Lobbying is now a boom industry. The New York Times reports that in an era when people find they can do without many things, the one thing they can’t do without is influence in Washington. In an article entitled “Lobbyists Prosper in Downturn”, the NYT notes that while
they’re furloughing many city workers … cut staffing by about 5 percent .. officials in Tracy, Calif., are trying another way to help make ends meet in these tough economic times: They’ve hired a Washington lobbyist. It’s an idea that seems to be spreading. Senate lobbying records show that dozens of cities and counties signed up with lobbying firms in the first three months of this year. Their goal is to get a greater share of the money flowing out of Washington, from a record federal budget to the $787 billion economic stimulus package.
Since the Federal government is giving away money — never mind that it comes from the community’s own pockets — then there’s nothing for it but to be first in line. The article describes the stampede:
”The idea that they’re going to lower your taxes if we don’t accept any money is a little bit ridiculous,” Brumback said. The city will spend $40,000 for federal lobbying and $25,000 for lobbying at the state level. Expectations for the return on that investment are high. ”If you’re not getting at least 10-to-1, you’ve hired a bad lobbyist,” he said.
One of the open questions over the Roman practice of Bread and Circuses is which was corrupted most: the court of the emperor or the crowds. My guess is that the practice corrupted both sides of the deal. Still, where the band goes so will the crowd. “‘That’s where the money’s coming from right now and we need to get our piece of the pie,’ said Sarah Barr, director of communications for the city. Cities and counties hiring lobbyists tend to spend in the tens of thousands per year, about what they would spend for hiring one employee. For that money they get a team of lobbyists, each of whom serves multiple clients. The team can include lawyers, former congressional aides and even former lawmakers.” For that money they also get sucked into the system and pretty soon it’s an institution which won’t go away.
Obama has the potential to become a truly different kind of President, one whose relationship with the people he serves is colored by the size of the bag of borrowed largess he has at his knees. The inexpressibly sad practice of making people petition for their own money used to be a feature of cheap, tin-pot banana republics. Whether or not this innovation is progress is a subject for debate; that it’s ‘progressive’ is abundantly clear.
The author Shelby Foote noted, as did Carl Sandberg in his four volume piece on Abraham Lincoln that Lincoln was beseiged by “lobbyists” and seekers of favors.
Lincoln described it this way when asked about the problem.
“There are too many pigs for the teats”
I am sure Julius Caesar had the same problem as do all men of power. It continues to corrupt every political system that has ever existed. We just know a whole lot more about it now than ever before. Power after all is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
‘That’s where the money’s coming from right now and we need to get our piece of the pie,’ said Sarah Barr, director of communications for the city.
When 10:1 ROI is expected, then Ms. Barr clearly wants more than her city’s piece of the pie. She wants the pieces from a lot of other cities too, in particular cities that didn’t hire lobbyists, perhaps cities like Greenwood, SC. Her lobbyists will take Greenwood’s entire pie, and the pan, if they can.
Is there any incentive for being moral in this game? If a city or county doesn’t lobby state and federal governments for money, the money will merely go to somebody else who did lobby for the money.
Once it becomes known that lobbying for money isn’t cost effective (or may even backfire), money for lobbyists will dry up.
Yes, yes…
It was President Grant that named these parasites ‘lobbyist.’
He found them in every lobby he tried to cross…
Especially on his way to diner.
Grant found that his money was no good, time and again.
Remember President Ford’s annual food outlay: $5.00 for a sandwich at the Federal Building in DC. ‘Twas an impulsive meal — no lobbyist to pick up the tab!
Like dung beetles everywhere lobbyists have a tasteless appetite for the ‘fruit of Congress.’
As nasty it is to see laws concocted by the lobbing heads; the real stink flows from the earmark and the private tax breaks.
Our polity needs de-programming from Leftism.
Obambi is destined to be that agent of change; by proving with negation all of its anti-virtues O will resolve the issue with an economic Samson option.
The DNC temple iconography will come back to haunt us all.
The population explosion in the Washington, DC area is hard to appreciate. Within living memory that town was a sleeply little southern hamlet with outrageously grandiose architecture and outsize prominence.
That character and flavor is gone with the wind. I ran into a young man born and raised in Alexandria, VA who finished college at UVA, and he might as well have been from Boston. Northern Virginia ain’t The South anymore. Robert E. Lee must be spinning his grave.
This population explosion is directly attributible to the meteoric growth of the federal government and, increasingly, its lobbyists. I saw an article in the Washington Post that claimed 40,000 people have moved into the area during the past five years who are employed trying to influence federal policy.
We have an out of control monster on our hands here, and this pattern of growth fuels itself. I used to argue this with John McCain, a man who honestly detests the influence of money and special interests in government, yet at the same time always came up with solutions that expand federal power. These goals work against themselves. When the government pulls up a chair at any table, then all the players will immediately begin lobbying to influence it. They’d be crazy and foolish not to.
Big government = armies of lobbyists and influence peddlers.
Obama’s problem in trying to practice large-scale patronage politics is that the scale defeats him.
It’s an easy enough thing to do that on a small scale, Cuba, Nicarauga, Venezuela, Iran, Bolivia, and Peru come to mind.
But in a nation as large as ours, other more brutal methods must be used: ala Putin. Or the Chinese. This requires a large, well paid army of thugs and killers.
Because the problem is that there simply is not enough money to pay off enough of the crowds. The Roman Emperors only needed to pay off the Roman crowds. Obama needs to pay off all his Metrosexual, SWPL Yuppie supporters, Hispanics, and Women voters. [Black voters will back him regardless, so they get nothing.] There simply isn’t enough money for him to tax, steal, borrow, beg, and print to pay everyone off.
Meanwhile doing so makes enemies, and powerful ones: Energy, mining, lumber, agribusiness, manufacturing, coal, real estate, Amazon, Google, Ebay, Wal-Mart, White Blue/White collar men, retirees (ruined by Obama’s inflation to pay off his pals).
The Emperor’s Bread and Circuses were cheap. They did not beggar the provinces of Spain, Gaul, Britain, Greece, Anatolia, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere to pure poverty. Or threaten well off men there with poverty. Machiavelli had a few things to say about that.
Habu:
Lincoln described it this way when asked about the problem.
“There are too many pigs for the teats”
It goes to show that there really is a swine epidemic in Washington.
whiskey/6
That, paying off all of them, or rather the impossibility of it thereof, seems to indicate that this is all a setup. 0 is a gonnabe incarnate and once he fulfills his mission (ramming as much crap through the system as possible) and is unable to charm the constituency anymore, he is as good as gone. Whether the BCert will suddenly be brought into the light or some other method would be deployed, does not matter.
Nobody seems to be certain who said this first, but it appears to have been around for a long time:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.”
And here we are.
I’m looking at a 1000% expected return, and wondering why the last few years isn’t instructive to these people on the dangers of using what amounts to political leverage investing to increase their rate of return? It’s bad enough that LTCM blew up in 1998 and nearly took down the financial system back then, the major investment houses that funded LTCM went on to each develop their own in-house LTCM, pretty much all of which blew up simultaneously in 2007-8. They saw it happen, it nearly took down their firms a decade earlier, and yet they waded in again. Makes you wonder what the value of institutional memory is in the face of the profit motive, it seems to be pretty low if someone has a new equation to explain why the last equation didn’t work.
Now people are expecting to get something for very little, using the political process as the market. Again, the risk is discounted and the people pointing out the enormous systemic risk (Tea Party folks, for one example) are disparaged. Disappointing that we’re down to the borrower of last resort and the same strategies are being employed, with the persistent suspension of disbelief in TANSTAFFL and other pretty much inarguable rules of human group behavior. The blowup of the economic system has had some pretty dire implications, blowing up the lender of last resort — that’s a whole order of magnitude more dire.
The only solution I see is to bring the fiscal focus back to the state and local level as much as possible. If the citizens of Tracy, CA can’t afford to have sewer and water repair, police and fire staffing to meet their needs or adequate school facilities then why is their income tax money flowing past those problems straight to Washington? Or even Sacramento for that matter? The obvious answer is that the power to tax is the power to control, and the feds would rather fix some of the local problems that meet an overarching political end than allow the elected officials of Tracy to fix all of the problems and forward the remainder to Washington. Or Sacramento.
This seems like an appropriate thread to re-post a link I have found to be as enlightening as it is simple to understand. It should be required reading for all citizens and politicians.
Not yours to give
I think either Habu, Whiskey, 2164th or Cannoneer originally posted it way back when. Thank you.
When everything comes from the State you must perforce ask the State for what you need. When your very existence is dependent on the State, you must petition the State for the continuation of your life.
The State is into everything, therefor everything has a vital interest in DC.
It must be cut back.
“When your very existence is dependent on the State, you must petition the State for the continuation of your life.”
And if the State fails to provide, it seeks to murder you, and you must act accordingly.
Making promises you can’t keep can be very dangerous.
LCTM = Long Term Capital Management, a “hedge fund” financial group founded in 1994 to include among its directors the famous economics scholars Myron Samuel Scholes and Robert Cox Merton.
Everyone was certain they were GENIUSES because their theories appeared to provide unprecedented reliability in predictive analysis of various esoteric investment modalities. (Of course, anyone familiar with investment knows I just made up all that language.) AND to top off, in 1997 they were crowned NOBEL fer-Pete’s-sake laureates in Economic SCIENCES.
Seems like the problem with a lot of toplofty economics thinkers is that their theories work fine as exercises in symbolic math, but don’t allow for the imponderable complexities of the so-called real world.
It’s not so much that they’re wrong, as it is a problem of naive over-optimistic expectations. (Think of the followers of the Reverend Jim Jones…)
While attempting to educate self on these characters, I kept seeing credulous statements such as the assertion in an article by Encyclopedia Brittanica that the so-called Black-Scholes formula “showed that shares and call options could be combined to form a riskless portfolio.”
I would really appreciate it if at least the stinking peer-reviewed articles about GENIUS ECONOMISTS would qualify statements like that: i.e., “…shares and call options could be combined to form what seemed to be a riskless portfolio.”
Well, after some early apparent success – something like 40 percent after-expense returns on the initial one billion dollar funding – the group was disemboweled like a wildebeest on the Serengeti. In the chaos of a series of crises in East Asian and Russian financial markets in 1997 and 1998, LCTM hemorrhaged an estimated 4 billion dollars (according to some sources) in about sixteen weeks. Even though the company had leveraged deals valued near a hundred billion, when they flopped over dead, over a TRILLION dollars worth of contracts linked to their transactions were suddenly perceived by the market as worthless paper.
If the present Rohypnol abuse of the banking system by Urkle O’Bumble & Co. seems like déjà vu all over again, you might be remembering how the Federal Reserve Bank of New York organized a bailout to save most of the major banks at risk from LTCM’s implosion. The phrase being bandied about at the time reverberates through the present sordid mess: “The bail out was necessary to prevent collapse that could bring down the entire financial system.”
Roger Lowenstein authored a book titled “When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management” that has been hailed as a helpful analysis of the mess. Random House, ISBN 0-375-50317-X
By the way, one good thing about the constantly expanding population of lobbyists around the District is this: They MUST increasingly compete with each other. Their budgets must eventually contribute to the larger economy, because they have to find living accommodations, restaurants, medical services, grocery stores, car rentals, taxis, money laundries, miniature microphone and camera manufacturers, computer hackers to spy on congresscritters and each other, bribes for maids, bribes for parking wardens, bribes for valet services, bribes for concierges, bribes for other lobbyists, multiple corporate attorneys, criminal defense attorneys, bribes for judges, jurors, bailiffs, court reporters, police sketch artists, and reporters for the alleged news media.
Oh, yeah. And bribes for the legislators.
It’s trickle-down economics with a different slant.
The problem is not ‘lobbyists’- don’t be like Obama and say that you hate special interests and lobbyists. James Madison said long ago that factions are natural- but controllable by letting as many form as possible and having them fight over nothing. That is why the federal government was designed to have such a low budget and so little power- lobbyists, who naturally form, would have little to fight over.
The problem is the spending of Obama and the Democrats- the problem is not the lobbyists and special interests and whatever else you want to call them. Don’t get distracted or confused- last election, the American politic did, and look what happened.
@MadFiddler,
I should have spelled out the name Long-Term Capital Management before using the acronym. I recently read the Lowenstein book and the parallels to the recent blowup were shocking to say the least. 30:1 leverage, risk “managed” with formulaic mathematics, initial success leading to overconfidence, movement beyond even the previously guesstimated risk. Finally, hubris begets nemesis and LTCM finds itself in positions that they could not unwind. An all too familiar story these days.
And now the insanity of doing the same thing to the federal government, grabbing for the biggest possible piece of an inflationary pie, like the passengers on the Titanic scrambling to the stern to avoid the freezing water. Obama is likely to accomplish much of his legislative agenda, meaning that even the country’s ability to print money will be exhausted. The Chinese are already signalling their lack of appetite for our debt, the only benefit to this current economic crisis is that for the time being people are willing to buy our debt as a safe harbor, but should that change things should come apart in short order. Heck, I wish they had to actually print the money, the physical creation of currency would slow the process of devaluation.
The blowup is coming, if things don’t change. Unfortunately, the Change we were promised is leading to the blowup, once again at the urging of the “smartest” people on offer. Speculation in the political market, created by the rapid expansion of the reach of the federal government, is just the latest manifestation, and quite possibly the last of our current era. What comes after will hopefully be more rational.
After the precipitation of all the crap now in an aerosol state, we will very likely settle down to a simpler system in which even recent graduates of government schools can sort out the rules.
It will probably be recognizable to a person transported from, say, the land of the Angles in the last century before the Battle of Hastings.
Alexis writes: “Once it becomes known that lobbying for money isn’t cost effective (or may even backfire), money for lobbyists will dry up.”
A public aversion to earmarks, lest we forget, was only such a short time ago a feature of the second Bush administration. ‘Earmarks’ became something of a dirty word, especially as it seemed to stick to a Republican administration. But practiced by Democrats, it’s all o.k., I guess.