Liberal Realism

NYT: The Israeli Lobby infiltrated two spies in US Government

According to an article from the New York Times, 4/21/09: "One of the leading House Democrats on intelligence matters was overheard on telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency agreeing to seek lenient treatment from the Bush administration for two pro-Israel lobbyists who were under investigation for espionage, current and former government officials say.

The lawmaker, Representative Jane Harman of California, became the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee after the 2002 election and had ambitions to be its chairwoman when the party gained control of the House in 2006. One official who has seen transcripts of several wiretapped calls said she appeared to agree to intercede in exchange for help in persuading party leaders to give her the powerful post.

One of the very few members of Congress with broad access to the most sensitive intelligence information, including aspects of the Bush administration's wiretapping that were disclosed in December 2005, Ms. Harman was inadvertently swept up by N.S.A. eavesdroppers who were listening in on conversations during an investigation, three current or former senior officials said. It is not clear exactly when the wiretaps occurred; they were first reported by Congressional Quarterly on its Web site…

MORE….

WAPO: The Lobbrycracy, exposed

 

In a remarkable illustration of the power of lobbying in Washington, a study released last week found that a single tax break in 2004 earned companies $220 for every dollar they spent on the issue -- a 22,000 percent rate of return on their investment.

More….

The Economist: Pentagon 2.0

A daring punt

Apr 8th 2009 
From The Economist print edition

Robert Gates changes the Pentagon's priorities

MORE men at the expense of machines; more drones rather than top-end fighter jets and future bombers; more helicopters for combat troops rather than a replacement for the presidential chopper; more coastal vessels and fewer aircraft-carriers; better cyberdefences, but scaled-back missile defences and laser weapons. In short, the new American defence budget would spend more on today's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and less to stave off future threats from China or Russia.

The proposals have delighted those who think America will fight irregular "small wars" for the foreseeable future, and horrified those who believe it must be ready to fight big conventional ones. John McCain thinks the 2010 budget is "a major step in the right direction". But a fellow Republican senator, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, muttered of "disarming America".

That is stretching the point. With a defence budget request of $534 billion next year (a 4% increase on this year), plus $130 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama administration is hardly cutting defence. But the priorities outlined on April 6th have the fervour of a new administration determined to do things differently—except that the man at the top is the man who ran the Pentagon in the last Bush years, Robert Gates.

How to explain the transformation in "Gates 2.0" as some pundits now call the defence secretary? To begin with, Mr Gates has spent the past two years trying to avert military failure, first in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, rather than taking on powerful constituencies over contracts for expensive equipment. He has given notice for nearly a year that the Pentagon's spending priorities would have to change to support its new emphasis on counter-insurgency. Moreover, the financial crisis means that America will not be able to spend more to equip itself both for small wars and for big ones. Mr Gates says the budget is "one of those rare chances to match virtue to necessity, to critically and ruthlessly separate appetites from real requirements". See article

 

The end of the “military industrial complex”?.....naaaa don’t think so

Interesting article from the Economist, march 21/09, called In the Line of Fire:

EXPERIENCE suggests that shares in defence companies can offer a safe haven for investors during periods of economic turbulence. During the previous two recessions, American defence shares outperformed the market. That is not surprising: more than any other industry, defence is a client of government. And governments set military budgets according to their involvement in wars and their perception of external threats—neither of which has much connection with the business cycle.

But in this downturn, something different is going on. So far this year the S&P 500 index has fallen by 14%, but defence shares have fallen by 22%. The cloud hanging over the industry is the gloomy conviction that after eight years of George Bush, during which the Pentagon's budget more than doubled to $666 billion, Barack Obama is determined to change things.

The reduction in spending is not exactly imminent. The budget for 2010, which will be announced next month, was largely set by the outgoing administration and will be close to 2009's $654 billion. Because of the winding down of operations in Iraq, the Office of Management and Budget currently expects a 4% increase in base funding over 2009—not exactly short rations. It is what will happen in the subsequent years that is worrying the industry.

He has not gone into specifics, but in the past few weeks Mr Obama has given glimpses of his thinking. At a White House fiscal-responsibility summit on February 23rd, he singled out the project to produce a new presidential helicopter as "an example of the procurement process gone amok", and assured his former rival, John McCain, that curbing procurement excesses was one his most urgent priorities. The next day, in a speech to Congress, Mr Obama promised to "reform our defence budget so that we're not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don't use."

On March 4th he went further. Citing a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found that 95 big weapons contracts were over budget by a total of $295 billion, he contrasted projects "designed to keep the American people safe" with those "designed to make a defence contractor rich."

Adding congressional firepower to the president's statement of intent is a bill introduced in February by Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Mr McCain, the committee's senior Republican. Its aim is to force the Pentagon to get tough with military contractors that fail to deliver the goods.

It seems clear that Mr Obama is willing to scale back or scrap projects that are of decreasing relevance to America's 21st-century security requirements, or have become embarrassing money pits. The VH-71 programme to replace the helicopters used to carry presidents around certainly falls into the embarrassing category. Lockheed Martin and its partner Augusta Westland, a subsidiary of Italy's Finmeccanica, are on course to supply 28 helicopters at a cost to taxpayers of $13.2 billion.

But more important are the really big-ticket items that are likely to face much tougher scrutiny under the new regime. The air force would like a second batch of F-22 fighters to add to the 187 it will already have by 2011. But after spending more than $62 billion so far on the Lockheed Martin/Boeing plane, spectacularly capable though it is, Mr Obama and Congress may decide that enough is enough. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is another programme that looks vulnerable. The GAO said this month that the total investment to acquire 2,456 planes and support them in service will exceed $1 trillion.

The GAO and the Pentagon are also at odds over the army's $159 billion Future Combat Systems (FCS) project, led by Boeing and SAIC, a systems integrator. The GAO reckons FCS is running about $21 billion over budget, and said last week that the programme had "spent about 60% of its development funds, even though the most expensive activities remain to be done before the production decision". Nobody would be surprised if Mr Obama opted for a cheaper, later and less ambitious version of FCS. The same applies to missile defence, only more so—Mr Obama is a declared sceptic about the whole idea.

Defence firms still have some attractions for investors. As Noah Poponak of Goldman Sachs points out, most have strong balance-sheets and cashflow, and the geopolitical landscape is no less threatening. And shares of European defence firms have not been hit as hard as those in America. Having largely missed out on Mr Bush's party, they are facing less of a hangover now. But with a military budget almost as big as the rest of the world's combined, even quite small changes in American defence spending have big consequences for the industry. Military spending moves in long cycles. After ten fat years, some lean ones are in store.

Recommended piece from New Yorker: Conflict of Interest

I really encourage people who is interested on interest group politics in US this article from New Yorker: Conflict of Interests, Does the wrangling of interest groups corrupt politics -or constitute it? It is a critic of two books on the problem of interest groups. The first, “The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures,” by Arthur Fisher Bentley, is the one that interest the most. Nicholas Lemann makes very ineteresting suggestion and reflections while critizising it.

My favorite part is:

Just before the table of contents in “The Process of Government,” on a page all alone, is the avowal “This book is an attempt to fashion a tool.” A century later, the tool that Arthur Bentley was attempting to fashion retains its utility, and not merely for understanding the American political system. (Those who believed in 2003 that Iraqi politics was best understood as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship, rather than as a struggle among groups, could have learned from him.) Bentley may have pressed his arguments too far, but, given our tendency to dismiss interest groups as the serpents in the political Eden that the Founders created, “The Process of Government” serves as an indispensable corrective.

When the reputation of Bentley’s masterpiece was at its peak, it was not just because he had fashioned a useful tool, of course; it was because many people saw pluralism as being not only accurate but attractive. To regain that perspective today requires an even greater undoing of deeply ingrained habits of thought. Pluralism, in the tradition of Bentley, requires that one see one’s own political passions, and those of such unimpeachable actors as winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and members of the Concord Coalition, as representing something other than the promptings of pure justice. That does not come naturally. One has to see that sincere talk of the public interest and the general good can be dangerous tools in the hands of people one disagrees with, if not in one’s own. (If you’re a liberal, reread President Bush’s second inaugural address, a grandiose exercise in public-interest rhetoric meant to lay the groundwork for waging the war on terror and privatizing Social Security.) One has to get over the habit of assuming that “interests,” and, worse, lobbying and corruption, are the province only of one’s political opponents, and not one’s allies. Pluralism means dialling down the moral stature that we attach to universalist arguments, and dialling up the moral stature of particularism.

Still, the pluralist vision does admit an element of justice. In any political system that gives people the freedom to organize and vote—and even, historically, in many systems that don’t—the logic of pluralism explains why those who do the hard, quotidian precinct work of politics will generally have more influence than those whose political participation is confined to writing, thinking, filing lawsuits, writing regulations, and spending money on media buys. In Bentley’s scheme, that’s all interest-group activity, but of the weaker “talk” (instead of the stronger “organization”) variety. Throughout American history, political organizing has been the means that outsiders—immigrants, farmers, African-Americans in the Reconstruction South, and, more recently, netroots activists on the left and evangelicals on the right—use to gain advantage against the more talk-oriented élites, who regard their political aims as corruption or special pleading. On the last page of “The Wrecking Crew,” Frank finally mentions what, from a pluralist perspective, would be the first order of business if you believe as passionately as he does that business-controlled conservative lobbyists are running Washington into the ground: organizing a political opposition. To be truly effective, though, such an opposition would have to muster its own army of Washington lobbyists. It’s tempting to think that just over the horizon lies a procedural reform that will lead to the lasting triumph of what looks to you like good government. But the truth is that the only way to defeat one set of interests is with another set of interests.

Government interventionism during US history

This a great interactive feature from the Wall Street Journal (linked to the image) on the "regulatory pendulum" of Governement interventionism during US history. Murdoch´s newspaper still hold its quality, despite that they repeat the same false statement I highlighted in my past post about the Fed being created by the pressure from progressives. Once again: It is not true, the Fed was created and it is owned by the big bankers.

WSJ says the left created the Fed. It is not true

The Wall Street Journal has published a really interesting article (Amid Turmoil, U.S. Turns Away From Decades of Deregulation) on how "housing and financial crisis convulsing the U.S. is powering a new wave of government regulation of business and the economy·". Is a really complete work with some good interactive features and a really extent coverage. Thought, it has a flaw on its historic recount of what it calls the "Regulatory Pendulum". It starts saying correctly:

The struggle between markets and the government is as old as the country itself. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton pushed for higher tariffs to protect nascent U.S. manufacturers, saying he wanted to preserve "a monopoly of the domestic market." That directly clashed with the get-the-government-off-our-back agrarianism of Thomas Jefferson.

Completely true, the struggle between protectionist and laissez affair liberals has been constant on US history. More on, protectionists were the winners of the ideological fight for a long time.

Then the article makes a huge historical mistake, as it says:

Since then, various crises have sent the pendulum swinging back and forth. The handling of the financial panic of 1907 -- when a private individual, banker J.P. Morgan, bailed out a floundering U.S. economy -- stirred so much political outrage on the left that in 1913 the government created the Federal Reserve to run the financial system

Yes, the enormous power of bankers was seen as threat on those days. The big corporations' dominance over US economy and politics were the cause of what is now known as the Progressive Movement.  It gave rise to much critical thinking on the issue of how to regulate the economic activities that could affect the people. What is false is to say that the Federal Reserve was created because of the pressure coming from the left. Wrong. Completely wrong. It was created by the same bankers that caused the crisis, to consolidate their power. JP Morgan among them. It was conceived during a secret meeting on private club of Jekyll Island. Sounds like a conspirator´s theory fantasy, but it is not. Make your own research. You may start by checking this documentary, it will tell a few things you may not know: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWKlz2Z4Nlo

 

That is why Woodrow Wilson say this after creating the Federal Reserve:

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

WSJ: Secrets contractors are not under any scrutiny

Iraq Case Sheds Light
On Secret Contractors

By SIOBHAN GORMAN and AUGUST COLE
July 17, 2008

When Dave Boone complained that his fellow security contractors in Iraq were stockpiling weapons and padding their expense reports, his company talked him out of quitting and promised to run a tighter ship.

Later, Mr. Boone reported that colleagues guarding U.S. spy personnel had fired shots into a Baghdad neighborhood and falsely claimed they defeated a horde of snipers. This time, the company fired him -- though two of its people backed up Mr. Boone's account. He has spent more than three years trying to get U.S. officials to investigate the incident.

Security contractors in Iraq have been in an intense spotlight since employees of another firm, Blackwater Worldwide, were involved in a shooting incident last fall that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, leading to a Justice Department investigation and efforts by the Iraqi government to clamp down on their actions. Overall, the U.S. has about the same number of contractors as military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But a fast-growing type of government contracting largely escapes such scrutiny: secret programs, or "black" contracts, assisting intelligence agents as they operate in war zones. These contractors have carried out some of the government's most sensitive work -- conducting interrogations, manning secret prisons and guarding spy-agency personnel. The programs' existence, size and scope are classified, and so are the details of their troubles.

HIDDEN PROTECTION

   

•  The Company: MVM has quickly grown to become one of the top providers of secret security to the CIA and NSA in Iraq and Afghanistan.

•  What's Happened: MVM has faced multiple charges from employees of mismanaging contracts, but according to former managers, it has not addressed the issues.

•  What's at Stake: Such secret programs, or 'black' contracts, often escape scrutiny because of their classified nature.

The House of Representatives Wednesday passed a broad bill tackling a wide range of intelligence policy issues, including tightening oversight of such contractors. It would force intelligence agencies to keep Congress better informed about their use as well as any formal probes into wrongdoing. But the legislation faces serious headwinds: The White House threatened a veto Wednesday, arguing that some of the provisions would hamper its spying operations.

Mr. Boone's little-known employer, MVM Inc., before 2001 mainly provided school and courthouse guards in U.S. cities. As the U.S. sought to supplant its own overstretched forces, MVM quickly grew to become one of the top few providers of secret security in Iraq and Afghanistan, alongside companies including Blackwater. MVM has handled much of the Central Intelligence Agency's and National Security Agency's personal security in war zones.

CIA Station

It's hard to assess the total of intelligence workers in Iraq because the numbers are classified. In addition to the 150,000 troops in Iraq, Baghdad has become the CIA's largest station overseas with officers estimated in the hundreds. The NSA, the super-secret electronic eavesdropping service, has significantly expanded its presence in Iraq.

MVM's entry into the security elite has been rocky. Mr. Boone is suing the firm over his firing after the 2004 shooting incident, which occurred after his team, while guarding NSA personnel, was hit with a car bomb. Mr. Boone contends the firm let him go rather than address a pattern of hazardous field management in the program, dubbed "Scorpion."

Scorpion team members, including Dave Boone at center, in Baghdad.

In court papers from the case, in federal district court in Colorado, MVM responds to Mr. Boone's claims about the shooting incident by saying the company "is without sufficient information to admit or deny the allegations...and therefore denies those allegations." A federal district court ruled against Mr. Boone's claim of wrongful termination on technical grounds; Mr. Boone is appealing.

Documents from the court case and other interviews provide a rare look into the troubles of MVM's classified security contracts. Other employees and managers have written detailed critiques of company operations. A member of the Scorpion team wrote lengthy notes about poor training, procedures and equipment. Two managers of another MVM program for the CIA -- a program then known as "Viper" -- wrote of similar problems there and said they got no response.

MVM, which had no comment on the managers' letter, has repeatedly been warned by U.S. officials that it hasn't provided adequate personnel under its contracts. MVM recently learned it could lose a big chunk of its Viper operation, now renamed "Panther," to rivals that have been invited to bid for it.

MVM MEMO

   

In August of 2004, Daniel Elissalde -- who worked for U.S. security contractor MVM and was a member of a project team called Scorpion -- sent a 16-page memo to the company's management. He later quit the company. Read edited excerpts of the memo.

The company's difficulties aren't unique, although its larger competitors can more easily absorb these kinds of problems. All firms face a finite number of highly skilled ex-soldiers, leaving many short of qualified personnel. Others have struggled to meet government standards because they're new to working in war zones. Contracting in a war zone is also an inherently unpredictable venture.

In an interview, MVM's chief executive, Dario Marquez, said the government has been satisfied with MVM's work. "We have a great working relationship with both these clients," he said, referring to the CIA and NSA. To buttress that point, MVM showed The Wall Street Journal a handwritten, favorable NSA review of the Scorpion program. But Mr. Marquez acknowledged that MVM, along with its rivals, has had personnel problems.

"Every contractor has a harder time finding these qualified people," he says. The NSA declined to comment about its experience with MVM, as did the CIA and the State Department.

MVM, of McLean, Va., was started in 1979 by three former Secret Service agents, who named the outfit with the first letter of each of their last names. Mr. Marquez bought out the other two and built a company specializing in protecting buildings. Shortly after the terror attacks of 9/11, the company's security business boomed. Demand for its domestic protection work soared as government buildings of all types sought more guards and gates.

The firm started to seek more overseas work and landed contracts with the Army and the Justice Department, the latter to protect scientists examining mass graves in Iraq. The company says its classified contracts for overseas intelligence operations have grown to represent 30% of the company's quick-rising revenue, bringing in $60 million last year. The company says it hopes to triple that total within five years. But MVM has run into problems with the way it manages both of its major classified programs.

In the runup to the Iraq war, MVM won the Viper contract, providing security for CIA officers overseas. After 18 months, some of its managers began to write MVM officials about problems. Two managers complained of poorly trained personnel, unresponsive senior management and weapons that went missing, in excerpts seen by the Journal. MVM Chief Financial Officer Joseph Morway attributes any equipment issues to "start-up" problems and declines to comment on the managers' letters.

In a deposition for Mr. Boone's lawsuit, a former Viper manager named Mark Adams said, "They couldn't keep track of their equipment, they didn't have an accounting system for it, they couldn't get their bills paid." The 15-year CIA protective-services veteran added, "In my opinion, they were putting people in harm's way out there...We had written several reports on the memos on these issues, and they were not well received."

Hurt by Turnover

MVM received CIA warnings about inadequate personnel on Viper in 2004 and again last year after the agency ratcheted up requirements that MVM had to meet, said current and former MVM managers. The program has been hurt by turnover, going through about 10 program managers during the past five years, three former managers said. Mr. Marquez discounted the significance of the turnover, saying that the "backbone of the company" was a group of experienced senior managers.

RELATED DOCUMENTS

   

• Read Dave Boone's complaint against MVM for wrongful termination and MVM's response.

• Read the official MVM after-action report from Nov. 20, 2004.

• Read Dave Boone's after-action report from the same incident.

• Read Mickey Johnson's version of events.

• Read MVM emails about the NSA judgment in the case and about Mr. Boone's termination.

• Read Mr. Boone's email to MVM CEO Dario Marquez.

• Read the NSA's repsonse to an inquiry from the office of Sen. Ted Stevens.

• Read the U.S. District Court of Colorado's decision in MVM's favor.

To rapidly fill empty slots, two former managers say, MVM has been offering bonuses in the tens of thousands of dollars to new hires, even for short-term commitments -- and even as it has reduced the daily pay it offers. Mr. Morway acknowledged that MVM and other companies have to offer bonuses to qualified applicants because "the pool is shrinking," yet competition for government contracts has lowered the pay they can offer. "There's pressure to bring down those salaries," he said.

Late last month, the CIA decided to rebid the bulk of MVM's contract -- one of MVM's biggest, say former managers. Blackwater and a small Nevada-based firm, SOC Inc., also currently have portions of the contract. Mr. Morway described the CIA's offer to other firms to split the work as a way to make staffing the program easier for the government and his company. Two former managers said the unusual move came after MVM regularly delivered between five to 30 fewer guards than required. Mr. Morway said that the company did have challenges meeting the staffing requirements but subsequently addressed them.

The State Department terminated a nonclassified MVM contract guarding the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2005, citing inadequate personnel in that case as well. Among the issues: The firm provided a crew of Peruvian guards who couldn't speak sufficient English, Mr. Marquez acknowledges. He says the State Department couldn't give MVM enough time to correct the problem. The State Department terminated the contract "for convenience," language that permitted MVM to win other federal contracts.

Mr. Boone first joined MVM in March 2004 for the Scorpion contract providing security in Iraq for NSA personnel. A 20-year veteran of the Army's Special Forces and an experienced sniper with tours in El Salvador and Bosnia, Mr. Boone retired from the Army in 1998 and began work as a contractor.

His first rotation in Scorpion didn't go well. He complained that teammates filed for reimbursement from the government for items they hadn't purchased, and stockpiled assault weapons. In a deposition, John Hickman, who later took over managing the Scorpion program and eased some people out, said many on the team at the time "weren't qualified. They were living a big lie; they were on a magic carpet ride."

Mr. Boone quit in June 2004. That summer, teammate Daniel Elissalde wrote a 16-page memo to MVM detailing his own concerns about Scorpion, saying that MVM's armored-car convoys traveled too close together, leaving them too vulnerable to attack; personnel obtained weapons on the black market and lacked night-vision goggles; and vehicles had chronic, basic problems such as broken door handles.

"I am now using the string attached to the keys to pull the door open," Mr. Elissalde wrote. "Sort of inconvenient but during the last rocket attack I did manage to get out of the car in reasonably quick time." He also wrote that NSA officials had learned of weapons stockpiling and told MVM contractors to stop. Then, like Mr. Boone, he quit.

MVM owned up to some of the problems Mr. Boone raised. Former Scorpion program manager Louis Sengebush described in a deposition how MVM addressed Mr. Boone's complaints and asked him to return. "We knew...he was experienced," he said. "He was a straight-up guy and I trusted him." Mr. Boone returned that September, thinking the problems were fixed, but they continued, he says.

Then on Nov. 20, 2004, as the Scorpion team returned from the Baghdad airport after dropping off an NSA officer, Mr. Boone and his five teammates were hit head-on by a car laden with explosives. The single blast totaled the team's two vehicles, as Mr. Elissalde had warned could happen. According to Mr. Boone and a report by teammate Mickey Johnson, the only potential enemy in the area was a young man whom Mr. Johnson said he ordered to the ground.

One teammate began firing indiscriminately into a nearby neighborhood, the two men say, and ceased only when an Army unit arrived at the scene. It was unclear whether anyone was hit. The Army says it cannot find its report on the incident.

Two team members produced what would become the firm's official "after-action" report for the NSA, complete with diagrams. It said the team was ambushed by between 20 and 30 enemy snipers whom they fended off, killing three of the enemy and wounding seven more.

Team leader Mike Pietragallo wrote a similar report to the agency, but in his deposition for the Boone case he said he didn't see any snipers. He didn't respond to requests for comment. The authors of the official report couldn't be reached.

Claims of Coverup

Mr. Boone contends the report was a coverup meant to camouflage incompetence. In January 2005 he took his concerns to MVM's upper management. Bruce Tully, then a senior MVM manager at the time, conducted an investigation, according to Mr. Tully's deposition. He concluded Mr. Boone's version of events was the most credible.

Of the official report, Mr. Tully said in his deposition, "My personal and professional opinion is, I just don't believe this." Photos of the vehicles showed no bullet holes, he pointed out. No further records have surfaced of the Iraqi casualties or captives the report describes.

MVM's Mr. Marquez says the matter of the disputed report "was adjudicated" by MVM and the NSA, but wouldn't say how or provide further details. "I'm not going to tell you what's accurate and what wasn't," he says, adding the matter was mainly up to the NSA to resolve.

The NSA says it's up to the company. Mr. Boone got no response from the agency when he tried to report his concerns to its inspector general. The agency wrote Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, whose office tried to intercede for Mr. Boone, that it wouldn't pursue the matter, which it called an employer-employee dispute.

In February, Judge Edward W. Nottingham of the federal district court in Colorado ruled against Mr. Boone's claim of wrongful termination on technical grounds. Mr. Boone is appealing. The Pentagon's inspector general began a preliminary review in May. The office of Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of a powerful House watchdog committee, initially didn't respond to Mr. Boone, but recently a spokeswoman said the office was opening a "preliminary investigation."

The Power of Lobby in Europe goes under no control

Legaltoday.com: La Lobbycracia Europea

Aparicio Caicedo,
analista del Gertrude Ryan Law Observatory

En Estados Unidos, la industria farmacéutica rompió un nuevo record en 2007. Ha empleado más de 168 millones de dólares en persuadir a los más influyentes legisladores de la nación norteamericana sobre la política sanitaria más "apropiada" para sus ciudadanos. Por otro lado, en suelo europeo, Telefónica ha sido la primera multinacional en suscribir el registro de lobbistas en Bruselas, ha declarado que el año pasado ha gastado casi un millón de euros en defender sus intereses ante la tecnocracia comunitaria. Dos incidentes que poco tendrían en común si no fuera porque ponen de relieve la creciente influencia de los grupos de poder corporativo en los altos centros mundiales de decisión.

La vinculación directa del mundo empresarial en el proceso político es una práctica de mucha tradición en Estados Unidos y puede decirse incluso que es tan americana como el pie de manzana. A finales del siglo XIX se originó una profunda transformación en las relaciones institucionales entre la clase empresarial y los dirigentes políticos del Congreso estadounidense, iniciándose un fenómeno conocido como pressure politics. Tras el avance de las telecomunicaciones y el transporte, proliferaron asociaciones y colectivos empresariales por todo el territorio. Las empresas localizadas en distintos puntos geográficos del país, antes prácticamente incomunicadas entre sí, empezaron a cobrar conciencia de sus intereses comunes y de los beneficios derivados de actuar en forma conjunta frente a los órganos del gobierno federal.  Sociedades de todo tipo incurrieron en este nuevo modus operandi, desde productores agrícolas hasta la industria del acero. En adelante, esto permitió a los colectivos corporativos ejercer presión política de forma más coordinada y eficaz. No obstante, es en años recientes que esta vinculación ha adquirido matices alarmantes. Según Public Citizen, más del 40 por ciento de los legisladores que abandonaron el Capitolio desde 1998 hasta 2005 fueron reclutados luego por las grandes firmas de lobbistas en Washington.

Nunca ha estado completamente definida la frontera entre el lobbyism y la corrupción pura y dura. Y esto ha sido objeto de un frenético análisis por parte de académicos, activistas y políticos en Estados Unidos. Se trata de grupos industriales buscando la adopción de medidas proteccionistas, de asociaciones campesinas luchando por la obtención de cuantiosos subsidios agrícolas, contratistas militares en puja por jugosos pactos con el Pentágono, grupos étnicos (como el lobby israelí o el de los indios americanos), movimientos religiosos, etc. Es muy difícil definir cuándo, quién y cómo se traspasan los límites de la ética. Todos tienen derecho a defender sus valores e intereses frente al gobierno. El problema comienza con los grupos corporativos que buscan comprometer a los encargados de la toma de decisiones para satisfacer sus propios intereses, a costa del bien común. El escándalo protagonizado por Jack Abramoff, otrora todopoderoso lobbista muy cercano a la jerarquía del Partido Republicano, destapó hace pocos años una caja de Pandora que parece no tener fondo. Sobornos, lujosas invitaciones, regalos inconcebibles: esas son sólo algunas de las fórmulas utilizadas por los empresarios para compensar las gestiones de congresistas y senadores. El caso Abramoff fue sensacional, puso de manifiesto toda la suciedad que se escondía bajo la alfombra, y aún hoy las investigaciones siguen cobrando víctimas.

Todos saben que si quieres algo de Washington, no hay que escatimar a la hora de pagar los elevados honorarios que demandan los "mediadores" profesionales con contactos apropiados en el Capitolio, la Casa Blanca o donde se los necesite. Los más solicitados son, generalmente, legisladores y funcionarios retirados que aprovechan su cercanía y acceso privilegiado para pedir favores y lucrar por ello. Sin embargo, pocos sospechan que precisamente lo mismo sucede en el Viejo Continente. Los ejemplos son cada vez más numerosos. En terreno ibérico tenemos, como muestra reciente, el caso de Eduardo Zaplana. Telefónica sabe que no todos los caminos llevan a Roma y, por ello, muchos señalan que fichó al antiguo vocero del PP, cercano a Silvio Berlusconi, para afianzar la estabilidad de sus inversiones en Italia.

¿Qué pasa si descubriésemos que en las herméticas esferas del poder europeo se escuchan sólo las voces de las grandes empresas? Pues bien, cada vez más personas se lo están preguntando, y con razón. Hay más de 15.000 lobistas en Bruselas. La capital belga es el segundo centro de poder político con más lobistas después de Washington. Son hombres y mujeres que se ganan la vida buscando que los euro-funcionarios tomen las decisiones que más favorezcan a sus clientes. Se trata de decisiones que afectan la vida de todos. No existe control alguno sobre su actividad. ¿Tendremos uno o varios Abramoffs europeos pululando en el Parlamento o la Comisión? Nadie lo sabe. Y ello se debe a que, al contrario de lo que sucede al otro lado del Atlántico, nadie los supervisa. Precisamente ello motivó a un grupo de activistas a formar la coalición ALTER-EU, orientada a proponer reformas normativas que regulen la actividad de los eurolobbyist. En Estados Unidos, si bien el problema está lejos de resolverse, existe ya un conjunto de normas e instituciones que han permitido que se descubran importantes affairs de corrupción como el antes descrito. Y, lo más importante, se ha logrado que sus protagonistas reciban el castigo que merecen. ALTER-EU no se manifiesta conforme con los tímidos proyectos, actualmente en práctica, de establecer un programa de registro voluntario de lobbistas. Sus responsables señalan que todas sus iniciativas han sido paralizadas por la pesada impronta de algunas asociaciones poco acostumbradas a la claridad en su accionar.

Son muy variadas las razones que han llevado al enquistamiento de los lobbistas en Bruselas. En algunas ocasiones se trata de una simple falta de escrúpulos y en otras de  mera necesidad técnica. No obstante, una de las causas primarias es que estos agentes privados facilitan enormemente el trabajo de una sobrecargada tecnocracia. Los lobbistas lo saben, y con sus abultadas cuentas de gastos no escatiman en la elaboración de informes técnicos, propuestas legislativas y todo lo que consideren necesario para agradar a los servidores públicos que puedan satisfaces sus aspiraciones. Todo ello es bienvenido por una burocracia incapaz de desdoblarse para cumplir con una abrumadora carga de tareas. Sin embargo, no por ello hay que renunciar a la transparencia y el establecimiento de parámetros más rígidos de control sobre la veracidad y objetividad de la información proporcionada por los grupos de interés. Hasta entonces, el ciudadano común seguirá confiando en los causes institucionales, hipnotizado por las formulaciones abstractas de un contrato social que es quebrantado día a día. ¿Qué hacemos? ¿A quién tenemos que invitar a almorzar?

Obama and the Ethano Lobby

Obama says he will cut down the influence of the interest groups on government. So, will he cut all his ties with the ethanol industry, and especially with corn growers? Remember that one the problems of the high prices of corn is the biofuels campaign, and that corn is the most inefficient sources of fuel. According to the New York Times:

Mr. Obama is running as a reformer who is seeking to reduce the influence of special interests. But like any other politician, he has powerful constituencies that help shape his views. And when it comes to domestic ethanol, almost all of which is made from corn, he also has advisers and prominent supporters with close ties to the industry at a time when energy policy is a point of sharp contrast between the parties and their presidential candidates. More