It is during periods of extreme national turmoil and stress that the fractures and distortions appear in the frame work of Government. The current era is such a time. Dramatic proposals are currently being debated in our American Congress, the outcome of which will shape the destiny of America for decades in the future. Roll up your sleeves and get more below.
The American public has indicated that they want the Public Option included in the Health Care bill by some 76% in recent polling. However, the entire Health Care industry stands in solid opposition to the Public Option provision and is spending upwards of $1.4 million a day to influence defeat of the Public Option provision. Many members of the House and Senate were recipients of huge sums of money from the Health Care lobby long before the Health Care Reform debate started and are not included in the current $1.4 million per day lobbyists are currently spending. (There are over 31 members of Congress who have received money from the Health Care industry ranging from $7,504.867 to $788,650.) However, the current massive lobby effort is unprecedented in the history of American lobbying, and represents a direct override of the wishes of the overwhelming majority of American people. This is an unabashed smack in the face of the American public by the apostles of corporation greed. There is a strange dichotomy in the behavior of Congress in this situation. First it gave almost two trillion dollars of the people’s money to bailout of Wall Street investment houses. Meanwhile the same bailed out investment houses fund the Health Care Corporations, who in turn are currently spending $1.4 million per day through their respective lobby firms to persuade Congress to write legislation that will disenfranchise American citizens from their right to access a Public Option for their health care.
It is important here to understand the relationship between Wall Street, Corporate America and the Congressional Lobby industry. It is not an understatement to say that Wall Street is the main temple of American greed. Wall Street analysts and investment bankers do not care about the actual functioning of American business beyond a casual look at the “fundamentals” of the business. The majority of their time is spent attempting to design a foolproof predictive system that will determine how many shares of a given equity will be bought and sold and what the price per share will be for either transaction. The American business’s relevance to the Wall Street industry has no sociological implications whatsoever. The standard corporate remedy for any temporary business shortcomings (regardless of the cause) of laying off thousands of workers is always welcomed by Wall Street because preservation of corporate capitol is of ultimate importance to the Investment Houses.
All corporations hosted by Wall Street Investment Houses are continuously under the Wall Street analysis’s whip to improve their “bottom line” or cash profits. There is never any question of ethics when it comes to improving the bottom line, anything goes. There was no shock or outcry several years ago when a fortune 500 company bought out the entire holdings of a woman who had built an empire of pornographic magazines and films for some 50+ million dollars. Wall Street was happy, as it would greatly improve the corporate bottom line. The long and the short of Wall Street is that this industry is like a hammer. It is only designed to do three things, invest money, make a profit, and pressure companies to create that profit. As a hammer is designed to apply sudden force to whatever it strikes, Wall Street is likewise designed to constantly build profits without any semblance of integrity. To believe otherwise is to romance a snake.
If the nation is to survive and prosper in the 21st century, American business must wean itself off of public investment as it currently exists and return to private funding exclusively. It is only in this business stature can businesses plan and manage their destiny. I have personally witnessed many corporations that were forced to conceal the actual cost and budgets for their in-house Research and Development for the Wall Street analysts for fear of huge stock losses if the size of their R&D budget became known. So they used propriety as the reason for the extraordinary amount of secrecy surrounding any new product development, imposing threats of termination on any employee leaking company information about the new product.
To return to the question of health care, obviously the main product of this industry is servicing member’s health needs. This industry like all other corporations funded by the Wall Street Investment houses is constantly under pressure to improve their “bottom line” profits. Under these conditions greater profits can only be derived by either of two ways, reducing the cost of patient care or increasing the cost of patient care. The Health Care Industry has taken advantage of both private and Government health insurance program to fix costs to keep Wall Street happy with their bottom line from year to year. However, now the Government is proposing the Public Option, a plan that would be administered by the Government! Yikes!! Corporate Health Care has been screeching for years because the Government is so inefficient and prone to waste, it must be kept out of the health care business. However, now that it looks like the Government might actually get into the health care business, these same private Health Insurers are finding that they cannot compete with the Government’s 3.5% inefficiency rating (as currently in Medicare).
Why can’t private Health Insurers compete? Because their profit “bottom line” has been inflated to meet the demands of Wall Street. Hence they are pulling out all the lobbying stops to derail the Public Option in congress. People, for these corporations it is a time of gut wrenching desperation. These folks are fighting to survive.
Hopefully with this brief explanation of the relationships between Wall Street, Corporate America and Congress, we can move on to the political specifics and the immediate ramifications of this unholy alliance on the future of America and the American voter. At this point a consideration of the Senate side of Congress is in order.
The founding fathers were in great admiration of the British form of Government with its two Houses, the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The creation of the House of Representative was a direct copy of the English House of Commons. However, since America was being founded as a refuge for all men from the tyranny of rule by Royalty, the founding fathers had to find a different name for the governmental body functioning like the House of Lords. So they looked to the Roman Empire and chose to name this alternate body, the Senate. Unfortunately they winked at the recorded history that the Roman Senate was actually composed of Roman aristocracy, not plebeians.
The 17th Constitutional Amendment passed in 1913 directed that Congressional Senators would be elected by popular vote in each State. Here-to-fore Congressional Senators were appointed by each States legislatures. Congress felt that this change would make Senator’s more sensitive to the wishes of the American public, while providing greater insulation in the Federal Government from local and regional State politics. However, this essentially created a political vacuum which Lobbyists quickly moved to fill. Over the decades the political influence over the Senate has grow into a massive force, currently dwarfing the wishes and needs of the respective Senator’s constituents. Make no mistake; lobbyists have been a part of the American Government since its inception. A brief history of American Congressional lobbying follows below.
The following excerpt was taken from an address to the United States Senate by Senator Robert Bird on September 28, 1987. In this particular address Senator Bird traces the history of Lobbying of the American Congress.
“Lobbyists have been at work from the earliest days of the Congress. William Hull was hired by the Virginia veterans of the Continental army to lobby for additional compensation for their war services. In 1792, Hull wrote to other veterans’ groups, recommending that they have their “agent or agents” cooperate with him during the next session to pass a compensation bill. In 1795, a Philadelphia newspaper described the way lobbyists waited outside Congress Hall to “give a hint to a Member, teaze or advise as may best suit.”
As early as the closing years of the eighteenth century, there were widespread suspicions that large, well-financed interests were receiving special attention from the government. During the first half century of our Republic, the most distrusted and despised special interest was the Bank of the United States, a private bank chartered by the federal government. Critics of the bank pointed out that a number of sitting senators served as its directors, a clear case of conflict of interest. James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1791, “Of all the shameful circumstances of this business, it is among the greatest to see the members of the Legislature [Congress] who were most active in pushing this Job, openly grasping its emoluments.” On December 21, 1833, Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts wrote from Washington to the bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle: “Since I arrived here, I have had an application to be concerned, professionally, against the Bank, which I have declined, of course, although I believe my retainer has not been renewed, or refreshed, as usual. If it be wished that my relation to the bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainer.” That is stating it plainly, isn’t it?
The perception of impropriety that the bank fostered was a contributing factor to President Andrew Jackson’s decision to remove government funds and to veto attempts to extend its charter.”
Currently, the there are three super powerful lobby groups on K Street in Washington DC. These are the Health Care Industry lobby, the gun lobby, and the Pharmaceutical Industry. There are many other lobby groups representing hundreds of different special interest groups, but none come close to the power and influence of the big three above. In essence these three groups constitute a “shadow” government as often they not only influence legislation, but they often write draft legislation for their Congressional associates. This is obviously something that the founding fathers never for a moment intended or even visualized when they wrote the Constitution. From the earliest days of the American Government, Congressional personnel have publicly cursed and condemned the presence and actions of these “pernicious lobbyists” in their presence, but no serious effort was ever taken to remove them. All Government officials grudgingly accepted the “right of the people to petition” their representatives. So it is that this transmogrification has become a challenger to the workings of the legislative branch of the Government such that it imperils the sanctity and relevance of the American Constitution itself.
The idea has been for centuries that lobbyists are only narrowly concerned about the interests of the people who employ them. But in a fast moving global environment, these interests are becoming more diverse, international, and complex, such as impinging on Government policy itself. Lobbyists would have long taken over the U.S. Military, but they are held at a distance by the enormous power of the impregnable Pentagon which acts as a filter in both directions, i.e., employing lobbyists and receiving petitions from lobbyists.
All of the current problems plaguing America are traceable to legislative lobbyists. Lobbyists work constantly to control the legislative interaction between the Democrats and the Republicans. In this effort the lobbyists define when bipartisanship will be observed and when it will be rejected in the House and in the Senate. Lobbyists are extremely effective on the committee level, in many instances staging and documenting congressional hearings. Many Congress people come to Washington with the resolution to avoid lobbyists at all costs. However, they soon find as a freshman that their staff resources are often either shared or limited. They grudgingly learn that if they expect to have any success they must engage with lobbyists.
In this regard CONGRESS ITSELF must clean up its act in order to save America from lobbyist government. The solution is not complex. Simply provide the funding necessary to provide adequate staffing to provide for the legislative needs of all Congress people. This includes live and video tutorials as how to perform the process of conceptualizing, composing and writing legislation for the United States of America. Information must be provided for all issues the good, the bad, and the ones with warts. The “old boy” networking structures must be eliminated by encouragement of a sincere love for all Americans. Special closed seminars must be made available to Congress to deal with really tough questions ranging from ethics to ethical legislative conduct to influence administration, proper and otherwise. These are minor changes as compared to the possible national social train wreck that powerful legislative lobbying can create. The 21st century awaits America, and you the voter needs to take this situation seriously and get busy.