Ramblings 

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute of Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

Lobbyists: An Increasingly Influential Non-elected Fourth Branch of Government

It has been said that journalists and the media constitute a un-elected and influential fourth branch of government. While there is some truth in this formulation, a different non-elected group of men and women is increasingly playing the role of an important and little understood government adjunct. That group is lobbyists.

Some of this phenomenon attracted public attention when prominent lobbyist Jack Abramoff was recently indicted. Last year, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs held hearings on Abramoff’s relations with a half-dozen Indian tribes who had hired him. Writing in The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson notes that:

Indian tribes have become big clients on K Street. . . . In 1988, Congress authorized, and then established regulations over, casino gambling on Indian reservations. The result, from a lobbyist’s perspective, couldn’t have been happier. Gambling had two main effects. It made some tribes rich—Indian casinos bring in as much as $30 million a month—and it permanently entangled those gambling tribes with a Washington bureaucracy that seemed, to an outsider anyway, at once all-powerful and impossible to understand. In hopes of not getting squashed by the sozzled federal giant it’s gotten in bed with a gambling tribe that may spend $20,000 a month or more to retain the services of a Washington lobbying firm. 

While first-tier lobbying firms in Washington might bill a total of $20 million in fees a year, the Senate committee reported that Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon split as much as $82 million in fees from six tribes over three years. Abramoff also instructed the tribes to make donations to certain members of Congress and political causes he was allied with. He put on his credit card charges for Rep. Tom Delay’s (R-TX) golfing trip to St. Andrews in Scotland in 2000. It is illegal for a lobbyist to pay for congressional travel.

“Abramoff’s behavior is symptomatic of the unprecedented corruption—the intensified buying and selling of influence over legislation and federal policy—that has always become endemic in Washington,” writes correspondent Elizabeth Drew.

Corruption has always been present in Washington, but in recent years it has become more sophisticated, pervasive and blatant than ever. A friend of mine who works closely with lobbyists says, “There are no restraints now; business groups and lobbyists are going crazy—they’re in every room on Capital Hill writing the legislation. You can’t move on the Hill without giving money.”

A front-page story in The Hill, a Capital Hill newspaper, of April 29, 2004, reports:

Senate Democrats are offering lobbyists new access to Senate Democratic leaders and lawmakers in exchange for personal contributions of $25,000, the maximum amount allowed to national party fundraising committees. . . . Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a government watchdog group, said “It’s an appearance and reality problem in the sense that it explicitly provides people who provide large sums of money with access to lawmakers with the power to affect their interests.”

Lobbyists, needless to say, are deeply involved with both political parties, so the dilemma we face is systemic, not partisan. The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled since 2000 to more than 34,750, while the amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by as much as 100 percent. Lobbying firms can’t hire people fast enough and starting salaries have risen to about $300,000 a year for the best-connected aides eager to “move downtown” from Capital Hill or the White House.

Of particular concern is the manner in which former members of Congress are earning large salaries attempting to influence their former colleagues for a variety of special interest groups. According to a study by Public Citizen, lobbying, once considered a distasteful vocation, is now luring nearly half of all lawmakers who return to the private sector when they leave Congress.

Two decades ago, most top lawmakers who retired actually went home. The stigma of returning to Congress as a lobbyist dissuaded them. Today, however, sky-high lobbying salaries and the tendency of lawmakers to move their families to the Washington area, have made lobbying a frequent, even acceptable career path.

The Washington Post reports that:

Lured by the expectation of huge incomes for minimal work, 272 former members of Congress have registered to lobby since 1995. . . . Lesser-known legislators can easily double their $158,100 annual salaries when they become lobbyists. Senior lawmakers can earn even more. Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-LA) in 2003 famously turned down more than a million dollars a year to replace the legendary Jack Valenti as president of the Motion Picture Association. 

In the end, Rep. Tauzin, the former chairman of the House committee that regulates drug makers, became president and chief executive of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. In the 2002 election cycle, Tauzin received $91,500 from drug companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. 

“Access equals power in Washington, and few people have greater access than a former member of congress,” said Frank Clemente, director of Congress Watch. “We believe the public has the right to know how frequently their elected representatives change their allegiances and become lobbyists.”

Even professional lobbyists are resentful of the movement of former legislators into their domain. Former members of Congress have many advantages that average lobbyists do not. In the Capitol, former lawmakers can range more widely and move around with fewer security restrictions than anyone other than active senators and representatives. They also can walk into the members-only gym, the cloakrooms, private hearing rooms, and into the floor off the chambers—access that less-favored lobbyists do not have.

In fact, so many former lawmakers are lobbying these days that Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI), co-author of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, has proposed paring back the many privileges in the Capitol that former lawmakers enjoy. His plan would deprive lawmakers-turned-lobbyists of their ability to roam freely on the House and Senate floors, in the House gym and in areas of the Capitol that are otherwise “members only.”

“We’ve got a problem here,” said Allan Cigler, a political scientist at the University of Kansas. “The growth of lobbying makes even worse than it is already the balance between those with resources and those without resources.”

Patrick J. Griffin, who was President Clinton’s top lobbyist and is now in private practice, says:

People in industry are willing to invest money because they see opportunities here. They see they can win things, that there’s something to be gained. Washington has become a profit center.

Consider the example of Hewllett-Packard Co. The California computer maker nearly doubled its budget for contract lobbyists to $734,000 in 2004 and added the elite lobbying firm of Quinn Gillespie & Associates LLC. Its goal was to pass legislation that would allow the company to bring back to the U.S. at a dramatically lowered tax rate as much as $14.5 billion in profit from foreign subsidiaries. The extra lobbying paid off. The legislation was approved and Hewlett-Packard will save millions of dollars in taxes.

An alleged sense of entitlement among some lawmakers and aides is even producing concern on the part of lobbyists themselves. Reporter Jonathan Kaplan, writing in The Hill declares:

Speaking on condition of anonymity, more than a dozen lobbyists said there are some on Capitol Hill who actively solicit lunches, drinks and other favors from K Street and seem to regard it as their personal expense account. . . . Examples of what K Street objects to include: A congressman, whose family was visiting from the Northeast, called and asked to be taken to dinner; a Senate staffer, who was having dinner at the Capital Grille, noticed a lobbyist across the bar, walked over him and handed him his bill. . . . Another lobbyist said a former senior leadership aid would “call to have lunch with you and bring staff with her. She’ll eat lunch and have to run and go to another meeting. . . . You’re happy to do it, but it’s rude not even pretending that the lunch is for business.” 

Rep. Joel Hefley (R-CO), former ethics committee chairman, says: “When I first got here, I was told, ‘Joel, somebody pays for everything.’” He recalled a golf outing where a lawmaker, whom he did not name, kept telling a lobbyist how much he admired his golf bag. Sure enough, the lawmaker soon had a new golf bag. 

“I’ve seen the best and worst of this institution,” said Hefley. 

There’s always been a small percentage that has tried to bleed the system. People today are way more casual about expensive dinners at the expense-account restaurants. 

Some lobbying groups that focus on advocacy are now building on-the-side “federal marketing” practices that pitch their clients’ products to federal contracting officers. The war in Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have provided vast new areas for such lobbying groups to enter. 

In the case of Iraq, states Senator John McCain (R-AZ): “It’s like a huge pot of honey that’s attracting a lot of flies.” One alliance of lobbyists, New Bride Strategies, is busy seeking distribution rights for major U.S. companies producing everything from grain to auto parts to shampoo. “Getting the rights to distribute Proctor & Gamble products would be a gold mine,” said one of the partners at New Bridge. “One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out 30 Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country.” 

Recently, at the Pentagon, a prominent civilian official arranged a favorable contract for Boeing Co., before taking a job with the aerospace manufacturer. Bernard B. Kerik, originally the choice of secretary of Homeland Security, had to decline the post when it become public that he had earned $6.2 million in two years consulting for a company that did business with the Department of Homeland Security. The list of similar stories is a long one. 

If there are clear ethical standards in Washington, it is difficult to discover what they are. “We are seeing an easing of ethical standards and disclosure standards,” said Charles Lewis, who runs the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity. “They can dress it up any way they want, but they’re trying to increase the employment opportunities for their officials.” 

It is high time that the role of lobbyists in Washington be more carefully examined, particularly the role played by former members of Congress in influencing their former colleagues. The better we understand the real dynamics at work on Capitol Hill the better that we, as citizens, can bring our will to bear on what was meant to be a democratic process. 

Remembering Stalin’s Purges and How Idealistic Western Adherents to the False Communist Dream Were Among His Victims 

The brutality and horror of Joseph Stalin’s reign in power is now well-known. No one knows exactly how many people died in his purge trials of the 1930s, but it runs into millions. Robert Conquest says there were six million arrests, three million executions and two million deaths in the camps. Between 1931 and 1934, seven million people died in the great famine. In 1932, Zinoviev and Kamenev, two men who Communists all over the world trusted, were expelled from the Communist Party and sent to Siberia. In 1932, Stalin’s wife committed suicide. During the big show trials in 1936, 1937, and 1938, leading Bosheviks went to the firing squad beginning with Zinoviev and Kamenev and later including Krestinsky, Rykov, Piatakov, Radek and Bukharin. All were first tortured into making extravagant confessions. 

What is less well-known is the fate of Westerners who followed their own misplaced idealism to Moscow and threw in their lot with what they viewed as a great experiment to create a better world. In a thoughtful new book, Stalin’s British Victims, Francis Beckett, a regular New Statesman contributor, and the author of a number of important books, including Enemy Within—the Rise and Fall of British Communism, tells the stories of four British women whose lives were scorched by Stalin’s purges. One was shot as a spy; one nearly died as a slave laborer in Kazakhstan; and two saw their husbands taken away to the gulag and had to spirit their small children out of the country. 

Beckett notes that: 

Rosa Rust, Rose Cohen, Freda Utley and Pearl Rimel were all Londoners. Like hundreds of idealistic young Britons in the 1930s, they looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration, for a way which society could be run better without exploitation and poverty which unrestrained capitalism had created. They were less fortunate than most of us—they saw their dream fulfilled. 

Rose Cohen, for example, was a founding member of the British Communist Party in 1920 and, from the start, part of the small circle of young Communists, which soon came to dominate the party, including its future leader and most important figure in British Communist history, Harry Pollitt. 

In 1927, Rose and her husband Max Petrovskky moved permanently to Moscow. In 1929 she spent six months traveling to China and Japan, and also visited Poland and Germany on missions for the Comintern. In 1930, she was a student at the Lenin School before starting work as a journalist on a weekly English language newspaper, The Workers’ News, which later merged with another publication to become the Moscow Daily News. “Rose and Max were very happy,” writes Beckett. 

They were the golden couple of the expatriate community in Moscow. . . . They were sure not only of their own future, but of the future of the great socialist revolution of which they felt privileged to be a part. 

In the end, both Rose and her husband Max were arrested, sent to prison and shot. What had Rose done? At the time one of her many friends and admirers in England, Maurice Reckitt, wrote: 

The only evidence against her of which I heard was the report of a British comrade that she had declared that she would never let her child ride in a public vehicle, which was a counter-revolutionary sentiment! To anyone who knew Rose in London, and had ridden with her in many public vehicles which were her only means of transport, the story is as incredible as it is trivial. 

In 1928, Beckett notes:  

Another clever young Englishwoman married to a Russian arrived in Moscow. Freda Utley was well thought of in academic circles—a research fellow at the London School of Economics, a teacher at the Workers’ Educational Association. . . . She was invited to visit the Soviet Union as a representative of the University Labor Federation. There she came to know Rose Cohen and Rose’s charmed circle . . . and despite Bertrand Russell’s warnings, she joined the British Communist Party after the 1926 general strike, and she became an admirer of its impeccable proletarian leader, about whom she wrote years later; “The fact that Harry Pollitt led the British Communist Party deluded me into thinking that it was still a revolutionary working-class party seeking to establish liberty and social justice.” 

Back in London in 1928, Freda took the decision that was to change her life. She married Arcadi Berdichevsky, a Russian Jew who had studied at Zurich University and then, in 1914, went to the U.S. where he acquired a well-paying job. In 1920, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, the Soviet government asked him to go London because they needed his commercial expertise in Arcos, the Soviet trade mission. There he met and fell in love with Freda. In May 1927, the Arcos office was raided by the British police, who found some evidence of spying activities. The office was closed and Arcadi was expelled from Britain. He returned to Moscow and Freda joined him there the next year. 

In 1936, Stalin’s secret police came for Arcadi Berdichevsky and he was never heard from again. Beckett writes that:  

Freda found that old friends feared to speak to her. At the Academy of Sciences where she worked, several colleagues avoided her. She wrote afterwards: “When someone is arrested in the USSR it is as if a plague has struck his family. All are afraid of any contact, afraid to be seen talking to the stricken relations. I was comparatively lucky. Several friends stuck by me. 

Freda left Moscow with her young son Jon with “my political beliefs and my personal happiness alike shattered.”  

At the end of 1939 Freda emigrated with Jon to the U.S. and there, in September 1940, her anger spilled over into the pages of her book, The Dream We Lost: Soviet Russia Then and Now. Freda called herself: 

. . . the only Western writer who had known Russia both from the inside and from below, sharing some of the hardships and all the fears of the forcibly silenced Russian people. 

The Soviet Union was “a savage and barbarous Asiatic despotism.” She had seen for herself the “comradeship of the damned” within a “vast prison house.” Freda compared the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany and sought to show “the plain-mad liberals of the Western world that Russia’s reputedly planned economy is a myth.” 

British Communist leader Harry Pollitt did not rise to the defense of his old colleagues who were being oppressed in Moscow. In March 1938, when his dearest friends Rose Cohen and Max Petrovsky had been shot Pollitt wrote an article for the Daily Worker which began: 

The trial of the 21 political and moral degenerates in Moscow is a mighty demonstration to the world of the power and strength of the Soviet Union. The fact that the Soviet government has been able to bring to the dock the criminals who have been plotting for years against it is a proof of unity and stability. And it offers a tremendous contribution to the cause of world peace.

 

Beckett asks:

 

How could he write such rubbish? Here is the best defense I can offer, and it comes from his own pen. Pollitt wrote the following words on the Russian Revolution: “The thing that mattered to me was that lads like me had whacked the bosses and the landlords, had taken their factories, their lands and their banks. . . . These were the lads and lasses I must support through thick and thin . . . for me these same people could never do, nor can ever do, any wrong against the working class. I wasn’t concerned as to whether or not the Russian revolution had caused bloodshed, been violent and all the rest of it.” 

In his obituary of Stalin in The Daily Worker, Pollitt declared “Never . . . have I met anyone so kindly and considerate.” 

Discussing Pollitt and long-time Daily Worker editor Bill Rust, whose daughter suffered and nearly died as a slave laborer, Beckett states that: 

Dozens of British idealists, perhaps hundreds, died or suffered in Russia at the hands of a regime which men like Harry Pollitt and Bill Rust defended to their last breath. Pollitt ad Rust started their political life genuinely intending to make a better world, and ended up as apologists for a brutal dictator who tortured and murdered many millions, including close friends of theirs. Yet to their dying days, neither of them ever lost their admiration for Stalin. Rust died in 1949, but for Pollitt, that meant holding on to this faith all the way to 1960, through all the Khrushchev revelations of 1956 and beyond. How can this be? 

In 1956, Pollitt was heckled at a meeting of the Communist Party, and shouted back from the platform: “Defending the Soviet Union gives you a headache? You think I don’t know that? All right—if it gives you a headache, take an aspirin.” Beckett points out that:  

Pollitt had to swallow far more than just the treatment of the four women who are the main characters of this book. He knew of the deaths, and must have known of the torture of dozens of people of several nationalities, whom he had liked and admired, and remained to his dying day an apologist for the man who was responsible for it. 

Sadly, it was not only Communist party leaders who embraced the Soviet Union despite the horrors inflicted upon its people, but many respected Western intellectuals as well. 

Consider the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. In a July 1954 interview with Liberation, Sartre, who had just returned from a visit to Russia, said that Soviet citizens did not travel, not because they are prevented from doing so, but because they had no desire to leave their wonderful country. “The Soviet citizens,” he declared, “criticize their government much more and more effectively than we do.” He maintained that “There is total freedom of criticism in the Soviet Union.” 

Lillian Hellman, the famed American playwright, visited Russia in October 1937, when Stalin’s purge trials were at their height. On her return, she said she knew nothing about them. In 1938 she was among the signatories of an ad in the Communist publication New Masses which approved the trials. She supported the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland, stating:  

I don’t believe in that fine, lovable little Republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy about. I’ve been there and it looks like a pro-Nazi little republic to me. 

There is absolutely no evidence that Hellman ever visited Findland—and her biographer states that it is highly improbable. 

German playwright Bertolt Brecht, when he visited the Manhattan apartment of American philosopher Sydney Hook in 1935, just as Stalin’s purges were beginning, was asked by Hook about the cases of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Hook wondered how Brecht could work with the American Communists who were trumpeting their guilt. Brecht replied, “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Hook asked, “Why, why?” Brecht did not answer. Hook got up, went into the next room and brought Brecht’s hat and coat. 

During the entire course of Stalin’s purges, Brecht never uttered a word of protest. When Stalin died, Brecht’s comment was: 

The oppressed of all five continents . . . must have felt their heartbeats stop when they heard that Stalin was dead. He was the embodiment of their hopes. 

The respected American Quaker H. T. Hodgson provided this assessment: 

As we look at Russia’s great experiment in brotherhood, it may seem to us some dim perception of Jesus’ way, all unbeknown, is inspiring it. 

The story of Freda Utley is of particular interest to this writer because during the late 1960s in Washington, D.C. she and her son Jon and I became close friends. Her Memoir, Odyssey of a Liberal, deservers a wide readership, because it brings alive the intellectual battles beginning in the 1930s between those who persisted in defending and apologizing for Communism and those who came to recognize its evils and brutality. 

After her husband was arrested by Stalin’s police, Freda returned to England in 1937 to enlist George Bernard Shaw’s aid in gaining his release. Shaw wrote to her on July 8, 1937, that the:  

. . . five years will not last forever, that imprisonment under the Soviet Union is not as bad as it is here in the West; and that when I was in Russia and inquired about certain engineers who had been sentenced to ten years for sabotage, I learnt that they were at large and in high favor after serving two years of their sentence. 

Freda’s husband was not so fortunate, but was executed along with millions of others during Stalin’s bloody reign. 

Finally, as a result of Jon Utley’s perseverance, the facts about the fate of his father, Arcadi Berdichevsky, are now known. He notes that:  

My father was executed at Vorkuta on the Artic circle in the Soviet Union on March 30, 1938. In October, 2004, I visited the former concentration-camp town. Copies of files detailing his arrest, indictment, and execution order were sent to me by the FSB, successor to Russia’s notorious KGB. . . . Twenty million people are estimated to have died in these camps, but they are almost forgotten. 

Francis Beckett has performed a notable service in resurrecting this now largely forgotten chapter of history. Stalin’s British Victims deserves a wide readership. It is a cautionary tale for all those who are easily led astray by benevolent-sounding ideologies that conceal an iron fist behind their kind words and lofty sentiments. Stalin’s British Victims was published in the United Kingdom by Sutton Publishing Limited, Phoenix Mill, Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire. GL52BU.     * 

“Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it.” --Woodrow Wilson