*Something stinks in America* - U.K. Guardian.

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" Zepp " <zepp

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 07:43:24 -0700

[Zepps_News] Something stinks in America

 

 

 

 

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1582977,00.html

 

*Something stinks in America*

 

As a leading Republican prepares to face corruption charges, the fallout

will be felt as far afield as Westminster

 

*Will Hutton

Sunday October 2, 2005

The Observer <http://www.observer.co.uk>*

 

The most important political event last week for Britain did not take

place at the Labour party conference in Brighton, but in Travis County,

Texas. District Attorney Ronnie Earle charged the second most powerful

man in the United States, Tom DeLay, with criminal conspiracy. DeLay

resigned as the majority leader of the Republicans in the House of

Representatives while he fights the case, a stunning political setback.

 

American conservatism that has shaped American and British politics for

20 years has been holed below the waterline. It will take a lot more to

sink it, but DeLay's indictment is symptomatic of a conservative

over-reach and endemic corruption that will trigger, at the very least,

a retreat and maybe even more. One-Nation Tories and honest-to-God

Labour politicians can take some succour; the right-wing wind that has

blown across the Atlantic for nearly a generation is about to ease.

Hypocrisies have been exposed. The discourse in British politics is set

to change.

 

The story begins in the murky world of campaign finance and the grey

area of quasi-corruption, kickbacks and personal favours that now define

the American political system. American politicians need ever more cash

to fight their political campaigns and gerrymander their constituencies,

so creating the political truth that incumbents rarely lose. US

corporations are the consistent suppliers of the necessary dollars and

Republican politicians increasingly are the principal beneficiaries.

Complicated rules exist to try to ensure the relationship between

companies and politicians is as much at arm's length as possible; the

charge against DeLay is that he drove a coach and horses through the

rules.

 

If DeLay were another Republican politician or even a typical majority

leader of the House, the political world could shrug its shoulders.

Somebody got caught, but little will change. But DeLay is very

different. He is the Republican paymaster, one of the authors of the K

Street Project and the driving force behind a vicious, organised

demonisation and attempted marginalisation of Democrats that for sheer,

unabashed political animus is unlike anything else witnessed in an

advanced democracy. Politicians fight their political foes by fair means

or foul, but trying to exterminate them is new territory.

 

The K Street Project is little known outside the Washington beltway and

its effectiveness as a political stratagem is only possible because of

the unique importance of campaign finance to American politics. DeLay,

together with Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and some conservative

activists, notably the ubiquitous Grover Norquist who runs the

anti-state, anti-tax lobby group 'Americans for Tax Reform', conceived

the notion 10 years ago that they should use the Republican majority in

the House as a lever to ensure that the lobbyists, law firms and trade

associations that inhabit Washington's K Street, heart of the industry,

should only employ Republicans or sympathisers. To be a Democrat was to

bear the mark of Cain; K Street was to be a Democrat-free zone.

 

This, if it could be pulled off, would have multiple pay-backs.

Special-interest groups and companies have always greased the palms of

American law-makers and because of lack of party discipline, they have

had to grease Democrat and Republican palms alike to get the legislation

they wanted. DeLay's ambition was to construct such a disciplined

Republican party that lobbyists would not need Democrats, and so create

an inside track in which the only greased palms from legislators to

lobbyists would be Republican.

 

Lobbyists, law firms and trade associations should be told not to employ

Democrats, so progressively excluding them from access to the lucrative

channels of campaign finance. Democrats would become both poorer and

politically diminished at a stroke and the Republicans would become

richer and politically hegemonic.

 

It has worked. The most influential Washington lobbyist is Barbour,

Griffiths and Rogers; it employs not a single Democrat. Last year, in a

classic operation, House Republicans let the Motion Picture Association

of America (the film industry lobby group) know that appointing a

Democrat, Dan Glickman, as its head would mean $1.5 billion of tax

relief for the film industry was now in peril. Glickman staffed up the

MPAA with Republicans, but the threat remains. In 2003, the Republican

National Committee could claim that 33 of the top 36 top-level K Street

positions were in Republican hands. Today, it's even closer to a clean

sweep.

 

Corporations get their rewards. The oil and gas industry now gives 80

per cent of its campaign cash to Republicans (20 years ago, the split

was roughly 50-50), and influence on this year's energy bill was a

classic sting. American petrol can now contain a suspected carcinogen;

operators of US natural-gas wells can contaminate water aquifers to

improve the yields from the wells; the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

is open to oil exploration - concessions all created by DeLay's inside

track. And to provide ideological juice, there's a bevy of think-tanks,

paid for from the same web of contributions, cranking out the

justification that the 'state' and 'regulation' are everywhere and

always wrong.

 

But central to the operation is DeLay's mastery of the party in the

House. To get two more Republican votes in his pocket, he organised a

gerrymander in Texas to create two more seats in the 2004 election and

gave the Republican campaign there some extra campaign money. The

trouble was, alleges the DA, the cash from Washington originally came

from Texan companies, which are forbidden directly to back individual

candidates and that DeLay devised the illegal scheme.

 

DeLay vigorously insists he's the victim of a partisan stitch-up, surely

a case of the biter bit? Yet the scope for misdirection of political

funds is huge. Michael Scanlon, DeLay's director of communications for

six years, is under criminal investigation together with partner Jack

Abramoff for the way they used $66 million, paid by 11 casino-owning

native American tribes over three years into their K Street operation,

and which seems to have financed, among other extraordinary

expenditures, a DeLay golf trip to Scotland. Nobody checks too much on

how their money is deployed as long as it brings results - access, tax

breaks and legislative concessions. DeLay, Scanlon and Abramoff belong

to the same culture.

 

In Congress, moderate Republicans don't want guilt by association and

companies value their reputation. The K Street Project stinks, along

with all those associated with it. So far, the US media have been

supine. DeLay's tentacles, and those of Karl Rove, Bush's top political

adviser, have cowed media owners into the same compliance; if they want

favours, best advance the Republican cause like Murdoch's Fox News.

American newsrooms are fearful places.

 

But DeLay's indictment breaks back the dam. US politics moves in cycles.

Once it was Republicans who were going to clean up corrupt Democrat

Washington; now Democrats can champion the same cause. Nor can the media

afford to be on the side of the Old Corruption; it's bad for business.

The wheel is turning, an important moment both sides of the Atlantic.

 

 

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