Democrats Kiss Up to K Street

By David Sirota, In These Times. Posted July 18, 2007.

In 1903, journalist William Riordan published a series of interviews with George Washington Plunkitt, who was probably the most famous leader of New York's Tammany Hall (other than Boss Tweed himself). During a discussion of Lincoln Steffens' then-new book The Shame of the Cities, Plunkitt told Riordan that Steffens "can't see no difference between honest graft and dishonest graft and consequent, he gets things all mixed up."

The same thing could be said for our Congress.

"Honest graft," said Plunkitt, is when "the politician looks after his own interests, the organization's interests and the people's interests all at the same time."

Dishonest graft, by contrast, is engaged in by "looters" who "go in for themselves alone without considering their organization or the people." Think Tom DeLay and the Abramoff scandal. As the Associated Press reported last year, the Abramoff-DeLay relationship made DeLay "a king of campaign fundraising," allowing him "to visit cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants --all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political money empire." In the process, he helped pass energy legislation that gave away taxpayer money to energy companies and tax legislation that gave away taxpayer money to millionaires --all while creating a scandal that eventually helped to break his party's hold on Congress.

But in a certain sense, Republican corruption is the purest form of honest graft. The Republican Party does not pretend to be anything other than the party of Big Money. Take the famous K Street Project: designed by Republican congressmen to use the promise of access --and the threat of no access --to force corporate lobbying organizations in Washington to fire Democrats and hire Republicans, so that those new Republican lobbyists could siphon as much corporate campaign contributions as possible to Republican political candidates.

Had this operation performed its work in secret, one might be able to say Republicans at least tried to pretend they were something they were not. But the K Street Project actually had its own public website, bragging to the world about its pay-to-play scheme.

This is "honest" graft -- that is, being open and honest about what the American Heritage Dictionary defines as the "unscrupulous use of one's position to derive profit or advantages." The Republican Congress didn't make any serious effort to pretend to be anything else. And in holding onto Congress for 12 years, they made the same successful calculation Plunkitt did: They believed that honest graft doesn't "hurt Tammany with the people" if the people perceive it to be out in the open, and merely a small, necessary and innocuous cost of the government doing business.

Clearly, this formula failed in 2006 when, after six years of one-party control of Congress and the White House, the American public started to see how big, wasteful and destructive Republican corruption really was.

Democrats rode their populist, anti-corruption platform to victory in 2006. But as we are now beginning to see, what we may have with the Democrats is merely a transfer from honest graft to dishonest graft --that is, corrupt behavior that pretends to be done in the people's name and that flies in the face of what the people were promised.

On May 10, a handful of Democratic congressional leaders held a press conference to trumpet a so-called "deal" with the Bush administration to push forward a package of lobbyist-written trade deals -- the very same kinds of trade deals 100 of their candidates in 2006 said they would work to stop if elected to Congress. Though Democrats said they had secured basic labor and environmental protections in these deals, Thomas J. Donohue, the Bush-connected head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told reporters that he had been given "assurances that the labor provisions [in the deal] cannot be read to require compliance."

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) provides a good example of dishonest graft. In 1993, Emanuel was the Clinton administration aide charged with ramming NAFTA through Congress "over the dead bodies" of labor and environmental groups, as American Express's CEO cheered at the time. Emanuel orchestrated weekly meetings with K Street lobbyists to strategize about how to pressure Democratic lawmakers. Emanuel went on to cash in as an investment banker, raking in roughly $16 million over a two-year period. From his Wall Street perch in 2000, he published a scathing Wall Street Journal op-ed demanding Congress pass the China free trade deal --another K Street-backed goodie that has helped keep American wages stagnating in the face of skyrocketing corporate profits, and is now projected to destroy at least 1 million American jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

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David Sirota is the author of Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back (Crown, 2006).

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