Thieves fall out

A plea-bargain agreement signed by a key right-wing Republican Washington lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, is expected to lift the lid on the endemic corruption the ruling class uses to dominate the capitalist government.

Abramoff, who was facing 30 years, settled with federal prosecutors for a reduced sentence after pleading guilty to fraud, corruption and tax evasion charges, on the condition that he testify against members of Congress, congressional staffers and others whom he bribed. It is said that he has the goods on up to 60 members of Congress and their staffs. Where the investigation will go remains to be seen.

The most sensational charge against Abramoff is that he and his partner Michael Scanlon bilked Native tribes out of $80 million they paid him to protect their casino operations and then bribed various legislators and an Interior Department official. Abramoff and Scanlon used most of the money for personal schemes of enrichment. E-mails released to the press show how the two used racist insults against their clients, falsified information and outrageously padded bills.

Because they were defrauding the Native tribes, they fell into the hands of right-wing militarist John McCain, who is head of the Indian Affairs Committee of the Senate. McCain also is an arch-enemy of George W. Bush and has made ending corruption and campaign finance reform a cause célèbre of his political career, resulting in the passage of the McCain-Feingold bill outlawing soft money in political campaigns.

The pressure of McCain, who called open hearings on the scandal, was reinforced by the general pressure of the ruling class to break this scheme open.

Abramoff is said to have given millions of dollars to Tom DeLay, the former Republican House leader, now indicted for money laundering in a Texas scheme involving discriminatory congressional redistricting. Abramoff’s partner, Scanlon, is a former DeLay aide. He is accused of bribing Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) with campaign contributions, free meals and a trip to an exclusive golf course in Scotland in order to get legislation passed for his clients.

Abramoff bribed Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) to get a $3 million grant for one of his clients. Burns was the number-one recipient of cash contributions from Abramoff’s clients. He paid Ralph Reed, former head of the Conservative Chris tian Coalition and Bush’s southern election campaign coordinator, $4.2 million to block construction of a casino that would have competed with one owned by his clients. Grover Norquist, a right-wing outside adviser to the White House and a key architect of Republican lobbying strategy, arranged for White House meetings for Abramoff’s clients after they agreed to donate money to Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist’s organization.

Abramoff associate David Safavian, who was in charge of the $300 billion budget of the Office of Management and Budget, was also arrested for covering up his collusion with Abramoff in a land deal. Abramoff also paid the wife of DeLay aide Tom Rudy $50,000 to help his clients.

Abramoff did not leave the Democrats out.

He paid $67,000 to Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to help his clients. And House minority leader Harry Reid received payments of $60,000 and $10,000 from Abramoff to write a letter on behalf of his clients.

In addition, Abramoff is part of a criminal investigation in connection with a fraudulent casino cruise ship deal and a related gangland-style murder in Miami.

This is only what has been revealed so far.

Why ruling class cares

What has shocked the establishment is not that there is corruption, but that it has gotten out of hand. It is worrying sections of the ruling class and is so corrosive that it is damaging the prevailing political system. Abramoff may be the most dramatic symptom of the present malady, but the primary targets of the campaign are the higher-ups who were the architects of the present lobbying system in Washington—the creators of what is known as the K Street Project.

The K Street Project was initiated by DeLay and Norquist in 1995 after the Republicans got control of the House and the Senate in the mid-year elections. The aim was to get right-wing Republicans to take complete control of the vast lobbying apparatus that is housed on K Street in Washington, near the Capitol.

According to Nicholas Confessore, writing in the July/August 2003 issue of the Washington Monthly, Tom DeLay “famously compiled a list of the 400 largest PACs, along with the amounts and percentages of money they had recently given to each party. Lobbyists were invited into DeLay’s office and shown their place in the ‘friendly’ or ‘unfriendly’ columns. (‘If you want to play in our revolution,’ DeLay told the Washington Post, ‘you have to live by our rules.’)” The rules were to oust Democrats from their lobbying firms and trade associations.

A year later, according to Confessore, Haley Barbour, who was chair of the Repub lican National Committee, “organized a meeting of the House leadership and business executives. ‘They assembled several large company CEOs and made it clear to them that they were expected to purge their Washington offices of Demo crats and replace them with Republicans,’ says a veteran steel lobbyist. The Repub licans also demanded more campaign money and help for the upcoming election. The meeting descended into a shouting match, and the CEOs, most of them Republicans, stormed out.”

In 2000, when Bush was elected and the Republicans got control of Congress, Norquist accelerated the K Street Project. Working outside the government, he compiled a database “intended to track party affiliation, Hill experience, and political giving of every lobbyist in town.” (Washington Monthly)

According to Confessore, every Tues day morning, right-wing Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) convenes a meeting “in the privacy of a Capitol Hill conference room for a handpicked group of two dozen or so Republican lobbyists. Occa sionally one or two other senators or a representative from the White House will attend.

“The chief purpose of these gatherings is to discuss jobs—specifically the top one or two positions at the biggest and most important industry trade associations and corporate offices centered around Wash ington’s K Street.… In the past these people were about as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, a practice that ensured K Street firms would have clout no matter which party was in power.”

Confessore says that “the GOP is building its machine outside the government, among Washington’s thousands of trade associations and corporate offices, their tens of thousand of employees, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in political money at their disposal.”

The result: “The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer, are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the GOP.”

But it is not just Republicans who are being placed in strategic positions—it is right-wing Republicans. An article in Workers World newspaper of Oct. 9, 2005, quoted Elizabeth Drew’s piece in the June 23 issue of the New York Review of Books entitled “Selling Washington.”

Drew said that, “When I suggested to Grover Norquist, the influential right-wing leader and leading enforcer of the K Street Project outside Congress, that numerous Democrats on K Street were not particularly ideological and were happy to serve corporate interests, he replied, ‘We don’t want non-ideological people on K Street, we want conservative activist Republicans on K Street.’”

Drew gave a sense of how things have gotten out of hand. “There are no restraints now: business groups and lobbyists are going crazy—they’re in every room on Capitol Hill writing legislation. You can’t move without giving money.”

And this is increasingly costly to the corporate bosses. According to a June 22, 2005, dispatch in the Washington Post, the number of lobbyists in Washington had doubled since 2000 to more than 34,750 while the amount that they charged had increased by as much as 100 percent. Lobbying firms cannot hire fast enough. Starting salaries have risen to $300,000 a year for well-connected people. “Half of all lawmakers who return to the private sector when they leave Congress” become corporate lobbyists, said the article.

Fees that used to run from $10,000 to $15,000 a month are now $25,000 to $40,000 a month. This is something that the bosses understand well. The cost of doing business in Washington is skyrocketing and the terms of doing business are being dictated to them by politicians.

When the corporations resist the instructions from DeLay and Norquist, they suffer or are pressured. The insurance industry, the mutual fund industry, the electronics industry, the motion picture industry and others who resisted going along with Bush-promoted legislation that was contrary to their interests were penalized or threatened.

Drew quoted a Business Week article that told how the Business Roundtable was summoned to a meeting with a special assistant to the president, various cabinet members and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove. The Business Roundtable is made up of the CEOs of the top 160 corporations in the U.S.—a heavy concentration of powerful capitalists.

“They anticipated a friendly give-and-take about economic legislation, but instead they were told to get behind the president’s plan to privatize Social Security. As a result, these organizations have spent millions of dollars promoting Bush’s new program.… Business groups have been notably reticent about criticizing administration policies—even ones they deeply dislike.… An adviser to business groups says, ’They’re scared of payback, of not getting their own agenda through.’”

Forgetting who’s the master

Workers World wrote in its Oct. 9, 2005, article entitled “Behind Wash ington’s political scandals”:

“Bush and the Republican right wing are giving the corporations huge breaks and benefits to serve their profit interests. At the same time, they are making heavy-handed demands for money and political obedience. This is something that the bourgeoisie does not take kindly to—especially from the politicians who are supposed to be their servants.

“If the bosses want a Democrat on their payroll, for reasons of influence, they don’t want to be told whom to hire—not by their own servants, the very politicians they have put in office. The bosses will give money in bribes to get what they want, but when those bribes take on a flavor of extortion, then it’s a different story.

“Furthermore, the bosses have gone to great lengths to create and nurture the two-party system of capitalist politics. It gives them more options, depending on economic and social conditions. They certainly do not want to become excessively dependent on one current or grouping in any party.

“The Democrats are now looking at this discontent in the establishment and are licking their lips, hoping that they can get back into a majority in 2006 and have a shot at the presidency in 2008. In other words, they can get their lobbyists back on K Street. The ruling class can go through them to get its legislation and its deals.

“The real conspiracy of both parties is that carried out against the interests of the working class and the oppressed, who should oppose the corrupt right-wing reactionaries without running into the arms of the Democrats. The latter are just more slick in the way they support capitalist exploitation.

“The Democrats have to fight the Republicans on grounds of corruption because they have no political program to help the masses. They are for the occupation in Iraq: ‘Stay the course’ is their motto. They voted for the right-wing, racist, anti-abortion, anti-worker, pro-big business John Roberts for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. They have done nothing to help the victims of Katrina and Rita. They just play politics and criticize.”

Settling for a more subtle and restrained form of corruption and corporate influence under the Democrats will not serve the interests of the working class and the oppressed. Only an independent political and mass organization for struggle can chart a way out of the present crisis.