing their pure marketplace conservative credentials, but not actually pressing for action on Capitol Hill, which would have troubled their wealthy, freeloading funders. The smaller-budgeted Progressive Policy Institute and Common Cause, clearly against these corporate freebies, simply had no resources to give their views any sustained political cutting edge. No candidates, whether incumbents or challengers, had run on a promise to end corporate welfare “as we know it,” as they assuredly did with poverty welfare disbursements.

Even though the LibCons put forth at the Kasich hearing their first-stage priority list of corporate welfare programs for elimination, there was no pickup.

In theory, as a general agenda for LC convergence, direct and indirect taxpayer subsidies to fat-cat corporations, ones that are overpaying their bosses and underpaying their shareholder dividends while often not performing in return for the subsidizers' intents—e.g., synthetic fuels and improved auto engine efficiency—would be hard to surpass. In practice, it didn't seem to matter, even though, from time to time, a Democrat and a Republican would jointly introduce a bill to rid the country of an especially egregious subsidy or giveaway. There was just no traction to rid America of the curse of “aid to dependent corporations,” to borrow a phrase from the social welfare world. It didn't matter that lawmakers told their various publics how much they abstractly believed in limited government, fiscal responsibility, and accountability to the taxpayers, because they then turned around and unfurled a flurry of annual votes backing the corporate freeloaders. A few shameless lawmakers, such as Rep. Michele Bachmann, even had their own businesses that received various federal payouts. Importantly, as happened in relation to the law and the resolution on presidential war powers, no one in Congress, from either party, felt any push, heat, or encouragement from the White House or the media to change this status quo that keeps Washington busier with handing out largesse to corporations than with any other regular engagements. The process of Washington saving Wall Street years later in 2008–2009 reflected this institutionalization of the corporate state or what some call “corporate socialism.” Given how millions of Americans suffered from job losses, home foreclosures, greater consumer debt, and taxpayer debt on their children, how apt was Gore Vidal's expression that America “is a unique society where you have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich.”
³

During a debate with Ronald Reagan in 1977, sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, I elicited from him a clear distaste
for government propping up business. He noted that he kept telling his corporate friends not to have their hands in Washington's trough. He cited as an example of an unwarranted corporate giveaway the Jones Act, which restricted US port-to-port shipping to US-flag ships, thereby keeping shipping rates high. Reagan was known as a rhetorical opponent of business policies that begin and end with taxpayers holding the bag—another way of keeping taxes higher. Yet, on becoming president in 1981, Mr. Reagan continued and amplified corporate welfare, and avoided bringing up the topic in any of his speeches

Corporations Block Bipartisan Hand Clasping

Many other convergences suffer similar fates when liberals and conservatives join together only to find that, though they may be in a numerical majority, they are blocked by commercial interests. In 2003, the FCC voted 3–2 to allow even greater concentration of ownership by Big Media over television, radio, and newspaper properties in any community, in spite of an avalanche of protest by Americans of all persuasions, from the NRA to Common Cause. The battle moved to Congress. In an astonishingly lopsided result, the House voted 400–21, for the first time in its history overturning an FCC decision and handing Big Media a stunning defeat. Yet Big Media recovered and stanched a rising swell in the Senate, whose members were also responding to tens of thousands of emails and other messages from the voters back home. Unfortunately, the conflict was drawn out. Unlike corporations, the people had no staying power, and the controversy faded away. The FCC decision survived.