2022 was the first year that saw federal lobbyists spend over a billion dollars. The increased in 2022 and again this year, which isn’t even half over! There are over 10,000 registered federal lobbyists who are spreading that money around. The 10 top spenders in 2023 were:
US Chamber of Commerce- $69,580,000
National Association of Realtors- $52,395,289
American Hospital Association- $30,218,230
Blue Cross/Blue Shield- $28,589,340
PRMA- $27,628,000
American Medical Association- $21,215,000
Amazon - $19,860,000
Business Roundtable- $19,740,000
Meta (Facebook, Instagram…)- $19,300,000
CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association)- $17,180,000
Last cycle most of the biggest recipients of loot from lobbyists and their families were senators. This list is just the dozen worst crooks in the House (leaving out the crooks who ran for Senate):
Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) $607,793
Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)- $321,766
Liz Cheney (R-WY)- $314,190
Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)- $254,905
Ken Calvert (R-CA)- $236,763
Richard Neal (D-MA)- $229,157
Darin LaHood (R-IL)- $219,299
Vern Buchanan (R-FL)- $218,800
Frank Pallone (D-NJ)- $209,300
Steve Scalise (R-LA)- $196,015
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)-167,789
Drew Ferguson (R-GA)- $167,710
Patrick McHenry (R-NC)- 162,350
Foreign countries also lobby in a very big and very corrupt way. The 10 biggest spenders— each an aggregate since 2016:
China- $418,037,420
Japan- $249,994,382
Liberia- $301,061,913
South Korea- $293,200,802
Saudi Arabia- $261,592,296
Marshall Islands- $259,782,390
Qatar- $244,207,165
Bahamas- $238,342,390
UAE- $217,570,369
Israel- $181,571,521
The Mullins brothers— Brody, an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering business, lobbying and campaign finance, and Luke, a Politico writer covering the people and institutions that control Washington’s levers of power— have a new book, The Wolves Of K Street: The Secret History off How big Money Took Over Big Government, coming out tomorrow. Brody was part of the team that won the 2023 investigative reporting Pulitzer Prize for revealing financial conflicts of interest among officials at 50 federal agencies who bought and sold stocks of companies they were tasked with regulating. That was one part of the Swamp. K Street is another.
Lloyd Green reviewed the book over the weekend: how lobbying swallowed Washington. Lobbying was a $4.3 billion industry last year. America would be a far better place if— when the Supreme Court rules that a president has absolute immunity— Biden had every lobbyist rounded up and peremptorily shot in the head. There’s a problem with that though… half his family are lobbyists. Green wrote that the book is a smoothly written, meticulously researched and mesmerizing, 600 page “graduate seminar on how lobbying emerged and became a behemoth, an adjunct of government itself, taking its collective name from the street north of the White House where many of its biggest earners sit.
The book, wrote Green, “begins as a true-crime story. The suicide of Evan Morris, a lobbyist for big pharma, takes center stage. In the opening scene of the book, at a posh Virginia golf club on a balmy evening in July 2015, Morris, 38, turns a gun on himself. The seemingly almost idyllic backdrop to his death is actually a tableau of excess, complete with $150,000 initiation fees, an abandoned Porsche, an emptied bottle of $1,500 bordeaux and a scenic sunset. Millions of corporate dollars were missing and untaxed. An anonymous letter and an FBI investigation helped ignite Morris’s untimely and violent end. ‘The allegations would touch off a years-long case,’ the brothers Mullins write. Morris’ wife and estate settled with Genentech, his employer, the Internal Revenue Service and the commonwealth of Virginia. The government never charged anyone with a crime. Death had taken its toll.”
The Wolves of K Street is about way more than just one man. It is an engrossing lesson in how lunch-bucket sensibilities and the accommodation between big business and the New Deal gave way to neoliberalism, corporate activism and the decline of industrial unions.
The Democratic Party, to name just one major part of American life, would never be the same again. The Mullins brothers are keenly aware of the social forces that buffet and drive US politics. They recall how Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 left the party of FDR, Truman and JFK to wonder how it was no longer the political home of working-class America. Democrats wonder to this day.
The Wolves of K Street traces how the US reached this point, and lobbying attained its present stature, by following “three lobbying dynasties— one Republican, two Democratic— over the critical period from the 1970s to today, when the modern lobbying industry was created, corporate interests came to power in Washington, and the nature of our economy was fundamentally changed.”
The late Tommy Boggs, son of Hale Boggs, once a Democratic House majority leader, stands out as the patriarch and pioneer of Democratic lobbying. His name came to grace Patton, Boggs and Blow, a storied DC law firm now subsumed in Squire Patton Boggs, a sprawling global entity nominally based in Ohio. Evan Morris stood out as Boggs’s “prized pupil”— or apostle.
Next came the Republicans: Charlie Black, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and the late Lee Atwater, who would manage the 1988 presidential campaign of George HW Bush.
“[They] used their links to the Reagan revolution to erect Washington’s signature GOP house of lobbying,” the Mullins write. “Each member of the partnership had his own distinct role.”
Together, they bridged the gap between corner offices and the universe of conservative activists. Furthermore, Donald Trump was a client of Black, Manafort and Stone. Stone helped boost Maryanne Trump Barry, the property magnate’s late sister, on to the federal bench.
That history is why Manafort and Stone emerged as part of Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016; why the pair were caught in the special counsel’s net when it came time to investigate Russia’s attempts to help Trump; why they received presidential pardons before Trump left office; and why they stand to be back for one more rodeo as Trump runs for the White House again.
Tony Podesta, brother of the Democratic White House veteran John Podesta, is the keystone of the third lobbying dynasty examined by Brody and Luke Mullins, an “avant-garde political fixer [who] used his experience as a brass-knuckled liberal activist to advance the interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.”
The paths taken by Manafort and Podesta would eventually entwine. Out of the limelight, Manafort came to represent the interests of Ukraine’s anti-NATO Party of Regions and its head, Viktor Yanukovych. In 2012, seeking to stave off sanctions, Manafort enlisted Podesta to his cause.
“I used to call them the dynamic duo,” Rick Gates, Manafort’s convicted acolyte, tells the Mullins brothers.
…The Wolves of K Street ends on a weary note: “No matter what new obstacles have emerged, K Street has always managed to invent new ways to exercise its power over Washington,” the Mullins brothers conclude. “New fortunes to be made, new rules to be broken. New stories to be told.”
Over the weekend, Politico Magazine published a piece by the Mullins brothers, The Many Reinventions of a Legendary Washington Influence Peddler, about influencer peddler Jim Courtovich, who was excited about Trump’s pledge to drain teh swamp. “Trump’s victory,” they wrote, “would touch off the most dramatic reshuffling of K Street’s pecking order since the conservative revolution of 1980. The Democratic lobbyists who’d expected to flourish under a Hillary Clinton administration were now out in the cold, and the Republican lobbying establishment had almost no relationship with Trump. Suddenly every wheeler-dealer in the city was racing to make friends in Trump’s orbit, portraying themselves as longtime backers of the MAGA movement, even if they weren’t, and creating new strategies for getting what they wanted out of the president-elect. Washington’s entire lobbying industry, it seemed, was reinventing itself overnight. Reinvention was something that Courtovich had mastered years ago... [L]ike the Washington swamp itself, he always managed to survive.”
If trump did not drain the swamp, that means that obamanation gave the swamp over to him. And he gave it over to biden. And I've never seen or heard anyone with even a hallucination that biden did anything to drain the swamp that trump did not drain. And it is very reasonable and expected that neither of them will do shit to drain anything next admin.
so... what's all this "drain the swamp" all about anyway?
voters COULD drain the swamp. just quit electing swamp critters (both parties). but as long as voters look to the money to tell them who to elect... the swamp will be perpetual.
that's the fatal flaw in democracy. voters too stupid to elect benevolent leadership. also too stupid to understand their own stupidity is the real problem.