For the third straight year, the official amount spent by lobbyists has declined, and the number of registered lobbyists is the lowest it’s been in more than a decade.
Lee Fang talking:
My new story for The Nation looks into federal lobbying laws and the state of American lobbying. As you mentioned, on paper, the lobbying industry is decreasing. The number of registered lobbyists are shrinking. The amount spent is going down precipitously every year. But in reality, the influence industry, as it’s known, is growing very quickly. It’s becoming more sophisticated. Companies are spending more and more to influence policy. And in many ways, corporations are extending their reach and hiring as many lobbyists as they can as this industry grows.
when President Obama was campaigning in 2008 and he came into office, he declared a virtual war, supposedly, on lobbyists, had an executive order banning lobbyists from his administration. And this is one of the big ironies of the Obama administration. President Obama campaigned vigorously in 2008 against the influence and the outsized influence of corporate lobbyists in American politics. He promised to drain the swamp and to come into office and enact stronger ethics reforms. But the only real enforcement or official action that he took was an executive order right when he got into office to not allow registered lobbyists into his administration. The catch was, many lobbyists simply de-registered, pushing the system more into the shadows, more into the darkness, and leading to where we are today. And the administration, at the same time, started issuing exemptions to still allow registered lobbyists into the Obama administration. So, little has changed. If anything, Obama’s only action on lobbying has made the system worse.
Zach Wamp is a former Republican congressman from Tennessee, and like dozens of former congressmen and senators who have promised not to become lobbyists, Wamp left Congress and said he would start a business development firm, that he would not engage in lobbying, that he’s going back to Chattanooga, Tennessee. But as this video shows, I found Wamp on Capitol Hill talking to current members of Congress about Palantir. And as I talked to Wamp after his discussion with lawmakers, he said that he’s overseeing Palantir’s operation on Capitol Hill.
Now, Palantir is a very controversial company who’s backed by the CIA, a lot of venture capitalists here in the Silicon Valley area. And it works for intelligence agencies to synthesize large amounts of data. And there was a large—there was a scandal in 2011 that I helped break when I was at ThinkProgress. Palantir and two other defense contractors created a proposal for the United States Chamber of Commerce to develop a domestic spying program, using the same government-backed technology to spy on unions, on different labor activists and progressive media outlets. It’s not clear exactly how far that proposal went, but they did start gathering intelligence on all types of different left-of-center organizations and individuals.
American League of Lobbyists actually changed its name; they rebranded themselves as the Government Relations Professionals. I think if you look at the polls, and if you actually listen to some of these seminars from the large lobbying organizations and firms, they understand that the American public is incredibly upset with the level of big money in politics, of the influence of lobbying in politics. And they’ve adapted by this, not by reforming, not by changing their behavior or using better reporting standards; they’re simply massaging their image, and they’re de-registering. So, this example of changing the name from League of Lobbyists to Association of Government Affairs Professionals, is emblematic of that. Many big firms, instead of calling their lobbying staff “lobbyists,” they’re calling them public affairs directors, government affairs associates, other euphemisms, but it’s largely a smokescreen for the exact same type of behavior that’s gone on for a very long time.
Bangladesh and TPP. These two very big, controversial issues are another area where corporations are spending tens of millions of dollars that are not being reported on lobbying disclosure forms. No one really knows where the money is coming from, but large firms are hoping to impact both the situation in Bangladesh and the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, again, using these public affairs or government affairs officials to peddle influence without disclosure.
— source democracynow.org
Lee Fang, a reporting fellow with the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, where he covers money in politics, conservative movements and lobbying. His new in-depth cover story for The Nation is “The Shadow Lobbying Complex: On paper, influence peddling has declined. In reality, it has gone underground.”