WASHINGTON – If this country’s truth-in-advertising laws weren’t a cruel joke, half of this city’s lobbyists and most of Congress would be doing time.
The same principles Madison Avenue uses to convince you that your armpits stink, your breath smells and your car is a lemon are now common practice among Capitol Hill shills who want to sell you phone and electricity deregulation while blocking a tobacco settlement and any meaningful health reform.
Americans in general and Beltway pundits in particular have become accustomed to tossing their hands in the air and chuckling ruefully, ‘That Keystone Kongress, they’ve done it again,’ as though our elected representatives can’t protect constituents from ripoffs. Taxpayers shelled out between one-third and one-half a trillion dollars over that dumb Congress’s most famous “goof,” the 1980s savings and loan scandal. A few white-collar criminals did poster-boy penance in country-club prisons for that goof. But the criminals who made that scandal possible-our elected representatives-simply pushed their way through the revolving door into cushy private sector jobs. And you can bet their successors today won’t serve an hour for foisting the scams currently posing as reforms in Washington today.
Keeping in mind the rules of Madison Avenue-sell the sizzle, not the steak; make the customer pay; bait and switch; never give a sucker an even break-may help some voters avoid the mistakes others have made:
The 1996 telecommunications reform was a classic example of selling the sizzle and not the steak. Competition, lower prices and new products were the lobbyists’ promise (disseminated with nary a skeptical peep from the unblinking big business media). Mega-mergers between Bell Atlantic and NYNEX, Ameritech and Southwestern Bell; 35-cent payphones; and “slamming and “cramming” of unwitting long-distance customers have been the result. All unintended consequences of well-meaning if misdirected legislative efforts, we’re assured by TV talking heads.
When conservatives realized voters wouldn’t let them strangle the welfare state in the 1980s, they decided to pull it off life support in the 1990s. Abetted by the best Democrat president the GOP has ever had, right-wingers pitched life-time limits on most welfare payments combined with job training and education programs to break the cycle of welfare dependency. Then, pleading poverty, Congress reneged on-the-job training and education spending necessary to make real reform work. The results of this bait and switch should become painfully obvious on inner-city streets early in the next recession.
Perhaps the most galling recent example of lobbying legerdemain is the one going on right before our eyes with the federal tobacco settlement. As soon as states starting winning from cigarette companies some of the billions Medicaid has spent treating nicotine addicts, in barges Congress, ostensibly to negotiate a comprehensive deal. But where states wanted Big Tobacco to pay from its profits for medical expenses, the Feds now want to make the customer pay in the form of higher taxes, while limiting their ability to sue for damages in the future. Tobacco companies still will likely take a hit, but not too hard from a Congress that pulls its punches when the target is a big campaign contributor.
You’re supposed to be frustrated by the incompetence of a Congress which writes legislation to protect consumers that inadvertently abets speculators and profiteers. You’re supposed to hold blameless the lawyers and the lobbyists who, after all, are just zealously defending their clients’ best interests in a Byzantine system of laws and regulations not of their making. You’re supposed to go to the polls in November to throw out the bums who misrepresent your concerns, and replace them with fresh-faced honest Democrats and Republicans who will clean up that mess on Capitol Hill. You suckers.
William Hoffman welcomes your comments at [email protected].
