If Americans needed a good excuse to rally around the idea of serious campaign finance reform, then failed energy giant Enron Corp. has now provided one. The trouble is, will enough people demand it?
With each passing day, Americans are learning just how incestuous the relationship really is between Washington’s power-brokers and the corporate elite of this nation (and, if you were a Clintonite, the corporate elite of other nations as well).
Like roaches scurrying for cover when exposed, dozens of congressmen, lobbyists and government officials are now hunting mightily for a way out of the Enron limelight. In their wake, they are leaving behind heaps of cold, hard Enron cash that, just weeks ago, was operating at status quo, buying influence and currying favor.
But if there’s nothing wrong with soft money campaign contributions – as Americans have been told time and again for half a decade – then why are so many lawmakers and officials so nervous about being caught with Enron money in their pockets? It was all on the up-and-up, right?
Wrong. It never was.
Maybe that’s because a soft money “campaign contribution” is really little more than legalized bribery. Why else would wealthy individuals and corporations throw money at one of the most fickle and dishonest group of people in the world – American politicians?
Granted, this isn’t traditional bribery – which is to say, it isn’t bribery after-the-fact. That’s what is so insidious about soft money campaign contributions; they constitute bribery before the fact.
Why try to bribe a cop to look the other way if he catches you breaking the law when you can bribe the guys and gals who write the laws? That way you can eliminate the chance that what you’re doing will be ever be illegal in the first place. And that form of bribery isn’t illegal.
In fact, it isn’t even called “bribery.” It’s called a “campaign contribution.”
Or, maybe it’s called “freedom of speech.” That has to be one of the more pervasive lies of the entire campaign finance reform debate … equating the crime of bribery with the right to speak your mind.
It’s quite possible that, in the end, Americans will discover that Enron executives, who sold their stock years ago for profit while forbidding hapless employees from doing so and ruining their futures, did so legally.
If it turns out that corporate executives can cheat their employees that way legally, then you can bet corporate cash to lawmakers at some point in the past prevented Congress from criminalizing this kind of behavior.
There may be new laws forthcoming forbidding such practices in the future, but these Enron sharks will get away with what they’ve done because they and the starched white-collar cronies who came before them bought and paid for the right to do it.
Only then, they called it “getting good government.” Lawmakers like to call it “getting some access.” I call such examples by another name, but I can’t write it here.
Incredibly, even some financial and stock experts seem ready to blame the people – not the executives who fiddled while Enron burned. They say “buyer, beware” when it comes to stocks, and that investors should know about the company they’re buying before they buy.
Yet Enron put out false financial reports and hid the fact that they were in trouble and heavily debt-burdened. So how’s a poor 401K holder supposed to know?
Many of the power elite in government knew. They knew because Enron executives were telling them. Only they weren’t telling investors and employees. Not a peep in a press conference, not a leak to the media, nothing.
All that campaign dough bought their silence. Had I had Treasury Secretary O’Neill’s or Commerce Secretary Evans’ personal office numbers, maybe I too would have known (don’t tell me that neither of these guys – or the other power elite who knew – didn’t spread the word to their buddies that Enron was set to tank).
Of course, if I had their numbers, it would only have been because I bought and paid for that kind of “access.”
This isn’t an indictment against corporations or against capitalism. Readers have long known I am an advocate of both. Rather, this is an indictment against the buying and selling of government influence – the kind that can only be afforded by a select few who have personal and political agendas (regardless of whether they are liberal or conservative agendas).
If we don’t wean our politicians and political system off the money that has corrupted it, then America ceases to be a land of the people and for the people. Instead, we’re nothing more than the world’s best-armed banana republic.
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