[Peace-discuss] Fall of the Rovean Empire?

[Lisa Chason]

Fall of the Rovean Empire?

By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com
Thursday 06 October 2005 
Drunk on power, the Republican oligarchs overreached. Now their entire
project could be doomed
For 30 years, beginning with the Nixon presidency, advanced under Reagan,
stalled with the elder Bush, a new political economy struggled to be born.
The idea was pure and simple: centralization of power in the hands of the
Republican Party would ensure that it never lost it again. Under George W.
Bush, this new system reached its apotheosis. It is a radically novel
social, political and economic formation that deserves study alongside
capitalism and socialism. Neither Adam Smith nor Vladimir Lenin captures its
essence, though it has far more elements of Leninist democratic-centralism
than
Smithian free markets. Some have referred to this model as crony capitalism;
others compare the waste, extravagance and greed to the Gilded Age. Call it
21st century Republicanism.
At its heart the system is plagued by corruption, an often unpleasant
peripheral expense that greases its wheels. But now multiple scandals
engulfing Republicans - from suspended House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to
super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff to White House political overlord Karl Rove -
threaten
to upend the system. Because it is organized by politics it can be undone by
politics. Politics has been the greatest strength of Republicanism, but it
has become its greatest vulnerability.
The party runs the state. Politics drives economics. Important party
officials are also economic operators. They thrive off their connections and
rise in the party apparatus as a result of their self-enrichment. The past
three chairmen of the Republican National Committee have all been Washington
lobbyists.
An oligarchy atop the party allocates favors. Behind the ideological slogans
about the "free market" and "liberty," the oligarchy creates oligopolies.
Businesses must pay to play. They must kick back contributions to the party,
hire its key people and support its program. Only if they give do they
receive tax breaks, loosening of regulations and helpful treatment from
government professionals.
Those professionals in the agencies and departments who insist on adhering
to standards other than those imposed by the party are fired, demoted and
blackballed. The oligarchy wars against these professionals to bend
government purely into an instrument of oligopolies.
Corporations pay fixed costs in the form of legal graft to the party in
order to suppress the market, drastically limiting competitive pressure.
Then they collude to control prices, create cartels and reduce planning
primarily to the political game. The larger consequences are of no concern
whatsoever to the corporate players so long as they maintain access to the
political players.
The sums every industry, from financial services to computers, spends on
lobbying are staggering. Broadcast media firms spent $35.88 million in 2004
alone on lobbyists in Washington, according to the Center for Public
Integrity. Telephone companies spent $71.97 million; cable and satellite TV
corporations, $20.22 million. The drug industry during the same period
shelled out $123 million to pay 1,291 lobbyists, 52 percent of them former
government officials. The results have been direct: The Food and Drug
Administration has been reduced to a hollow shell, and Medicare can't
negotiate
lower drug costs with pharmaceutical companies. In the 2004 election cycle,
the drug industry paid out $87 million in campaign contributions for federal
officials, 69 percent of them flowing to Republicans.
Whereas almost all lobbying before the Bush era was confined to Capitol
Hill, now one in five lobbyists approaches the White House directly.
Consider the success story of one Kirk Blalock, a former aide to Karl Rove
as deputy director of the Office of Public Liaison, where he coordinated
political
links to the business community. Now, one year out of the White House, he's
a senior partner in the lobbying firm of Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock,
boasting 33 major clients, 22 for whom he lobbies his former colleagues in
the White House. Indeed, the Bush White House boasts 12 former lobbyists in
responsible positions, from chief of staff Andrew Card (American Automobile
Association Manufacturers) on down.
"The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled
since 2000 to more than 34,750," reports the Washington Post, "while the
amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by as much as
100 percent."
Macro- and microeconomic policies are subordinate to the circular alliance
of oligarchy and oligopoly. Government expenditures have raced to the
fastest pace of increase under Bush since President Lyndon Johnson's Great
Society. But the spending is not intended to prime the economic pump. Nor is
it
invested mainly in public goods such as infrastructure or schools; nor is it
used to expand the standard of living of the middle and working classes,
whose incomes and real wages are rapidly shrinking. Instead it is poured
into military contracts and tax cuts heavily weighted to the very
wealthiest, who do not in turn invest in productive capital. As a result,
the largest budget surplus in U.S. history has been transformed into the
largest deficit, whose bonds are principally held by Asian banks, a shift
that presages a strategic tilt of global power and long-term threat to
national security. The illusion that as the post-Cold War unipolar power the
U.S. faces no countervailing forces is undermined by the administration's
constantly draining deficits. Thus 21st century Republicanism reverses the
policies that brought about the American century.
Under Ronald Reagan, the unanticipated consequences of supply-side economics
- instead of tax cuts fostering increased government revenues, they blew a
black hole in the budget - has under Bush been a conscious policy following
the Reagan lesson. The reason is to apply fiscal pressure on
government, making its regulations more pliable for manipulation in the
interest of oligopoly and therefore the Republican political class. Just as
macroeconomic policy is the plaything of politics, so is microeconomic
policy. Environmental degradation, lowered public health and urban neglect
are
indifferent byproducts.
The Republican system is fundamentally unstable. Bush has no economic policy
other than Republicanism. As the economic currents run toward an indefinable
reckoning, the ship of state drifts downstream.
In stable systems, individuals are replaceable parts. Republicanism as
constructed under Bush is a juggernaut that cannot afford to scrape an
iceberg.
The Republican scandals converge on operators who are the center of the
oligarchy. Their own relationships are complicated and tangled. But the
outcome of the scandals affecting these major actors will inevitably unravel
the Republican project.
On Monday, Tom DeLay was indicted by a Texas grand jury for money laundering
of corporate contributions through his political action committee, a crime
that carries a life sentence. DeLay had resigned on Sept. 28 as House
majority leader after being handed his first indictment for felony
conspiracy. Even as DeLay proclaimed himself a victim of injustice - "I am
indicted just for the reason to make me step aside as majority leader" - he
proclaimed that he would rule "with or without the title."
As DeLay shouts defiance, federal prosecutors close in on one of DeLay's
"closest and dearest friends," Jack Abramoff, whose largess to DeLay over
the years, including lavish trips to Korea and Britain, are part of the
investigation. Abramoff's bilking of millions from Indian tribes has brought
other Republican figures, including lobbyist Grover Norquist, a key DeLay
advisor, and Ralph Reed, a central character in the religious right, under
legal scrutiny.
At the same time, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, investigating the
exposure by senior administration officials of the identity of CIA operative
Valerie Plame, has completed his inquiry by receiving the testimony of New
York Times reporter Judith Miller, and must issue any indictments before
his grand jury expires on Oct. 28. Within the White House, Karl Rove,
feverishly mustering wavering conservative support for Bush's nomination of
his personal lawyer and White House legal counsel, Harriet Miers, to the
Supreme Court, awaits.
Bush never much liked DeLay. DeLay criticized Bush's father, for which there
can be no forgiveness, and he criticized him, too. When DeLay wanted to
slash the earned-income tax credit, Gov. Bush, beginning his presidential
campaign in 1999 and seeking to establish his bona fides as a "compassionate
conservative," said DeLay wanted to balance the budget "on the backs of the
poor."
DeLay, the former exterminator from Sugar Land, Texas, a suburb of Houston,
who had called the Environmental Protection Agency "the Gestapo," had risen
from the Texas Legislature to the U.S. Congress. Once known for his
boisterous reveling as "Hot Tub" Tom, he became born again, and his
right-wing
politics always had a forbidding punitive undercurrent. When he became
Republican whip, he hung a whip on his office wall. He relished his
nickname, "the Hammer." Asked to put out his cigar in a restaurant because
it violated the nonsmoking rule, he bellowed, "I am the federal government."
DeLay never really respected Newt Gingrich, who had led the Republicans out
of their 40-year wilderness to control of Congress and become speaker of the
House. Despite Gingrich's penchant for vituperative personal attacks on
Democrats, DeLay thought he was soft. There was something of the lost boy
about Gingrich, who collected dinosaur bones, loved to visit zoos and
speculated about outer space. DeLay also felt that Gingrich had fallen under
the seductive spell of President Clinton and conceded too much to him. DeLay
plotted coups against Gingrich and finally succeeded after the Republicans
lost seats in the 1998 midterm elections. DeLay worried that Gingrich would
weaken in the struggle to impeach and remove Clinton, and because of
Gingrich's mistress on the House payroll, which made him doubly vulnerable.
DeLay coerced House Republicans to impeach Clinton, threatening moderates
that
he would fund primary opponents and deny them advantageous committee
assignments. Without DeLay, there would have been no impeachment. After the
Senate acquitted Clinton, DeLay preached at his local church that Clinton
had been impeached because he had "the wrong worldview."
The center of DeLay's operation was the K Street Project, the pay-for-play
system by which businesses and lobbyists kicked back to the Republican Party
in exchange for legislation. He kept a little black book noting which
lobbyists were good and which were bad, who deserved favors and who
punishment. One reporter, believing that the story about the black book was
apocryphal, asked DeLay, who proudly showed it to him.
Of all the lobbyists on the good list, Jack Abramoff ranked at the top.
Abramoff's provenance as a scion of Beverly Hills, Calif., could not have
been more fortuitous for a career in the Republican Party. His father was
president of the Diners Club franchises, owned by Alfred Bloomingdale, a
member
of Ronald Reagan's kitchen cabinet. Abramoff parlayed his connections and
money into a campaign that gained him the chairmanship of the College
Republicans in 1981, Year 1 of the Reagan era.
Abramoff's campaign manager was a radical right-winger named Grover
Norquist, and the two of them recruited a zealous younger activist to carry
out their orders, Ralph Reed. Reed required College Republicans to recite a
speech from the movie "Patton," replacing the word "Nazis" with "Democrats":
"The Democrats are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood! Shoot them
in the belly!"
Norquist was the first to point out the political potential of evangelical
churches to Reed, imagining that they could be turned into Republican
clubhouses. During the week of George H.W. Bush's inauguration, Reed
encountered Pat Robertson, the right-wing televangelist, who recruited him
on the
spot to run the Christian Coalition. "I want to be invisible," Reed
explained. "I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You
don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until
election night."
Norquist himself underwent a metamorphosis from gadfly to player with the
Republican takeover of Congress. His Wednesday meeting became a place where
conservative groups from the National Rifle Association to the Christian
Coalition plotted strategy. Norquist opened it up to lobbyists, who paid
exorbitant fees to be part of the action. They, too, were then coordinated.
Norquist was especially close to Gingrich, a relationship he used to build
up his own lobbying business behind front groups such as Americans for Tax
Reform. Once Gingrich was toppled, Norquist used Abramoff to link him
tightly to DeLay.
Karl Rove, whose political career began as chairman of the College
Republicans in 1971, was well acquainted with the Abramoff circle for years
by the time he began planning George W. Bush's presidential campaign. He was
not enamored of anti-tax crusader Norquist, who had made a grandstand
gesture
of assailing Gov. Bush in the mid-1990s for suggesting raising taxes to
support schools. But, for the campaign, Rove made peace with him.
In 1997, Reed left the Christian Coalition to found his own lobbying firm,
Century Strategies. He sent Abramoff an e-mail: "Hey, now that I'm done with
the electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts! I'm
counting on you to help me with some contacts." Rove soon recruited Reed
for the upcoming Bush campaign, setting him up as a consultant for Enron.
When Sen. John McCain defeated Bush in the Republican primary in New
Hampshire, Reed came into play. South Carolina was Armageddon. Suddenly,
McCain was beset by a series of vicious accusations, including racial slurs
about an adopted daughter and dirty tricks.
Marshall Wittman, who had worked as director of the Christian Coalition
under Reed, had joined McCain's staff, though Reed had attempted to bring
him along to the Bush campaign. "Ralph was very, very, very close to Rove,"
Wittman told me. "Ralph asked me in 1997 if I wanted to work on the Bush
campaign. Rove was operating everything. Rove parked Ralph at Enron. Ralph
told me before the New Hampshire primary that he would do what it took to
eliminate McCain as an opponent if he posed a challenge to Bush. He would do
whatever it took, that means below the radar, paint his face. Ralph has a
dual personality, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, charming in public and then
ruthless and vicious."
Abramoff grew ever closer to DeLay, helping DeLay's former aides who had
become lobbyists, who also assisted his business. Abramoff took millions
from various Indian tribes and then lobbied against them so they would pay
him more. Norquist complained to Abramoff about a "$75K hole in my budget
from
last year," and his pal put him in the deal. Reed was hired to use the
religious right to campaign against the casino that the Tigua tribe had
contracted Abramoff to help them open. Meanwhile, Abramoff forced the
Choctaw tribe, another client, to kick back $1.5 million to the Alabama
Christian
Coalition. Norquist acted as the go-between for the money, funneling it
ultimately to Reed's efforts.
Eventually, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee exposed the various scams;
it does not seem ironic that the committee's chairman is McCain. Soon, the
Justice Department was investigating. Norquist and Reed have both appeared
in front of the grand jury. Reed is running for lieutenant governor of
Georgia. "Ralph has notions he'll be president of the United States," said
Wittman.
Abramoff is under investigation by a grand jury in Guam for illegal
contracts and money laundering and another grand jury in Fort Lauderdale,
Fla. In that case, a former business partner in the SunCruz casino boat
company with whom Abramoff had had a dispute was allegedly murdered by three
hit men,
who have been indicted for the crime. Abramoff's business partner Adam Kidan
made payments from company funds of $30,000 to one of the killers'
daughters, who performed no services for the company, and $115,000 to a firm
the hit man owned. Reportedly, Abramoff is not under suspicion for the
murder,
but he was indicted in August for bank fraud in the case.
Last month, another player in the ring was arrested - David Safavian, a Bush
White House official, director of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy,
in charge of overseeing $300 billion in federal contracts. Safavian had been
Abramoff's lobbying partner in the mid-1990s before he became
Norquist's lobbying partner. Before he was elevated to his sensitive post in
the White House, he had been chief of staff at the General Services
Administration, where he tried to help Abramoff grab two federal properties
in Washington. On Wednesday, Safavian was indicted on five counts of perjury
and obstruction of justice. (Safavian's wife, Jennifer, is chief counsel on
the House Government Operations Committee, overseeing the investigation into
the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.)
Meanwhile, the grand jury in the Valerie Plame case prepares to conclude its
work. In August, it called Rove's assistant Susan Ralston to testify. As it
happens, she had formerly been Abramoff's assistant. And it was revealed
that before she allowed people to meet with Rove, she cleared them with
Norquist. Rove, for his part, often used Abramoff and Norquist as his
conduits to DeLay.
Now all the investigations are coming to a climax. Will it mean the decline
and fall of the Rovean empire? "Rove is the ultimate center of everything,"
said Wittman. "All roads lead to Rove. If it's Rove, everything collapses.
People say there is no indispensable man. That's not true."
But more than the fate of one man or even a ring around him is at stake. For
decades, conservatives created a movement to capture the Republican Party
and remake it in their image. Under Bush, Republicanism as a system
dominates.
With astonishing arrogance and bravado, the Republican oligarchy wired
politics and business so that they would always win. But in believing that
they actually possessed absolute power they have overreached. Now their
project teeters on the brink.


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