In the past two weeks, I attended book-launch parties for two authors who are about as different ideologically as one might imagine. After reading their books, what’s fascinating is how neatly the arguments of the two authors dovetail.
David Sirota’s “Hostile Takeover” is a near-encyclopedic chronicle of the perverse capture of the national government by a small set of greedy, selfish andmostly corporate interests that, through mostly legally means, have systematically tilted the economic and political balance of power in favor of an elite few who can afford to press the government into service on behalf of their shortsighted and destructive agendas.
An unapologetic liberal activist and writer, Sirota is unsparing in his criticism of politicians of both parties who, he argues, have essentially rolled over like lapdogs as well-financed trade associations and corporate lobbyists stroke their soft underbellies. He methodically deconstructs almost every conservative platitude and talking point, such as the purported regard for free trade and competitive markets in a country where government contracts are rigged and cheaper prescription drugs across the border in Canada are unattainable.
Then Sirota dismantles a variety of Washington hypocrisies:
» How members of Congress advocate privatizing insurance for citizens, then unashamedly avail themselves of their government-sponsored health care;
» How a president who cannot balance the federal budget conspires with corporations that reflexively turn to government for bailouts to pass stricter personal bankruptcy laws and punitive credit card laws to teach a lesson to Americans who can’t pay their bills;
» How blather about personal responsibility and performance-based compensation so sharply contrasts with corrupt CEOs who plead ignorance about their companies’ financial statements, then cheat workers of their pensions while accepting huge compensation packages and guaranteed retirement portfolios — regardless of whether stock prices rose or fell during their tenures.
Oh, and caution to any platitude-spewing critics who decide to challenge Sirota on the details: With more than 1,500 footnotes, the meticulously-researched “Hostile Takeover” is sourced better than a law review article.
Sirota’s macro account of how Washington operates pairs nicely with Matt Continetti’s “The K Street Gang,” a spellbinding case study in how greed and corruption reached their apogee during the past decade in the form of Jack Abramoff and his merry band of scuzzbuckets.
A conservative who writes for The Weekly Standard, Continetti’s riveting account rivals the true-crime bestsellers that Americans devour by the millions. Though already familiar with the basic contours of the Abramoff scandal, I raced through the book like I had no idea what the next page might bring — which, it turns out, I didn’t.
The sordid activities and web of connections from Abramoff to Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed and Abramoff’s lifeguard-turned-lobbyist pal Michael Scanlon are too complicated to distill here. But suffice it to say that, in reconstructing the pattern of graft, overbilling, fraudulent accounting and even murder that occurred, Continetti has established his investigative reporter credentials.
But Continetti also steps back to explain how regular K Street entrepreneurs — who, unlike Abramoff, operate fully within the lobbying rules and norms — depict their narrow and often ignoble agendas as honorable efforts to advance the public interest. Two tenets, he argues, define their approach.
First, a client’s interests are framed in ideological terms. So, for example, an effort to advance a casino owner’s interests is packaged by lobbyists as an attempt to “squelch entrepreneurship and constrain the dynamism of a free-market economy.”
Second, lobbyists willfully disguise their sophisticated publicity campaigns on Capitol Hill and in the media as if they were organic, grassroots movements that welled up from the populace.
Sirota couldn’t have said it better himself.
Thomas F. Schaller is an associate political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
