Reform?

Ethics Code for Lobbyists

Abramoff

After Abramoff came reforms (Holyoke 274-275) with loopholes, as National Journal reports:

The 2007 rules pre­vent a lob­by­ist for a cor­por­ate cli­ent from plan­ning or pay­ing for a law­maker’s trip. But the same rules al­low such a trip if it’s paid for by a for­eign gov­ern­ment. So while it does re­main il­leg­al for, say, a Google lob­by­ist to plan and ac­com­pany a law­maker on a free trip abroad, if that same lob­by­ist does so on be­half of Tur­key, it’s per­fectly leg­al. And if that lob­by­ist hap­pens to have both cor­por­ate and for­eign-gov­ern­ment cli­ents (as most do), they can still go abroad so long as it’s a coun­try and not a com­pany foot­ing the bill.

And that’s only one of the loop­holes the in­flu­ence in­dustry has ex­ploited to help law­makers score free travel. Today, a wide net­work of non­profits — many with a clear agenda and some with ex­cru­ci­at­ingly tight ties to Wash­ing­ton’s biggest lob­by­ing op­er­a­tions — are put­ting to­geth­er in­ter­na­tion­al con­gres­sion­al ex­cur­sions. Some of these pa­per non­profits have no staff or space of their own; they simply share with a sis­ter or­gan­iz­a­tion that lob­bies. Yet eth­ics of­fi­cials in Con­gress have deemed them to be in­de­pend­ent enough. In one in­stance, a lob­by­ist lit­er­ally re­gistered a new non­profit — in his own of­fice — that went on to pay for con­gres­sion­al travel abroad.

Big cor­por­a­tions bank­roll some non­profits, whose trips, in turn, can fea­ture stops at the busi­nesses of their cor­por­ate fun­ders. As a bo­nus, the grow­ing use of 501(c)(3) non­profits, which oc­cupy the same char­it­able rung of the tax code as soup kit­chens and the Amer­ic­an Red Cross, means that the wealthy and cor­por­ate donors un­der­writ­ing con­gres­sion­al travel can do so in secret and get a tax write-off along the way.

Revolving door loopholes

Transparency loopholes

Reform:  a low-priority issue for the public

Pensions and California

The Richest Counties in the US, with Median Household Income Estimate for 2013

• Loudoun County, VA $117,680
• Falls Church city, VA $117,452
• Los Alamos County, NM $110,930
• Fairfax County, VA $110,658
• Howard County, MD $108,503
• Hunterdon County, NJ $107,203
• Douglas County, CO $105,192
• Arlington County, VA $101,533
• Morris County, NJ $99,950
• Montgomery County, MD $97,873

The Snake Lobby Uses Tactics Similar to The Gun Lobby

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/12/the_snake_lobby_defends_dangerous_invasive_reptile_species.html

"Like the gun lobby, which the reptile industry resembles in its rhetoric, the snake dealers quickly learned to play the Washington game."

Since its founding in 2006, The United States Association of Reptile Keepers (USARK) defeated anti-reptile legislation in more two-dozen states. USARK claims that federal bans on snakes imposes national rules on a regional problem and largely depends on "red meat rhetoric" similar to the gun lobby. 

Lobbying at the COP21 Climate talks in Paris

"According to a new report from the advocacy group Corporate Accountability International, several of the Paris COP's corporate sponsors have direct ties to the fossil fuel industry, and, the group argues, a conflict of interest when it comes to the purported goals of the summit.

Beyond greenwashing, Bragg said it's unlikely that these companies will be able to have a direct impact on the policy outcome of this COP, given how many of the nuts and bolts were worked out by diplomats in advance. But he cautioned that the creeping influence of corporations over the last two decades of climate negotiations report has made diplomats overly sensitive to business-friendly solutions." 

http://influencemap.org/report/The-COP-21-Guide-to-Corporate-Climate-Lobbying

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/nov/27/paris-climate-talks-un-business-lobbying-deal-governments

CNN has fun with Cruz's B-roll

Someone mentioned in class last week that Ted Cruz uploaded another batch of uncut footage to YouTube hoping super PACs will pick it up for ads, and CNN noticed -- and produced a glorious super-cut of all of the awkward direction that goes into "natural" scenes. This doesn't add a great deal to our discussion of how candidates interact with super PACs -- we already knew about the video dumps -- but this is a pretty entertaining display of the phenomenon.

Watch:

h/t Vice

Foreign Lobbying

Breaking News 


CAIR and San Bernardino

Lee Drutman has a very smart take on the interest group politics of gun control:

Money is not irrelevant, and the NRA and related groups do spend a lot of it. But even if the NRA and other gun groups didn't spend a dime on campaigns, they would still be in a very powerful position for two reasons:

• The NRA and its allies have millions of dedicated single-issue voters who are deeply passionate about their Second Amendment rights; gun control advocates do not.
• Rural and suburban areas with higher rates of gun ownership and deeper passion for the Second Amendment are overrepresented in Congress.

Silverstein

• Lobbying for rebels
• Turkmenistan:  Still Bad
• APCO responds to Silverstein (But APCO has worked for Kazakhstan)
• Strategies 
• Policymaker outreach
• Media campaign: planting op-eds (today would include social media) 
• Coalition support 
• Think Tanks

More recently:  Russia and Ukraine

From POGO

Alternative databases from Sunlight and POGO

Mark Zuckerberg and the Rise of Philanthrocapitalism

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan decided they will donate to philanthropic causes roughly ninety-nine per cent of their Facebook stock over the course of their lifetime (close to forty-five billion dollars).

This has opened an interesting discussion about the newfound tendency of the wealthiest people to donate their money to charities instead of their heirs (which, conveniently, allows them to avoid a few types of taxes and eventually increase their own wealth). Further, the practice of giving vast amounts to charity allows the small number of the extremely affluent to promote causes near and dear to their hearts. 

"My intention, here, isn’t to enter the education debate. It is simply to point out what should be obvious: people like Zuckerberg and Gates, by virtue of their philanthropic efforts, can have a much bigger say in determining policy outcomes than ordinary citizens can."

Read the whole story here.

Foreign Influence and Ethnic Lobbies

Disputes about foreign policy are not new:

The "natural born citizen" clause

The Citizen Genet Affair

The Nazis of La Crescenta (real video, not a parody)



 Foreign Agents Registration Act

Ban on Foreign Campaign Money ...but

No Ban on Foreign-Connected US Money

And US diaspora groups, of course, have no limit at all.

Foreign-Born Population

Ireland

Mideast

• Public sympathies
• AIPAC
• CAIR
• Changing demographics

Armenia



And what happened?