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As
usual I have summarized the good bits for you. As many of these items
are impossible for me to verify you
should read them “as told” by Jack Abramoff. I think a disclaimer is
appropriate here as Jack has probably told more lies than your average
bear. Ay ay ay! What can be done about such scoundrels? When faced
with seemingly intractable conundrums you've just gotta plog hard!
Continuing
with the theme of corruption in Washington I picked up the juiciest
book I could find on the subject. I need to think about readership
engagement after all. The writer of the book I am about to cover is as
close as I can get to a gun-slinging cowboy/mafioso gangster/Bronx
hoodlum/Tarrantino muse in the world of Washington politics. He's
kind of fun in the context of a couch and a bowl of popcorn.. But he's
real, and he's been real bad..
His
name is Jack Abramoff and he has been described by some as
"Washington's most notorious lobbyist." He published his book "Capitol
Punishment" after serving time in jail and is now ostensibly fighting
for reform.
Let's get started..
Abramoff attempts to explain and justify his actions throughout this book. He did a pretty decent job of persuading me that he is not filled with bad intentions but I am not writing this piece to enable his absolution. I am interested in picking out the parts of the book that highlight how corruption takes place in Washington and what an insider like Abramoff suggests as a means to reform the system.
During college Abramoff became chairman of an organization called the College Republican National Committee. Later he went on to get a job at Reagan's grass-roots lobbying organization. It was there he says he got his first exposure to corruption. Reagan wanted to fund the MX missile but he was six votes short of victory in Congress. At that point Abramoff received a phone call from a Democratic congressman who offered 13 votes in exchange for votes on a different bill regarding a new naval base in Florida which the Democratic congressman wanted built. Abramoff then called his point of contact on Reagan’s team, Pat Buchanan - Reagan’s communications director and within a few minutes the terms were accepted.
After leaving this job Abramoff spent the better part of a decade making movies. He was thirty five before he went back into politics and this time he worked as a lobbyist.
What is lobbying? Lobbyists deal directly with our elected officials to persuade them to vote in a certain way. The term originated in the 19th-century when individuals would gather in the lobby outside a political chamber to speak to their elected officials. Lobbying is really nothing more than a form of advocacy, which is crucial to the democratic process.
In 1994 the Republicans took Congress for the first time in a generation. Because of the new "Republican tide" Abramoff's contacts within Republican offices soon became valuable. One day a member of Abramoff’s synagogue congregation offered him a job at a law firm where a senior partner was Bill Gate’s father and whose main client was Microsoft. Abramoff took the job and before long Microsoft needed access to the House Republican leadership. By now one of Abramoff's contacts, Tom Delay had become majority (Republican) whip. In accordance with their name "whips" enforce and induce party members to vote according to party policy. In one of the meetings a Microsoft executive firmly brushed off a solicitation from Delay for political contributions. Delay told the executive a story about a moment when Walmart did the same to him and how Walmart came to him a year later to get a ramp built from a federal highway. Delay then said: “You know what? They didn’t get their ramp. You know what else? They will never get their ramp.” That is some way to bully companies into making contributions! As of the time this book was published in 2011 Tom Delay was appealing a conviction on money laundering and conspiracy.
One of Abramoff's clients was the Choctaw Indian tribe who needed a lobbyist at one point to prevent a tax hike which was about to go through. The Choctaws and other tribes often made hundreds of millions of dollars a year in casino revenues. Paying Abramoff’s $150,000 monthly lobbying fee or campaign contributions to Tom Delay and other elected officials, was both affordable and a sound business decision. After scoring a victory for the Choctaws, Abramoff suggested to the tribe, as he often did with clients, that they should pay contributions to the elected officials that helped them. He goes on to say that he did not realize until he was sitting in a jail cell that these were nothing but bribes. Whilst dealing with the Choctaw Abramoff was around 40 years old. I highly suspect he knew his actions were wrong, but he was an ambitious man. He wanted to be the best lobbyist he could be. I think he did wrong partly because he thought the business worked that way and partly because he thought he could get away with it.
Abramoff attempts to explain and justify his actions throughout this book. He did a pretty decent job of persuading me that he is not filled with bad intentions but I am not writing this piece to enable his absolution. I am interested in picking out the parts of the book that highlight how corruption takes place in Washington and what an insider like Abramoff suggests as a means to reform the system.
During college Abramoff became chairman of an organization called the College Republican National Committee. Later he went on to get a job at Reagan's grass-roots lobbying organization. It was there he says he got his first exposure to corruption. Reagan wanted to fund the MX missile but he was six votes short of victory in Congress. At that point Abramoff received a phone call from a Democratic congressman who offered 13 votes in exchange for votes on a different bill regarding a new naval base in Florida which the Democratic congressman wanted built. Abramoff then called his point of contact on Reagan’s team, Pat Buchanan - Reagan’s communications director and within a few minutes the terms were accepted.
After leaving this job Abramoff spent the better part of a decade making movies. He was thirty five before he went back into politics and this time he worked as a lobbyist.
What is lobbying? Lobbyists deal directly with our elected officials to persuade them to vote in a certain way. The term originated in the 19th-century when individuals would gather in the lobby outside a political chamber to speak to their elected officials. Lobbying is really nothing more than a form of advocacy, which is crucial to the democratic process.
In 1994 the Republicans took Congress for the first time in a generation. Because of the new "Republican tide" Abramoff's contacts within Republican offices soon became valuable. One day a member of Abramoff’s synagogue congregation offered him a job at a law firm where a senior partner was Bill Gate’s father and whose main client was Microsoft. Abramoff took the job and before long Microsoft needed access to the House Republican leadership. By now one of Abramoff's contacts, Tom Delay had become majority (Republican) whip. In accordance with their name "whips" enforce and induce party members to vote according to party policy. In one of the meetings a Microsoft executive firmly brushed off a solicitation from Delay for political contributions. Delay told the executive a story about a moment when Walmart did the same to him and how Walmart came to him a year later to get a ramp built from a federal highway. Delay then said: “You know what? They didn’t get their ramp. You know what else? They will never get their ramp.” That is some way to bully companies into making contributions! As of the time this book was published in 2011 Tom Delay was appealing a conviction on money laundering and conspiracy.
One of Abramoff's clients was the Choctaw Indian tribe who needed a lobbyist at one point to prevent a tax hike which was about to go through. The Choctaws and other tribes often made hundreds of millions of dollars a year in casino revenues. Paying Abramoff’s $150,000 monthly lobbying fee or campaign contributions to Tom Delay and other elected officials, was both affordable and a sound business decision. After scoring a victory for the Choctaws, Abramoff suggested to the tribe, as he often did with clients, that they should pay contributions to the elected officials that helped them. He goes on to say that he did not realize until he was sitting in a jail cell that these were nothing but bribes. Whilst dealing with the Choctaw Abramoff was around 40 years old. I highly suspect he knew his actions were wrong, but he was an ambitious man. He wanted to be the best lobbyist he could be. I think he did wrong partly because he thought the business worked that way and partly because he thought he could get away with it.
How do the wheels get greased in the lobbying industry? Abramoff explains that lobbyists often don’t have law degrees (relationships are more important) and they can earn $300,000 a year. Once a lobbyist feels the need to have a strong relationship with a particular representative’s office he can use an assortment of tactics to woo them. It is common-place for lobbyists to buy the representatives sandwiches at lunch time, tickets to sporting events, golf games and dinners at posh restaurants. Some lobbyists choose to raise campaign funds. However, according to Abramoff the most effective method of wooing elected officials and their staff is via the hiring process. Abramoff explains how he would meet with an office’s staff member and after a few rounds of golf, drop the line “when you are done working for the congressman you should come work for me at my firm.” Abramoff states confidently that after his proposal “Every move the staffer made he made with his future at my firm in mind.” According to Abramoff the staffer would now essentially be working for Abramoff from within his/her office in Capitol Hill. In Abramoff’s experience 90% of staffers are interested in moving from Capitol Hill to K-street where salaries are much improved. K-street is an actual street which contains so many lobbying offices that its name has become synonymous with the lobbying industry itself. Abramoff states that he hired as many of these staffers as he could.
At
one point Abramoff had the idea of attracting a new potential client,
the Indian tribe called the Tiguas. To cut a long story short he
decided to approach them and suggest that he might be able to get them
officially recognized as a tribe which would allow them to open a
certain type of casino. I am telling you this because it is going to explain an
interesting mechanism which enables lobbyists to conduct business in an
underhanded fashion. Abramoff needed to add the change, regarding how
the Tiguas would be newly recognized as a tribe, to a bill. Lobbyists trying to
conduct similar shenanigans know that the best type of bill to add the
change to is
a reform bill. A lot of bills don’t
pass so the last thing you want to do is to put your amendment on a bill and wait for months for it to pass, only to find it doesn’t go through.
Reform bills are loved by Americans because they are supposed to fix the system. Since they usually
pass, lobbyists like to add their amendments to reform bills. Therein lies the irony. Reform bills, which are supposed to be
fixing the system, are the ones most likely to be used by those manipulating
the system for the sake of special interests.
So Abramoff got a fancy lawyer from his firm to write a short
sentence that no one would understand and used his contacts in Washington to
slip it onto a bill called the “Help America Vote Act” or HAVA which was designed
to correct the issues from the 2000 Florida general election ballot. Here is the wording Abramoff plopped onto the
bill: Public Law 100-89 is amended by striking section 207 (101 Stat. 668,
672.) Abramoff was overjoyed with the lawyer who wrote it for producing something completely unintelligible!
Items that are unrelated to the underlying bill should be fully explained and drawn to the front of the bill in bold print and put in plain language to put an end to this underhanded practice. I think it would be hard to argue against such a change.
Abramoff’s work had just begun. Congressman Bob Ney, the chairman of the
committee responsible for HAVA, needed to be
bribed. Abramoff had a meeting with Ney about adding the change for the Tiguas onto the HAVA bill. Ney agreed to it and from then on Abramoff lavished Nay with "almost daily"
meals at Abramoff’s restaurant and took him on a golf trip to Scotland. He needed to keep Nay “close” and “focused”
on the amendment. Ney suggested that Abramoff
contact Senator Christopher Dodd, the chairman of the Democratic version of Ney's committee. Abramoff's partner Mike Scanlon contacted
Dodd and came back with Dodd’s assent and a request for a $50,000 Democratic
contribution in Dodd’s name. Scanlon
covered the contribution directly from the budget the Tiguas had given
him. Abramoff states it was so common
that his staff members return from a congressional office having been asked
for money immediately after Abramoff’s staff member asked for help that he
would always double check when his staff did not request money for
legislators. Apparently there was/is
no subtlety in the process!
In 2006 ex-congressman Ney pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges
and served less than a year in prison. When this book was printed in 2011, former Senator Dodd had left the Senate to become one of
Washington’s highest paid lobbyists.
During the time Abramoff was fighting on the Tiguas front, Abramoff was called to defend Tyco whose ex-CEO Dennis Kozlowski had been convicted of fraud. Tyco had scores of lobbyists at this time but they had all failed to stop a bill which would have taxed Tyco $4 billion on past revenue. This change would potentially put Tyco out of business. According to Abramoff one of the underhanded reasons this fight was going on was because Tyco, now a "megalith," had grown by acquisition and had taken over about 300 companies over the last several years. Executives related to the acquired companies felt aggrieved. Abramoff says that public officials often crush the competitor of their donors. He decided to start a grass roots campaign calling thousands of companies that did business with Tyco and some of those company's presidents put calls directly into their respective senators’ offices. His grass roots team cross referenced Federal Election Commission lists to target the people each state Senator would not want to upset. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was the original sponsor of the bill against Tyco that Abramoff was trying to stop. Abramoff’s office attacked him on two fronts, causing scores of Iowa corporations to call him from one angle and becoming one of Grassley’s biggest fundraisers from another. Abramoff's team flew Grassley to their offices in Florida, Boston and Chicago for fundraisers and "plied" Grassley’s staff with "every trinket they had." One of the firms Abramoff worked at would sometimes spend $1.5 million in event tickets per year for precisely this purpose. The plan worked and the bill did not pass. After this Grassley became one of Abramoff’s "most dependable Senate assets." Grassley and the other Senator of Iowa Tom Harkin, "also a major recipient of Abramoff’s beneficence and campaign contributions," helped Abramoff’s tribal client beat a hostile takeover months later. Grassley's and Harkin's donors dined at Abramoff’s restaurant and used his firm’s sport boxes with frequency.
Senator Chuck Grassley is still the senior United States Senator from Iowa today. As of the time this book was printed neither Grassley nor Harkin had drawn any federal corruption charges.
Finally Abramoff’s wrongdoings came home to
roost. The Washington Post wrote an
article about Abramoff’s client representations and about his profit-sharing
relationship with Mike Scanlon in February 2004. Two days later Abramoff’s firm got a call from
Senator John McCain calling for congressional hearings regarding the
accusations. It all went downhill from
there. Among other things Abramoff had broken the law by violating the gift ban to legislators, failing to register his representation of the Tiguas and not revealing to clients that he was sharing profits with Scanlon.
During the congressional hearing, while Abramoff plead the fifth, Senators Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Tim Johnson and Senator Campbell, “hurled invectives” while Jack wondered how they would react if he mentioned the thousands in campaign contributions they had received from him.
During his time in prison, Abramoff pondered over ways to reform the system. Firstly he believes contributions and gift-giving by anyone lobbying the government, participating in a federal contract, or otherwise financially benefiting from public funds, should be entirely eliminated. Next, post-public service employment “one of the biggest sources of corruption in government” needs to be eliminated and this ban on congresspersons and congressional staff members from entering any entity that lobbies the federal government should be for life. Another thing Abramoff insists on is that congresspersons should have term limits to prevent lobbyists and special interest groups from developing long term relationships with them.
Abramoff is not an entirely dislikable man. He claims to have been giving 80% of the
millions he was making to charities at one point and was purportedly responsible for funding
a school. He is similar in some ways to
my old boss Ross Mandell who is currently serving time in prison. Abramoff is capable of decent acts and he
wants to believe he is a good man but he is so blindly ambitious that when
confronted by a choice between his honor and his goals, he all too often folds to the
latter.
To deal with corruption in politics you need to cast a far wider net than one simply used to capture villains like Abramoff. The lobbying industry may be designed and regulated with the best of intentions but from a practical standpoint it ends up engendering immoral behavior. Thus the corruption must be blamed on both the perpetrator and on the lobbying industry. There are problems with the system itself. From now on I will call this "systemic corruption." Systemic corruption affects many industries from finance to healthcare. It happens when a professional's interests are not aligned with the interests of the people that an industry serves and/or affects. Many professionals can relate to a scenario where they get a job in an industry and find that the act of conducting business as usual creates financial incentives for them to act immorally. Over time and due to the competitive pressures of a business environment, those immoral actions can become ever more acceptable and commonplace. In some cases the wrongdoing can become so entrenched that it becomes difficult to compete in an industry without sullying your hands. Abramoff goes on to make this point himself at the end of the book. However, a misalignment of incentives is sometimes hard if not impossible to eliminate. Thus the onus will always be on a professional to ask himself/herself whether their conduct is morally correct, even when their conduct does not break rules. Abramoff plainly broke the law. Some of the Senators mentioned in this piece did not break the law but acted immorally by asking for money in exchange for their help which places the average citizen at a disadvantage to companies that can afford to deliver big handouts. Since one might reasonably argue that one cannot become a Senator without raising money in such a fashion, this potentially becomes an example of onerous systemic corruption. As you know my days as an executive on Wall Street have engendered a passion within me for the subject of corruption (by which I mean situations where rules are broken) and a fascination with the complex subject of "systemic corruption" as I shall call it (which is the problem with the rules.) I hope to be able to expand on this as time goes by.
I am Cecilia Mackie, MPhys and I worked on Wall Street for 10 years
where I rose to an executive level. The owners of a firm I worked at
are now in jail. Because of this experience I have avidly researched
corruption based issues over the last few years. Outside of this plog, I am building a tech platform which will allow people to
participate in a community for political change. The platform will have
a mechanism to allow our community to enact change within the world
of American politics. Stay tuned for this exciting development!
