The screwed-up US Senate

Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution’s broader dysfunction.

George Packer's essay in the New Yorker is quite a depressing read on how the Senate works.  Just awful.  Here is Packer describing a typical senator's modus operandi:

Daschle sketched a portrait of the contemporary senator who is too busy to think: “Sometimes, you’re dialling for dollars, you get the call, you’ve got to get over to vote, you’ve got fifteen minutes. You don’t have a clue what’s on the floor, your staff is whispering in your ears, you’re running onto the floor, then you check with your leader—you double check—but, just to make triple sure, there’s a little sheet of paper on the clerk’s table: The leader recommends an aye vote, or a no vote. So you’ve got all these checks just to make sure you don’t screw up, but even then you screw up sometimes. But, if you’re ever pressed, ‘Why did you vote that way?’—you just walk out thinking, Oh, my God, I hope nobody asks, because I don’t have a clue.”

Whether it is in India or here in America, it is amazing how much life goes on in spite of politics and politicians. Do we have to wonder anymore why the energy bill is stalled, or nothing ever gets accomplished? 

The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.

Just awful!

Wall Street, White House, and Congress: a horrible alliance

Two different columns, in two different publications, in two different countries, but the bottom line is the same: the nexus between Wall Street's big banks and the political establishment in DC is not healthy for democracy.

First, here is Robert Reich, writing in the Financial Times.  (The guy is on a roll--only a few days ago he had a column in the WSJ!!!)

Tight connections between Washington and Wall Street are nothing new, of course, especially when it comes to Goldman. Hank Paulson ran the bank before becoming George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary. Robert Rubin followed the same trajectory under Bill Clinton, then returned to Wall Street to head Citigroup’s executive committee. Dick Gephardt, the former Democratic House leader, lobbies for Goldman. Some 250 former members of Congress are now lobbying on behalf of the financial industry. President Barack Obama himself received nearly $15m from Wall Street during his 2008 campaign, of which almost $1m came from Goldman employees and their families.
Politicians cannot continue to have it both ways. The close nexus between Washington and Wall Street is eroding trust in government.

And then, Frank Rich in the NY Times:

The truth is that both parties are too often in hock to the financial sector, and both parties bear responsibility for the meltdown. In response to a question from Jake Tapper of ABC News last weekend, Bill Clinton was right to say that he and two of his Treasury secretaries, Rubin and Lawrence Summers, “were wrong” to leave derivatives unregulated.

Bet Against The American Dream from Planet Money on Vimeo.

Cartoon of the day

Bootleggers, baptists, and Indian lobbying

Ever since I came across the metaphor of bootleggers and baptists (was that when I was in graduate school, I wonder!), I have been fascinated with how that shows up in so many political decisions. First, what is that metaphor? As summarized in wikipedia:

The bootleggers and the Baptists both have an incentive to limit the consumption of alcohol, the former with the economic reason and the latter with the ethical justification that people will support, though by their very nature the two groups wouldn't get along. The politician effectively acts as the go-between, taking the bootlegger's campaign contributions and citing the Baptist's morals in speeches.

Well, read for yourself the following excerpt from a news item related to lobbying by Indian companies:

As per the disclosure reports filed by lobbyist firms with the Senate and the House of Representatives, just four Indian entities — RIL, Nasscom, Sun Pharma and Orchid Chemicals — have together paid close to $2,75,000 (about Rs. 1.4 crore) during the first three months of 2009. Out of this, RIL has paid $1,90,000 to Barbour Griffith & Rogers (BGR) Holding, a high-profile lobbyist group that has many Fortune 500 firms and foreign governments as its clients, for providing “strategic counsel on issues related to trade.”

Incidentally, the U.S. Congress and the House of Representatives are currently considering new legislation to penalise, including a ban from doing business in the U.S., companies that supply petroleum products to Iran. RIL is on the hit-list.

I simply love the usage of "incidentally" in this news item :-)

As Shakespeare's Mark Antony said:

For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men

Are Politicians Failing Our Lobbyists?

We can't blame the politicians. The lobbyists have to stand up for themselves, and they need to find a different politician who will do what they want. Or, should lobbyists cut out the middleman, and start giving the money directly to voters? Or, go the extra step and put corporations directly in office?
Yes, it is an old, but absolutely relevant, satire from none other than The Onion :-)


In The Know: Are Politicians Failing Our Lobbyists?