“Do not Pass Go! How Government Is Killing Capitalism,” was the panel title. ACU Executive Director Dan Schneider said the panel was about how “socialism sucks,” and the problems of “government taking choices away from me and you.”
It was odd then, that Schneider, Conservative Political Action Conference, and the ACU brought on stage a revolving-door lobbyist to push for big-government protectionist policies that deprive American consumers of choice and protect his big business client from competition.
Listed on the program simply as “former U.S. Secretary of Transportation,” and whose conservative credentials were burnished with repeated references to his time in the Reagan administration, Jim Burnley is a registered lobbyist who got to make his clients’ pitch for government protection on CPAC’s main stage to a packed house.
Burnley is a lobbyist at storied K Street law/lobbying firm Venable LLC. Among a handful of lobbying clients is American Airlines, where Burnley lobbies on “UAE open skies issues,” among others, according to disclosure forms.
Translated: Burnley and Venable lobby Congress to try and prevent Emirates airlines and Etihad Airways from adding new routes serving American airports. Their argument, UAE subsidizes its airlines, and so the U.S. government should protect American Airlines and other U.S. carriers from having to compete with the foreign airlines.
Burnley made exactly that argument on stage at CPAC. He didn’t frame it as his lobbying pitch on behalf of his client. Instead, he said that keeping out subsidized foreign competition was a key fight in the defense of capitalism from the evil of socialism and big government.
To put this in the frame of the panel title, Burnley’s contention, cheered by ACU’s Schneider, is that our government is killing capitalism by allowing foreign companies to compete with Burnley’s client.
Maybe it represents change, and the triumph of Trumpian protectionism. More likely, it represents the status quo: conservatives, at the hand of revolving-door lobbyists, selling out free enterprise for the sake of corporatism.
