“Maybe senators should be like NASCAR drivers and have to have jackets with the names of all the people who are sponsoring them. Wouldn’t that be cool?” the late comedian Robin Williams once joked. “Then you might have a clue as to why the fuck they voted that way.”
Williams was referring to politicians beholden to Big Pharma who successfully watered-down President Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act back in 2009, but had Williams’ proposal been in place this month, folks might have noticed that nearly every Democratic senator who caved on the government shutdown also received significant campaign contributions from airline companies. After weeks of stalemate, the deal finally materialized as the shutdown began to affect traffic at the nation’s airports.
“The air travel industry spent more than $2.8 million via their Political Action Committees trying to influence the last election,” reports The Lever, a reader-supported investigative news source, “and since 2019, $842,500 went to seven of the eight lawmakers who flipped their vote to reopen the government without securing extended Affordable Care Act subsidies.”
Post-capitulation, millions of Americans are expected to witness their health insurance premiums skyrocket or lose coverage altogether.
In other words, we’re a long ways, corruption-wise, from the days when President-elect Jimmy Carter gave up managing his peanut farm to eschew potential conflicts of interest.
“We have the best political system right now that private money can buy,” David Sirota, who founded The Lever, said last month on the Current Affairs podcast.
Sirota has carved out a niche for himself as the anti-corruption guy and pulls no punches in exposing perceived graft among Democrats and Republicans alike.
“What we have previously called corruption is now in a lot of ways understood to be just politics … just the way things work,” he lamented. “Politicians who run for office are now presumed to be donor-connected, donor-financed candidates whose specialty is not necessarily any legislative expertise, but raising money … with the expectation of legislative favors.”
Need more proof? The fossil fuel industry has secured nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies over the next decade, according to a report by Oil Change International, a research organization pushing for a transition to cleaner energy. In comparison, the industry spent just $219 million on political contributions. That’s a return on investment well over 15,000%.
Turns out, corruption is the pollution those who care about environmental stewardship ought to worry about most.
“One of the best ways to protect public lands [from being sold off for drilling] is basic ethics reforms and preventing policymakers from profiting off of their office,” Toni Aguilar Rosenthal, a senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project, told the Sierra Club this month.
Revolving Door is a watchdog group that, while not legally allowed to sew logos on executive branch appointees, does the legwork to trace their corporate affiliations.
The powerful reach of West Texas fracking billionaire Tim Dunn, for instance, “is particularly insane,” Rosenthal explained, “and can be encapsulated in the fact that [Secretary of Agriculture] Brooke Rollins isn’t even the only cabinet member coming from the Dunn-backed think-tank world.”
Indeed, the heads of the EPA, the Education Department and Housing and Urban Development along with the U.S. Attorney General “all have some former association and/or title with the America First Policy Institute,” of which Dunn is a board member. “That paints an extremely concerning picture about the influence that a single person and a single corporation can have.”
Corruption, of course, can be notoriously difficult to catch red-handed, and the burden of proof already favors the wealthy, who can afford to lawyer up and take advantage of loopholes.
That’s why it’s key to insist that those with sway in our society avoid even the impression of impropriety, why judges and justices should recuse themselves from deciding cases in which they have a financial stake, why science journals should tell you who funded their studies and why members of Congress should be barred from trading stocks.
But the problem goes deeper than appearances.
“Imagine a CEO of a modern multinational corporation with $100 million to invest,” Zephyr Teachout, a professor of law specializing in antitrust at Fordham University, wrote several years back. “She can choose to invest the money in decreasing the cost of producing the product, or she can invest the money in changing the laws to decrease the corporate tax rate [through] a combination of campaign contributions, direct lobbying, media strategy and co-authored white papers.”
Most estimates predict the former strategy will deliver a return on investment of 5% while the latter delivers 50%, although it “decreases essential tax revenue for schools,” according to Teachout.
“We would expect the CEO to engage in the second strategy,” the professor concluded.
If Company A dumps toxic waste in the river and Company B springs for costly eco-conscious disposal, A is likelier to put a lower-priced product in front of cash-strapped customers while B is likelier to lose market share and go bankrupt.
Absent alert regulators or intrepid journalists, the public may never know.
In a poignant piece for the Southern magazine Scalawag, Texas native Danielle Monique Brown described the aftermath of the March 2019 chemical fire at a tank farm owned by Intercontinental Terminals Company (ITC) in the Houston area’s Deer Park suburb.
“My mother and a few of her siblings were among the thousands affected by the ITC fire and its aftermath,” Brown wrote. “She developed a chronic cough and, as the years passed, she suffered multiple cases of pneumonia and bronchitis. Having worked for decades as a caregiver, she found herself struggling to catch her breath during regular tasks like lifting a client.”
Cynics can probably guess the rest of the story.
A report from the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CBS) found that the fire was linked to ITC’s safety shortcomings, which the board had advised the company to remedy before the blaze. “Perhaps they felt it was more cost-efficient to just deal with the fallout in the event of an emergency,” Brown added.
“Many of Texas’ conservative legislators, who often live far away from the spills and explosions, worked hard to undermine the Environmental Protection Agency in order to keep safety regulations loose and the state ‘business-friendly,’” she continued, stating the sadly obvious. “They look away and, in exchange, their pockets are lined and their campaigns robustly funded.”
Even Republicans like to breathe clean air and drink clean water though, and it appears at least one is getting in on the fight. Arch-conservative GOP State Sen. Donna Campbell of New Braunfels recently urged Texas environmental regulators to deny a wastewater discharge permit tied to the San Antonio area’s Guajolote Ranch housing development.
That project would release millions of gallons of treated sewage over the Helotes Creek watershed in northwest Bexar County.
“In a sharply worded letter addressed to Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Campbell said the permit threatens groundwater quality, endangered species habitats and public health,” TV station KSAT reports. “She also questioned the agency’s permitting process.”
Welcome to the party, comrade.
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