[[link removed]]
THE REAL ‘DEEP STATE’
[[link removed]]
Franklin Foer
May 29, 2024
The Atlantic
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
_ Lobbying firms have disguised their influence so well that it’s
often barely visible even to savvy Washington insiders. _
, Pablo Delcan
On march 18, news broke that Donald Trump intended to restore the
disgraced lobbyist Paul Manafort to the ranks of his campaign
advisers. In any other moral universe, this would have been an
unimaginable rehabilitation. Back in 2016, as revelations about
Manafort’s work on behalf of pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine
began appearing in the press, even Trump considered him a figure so
toxic that he forced him to resign as chair of his campaign. Two years
later, Manafort was locked up in federal prison on charges of tax
evasion and money laundering, among other transgressions. His was one
of the most precipitous falls in the history of Washington.
But at this stage in that history, it’s not remotely shocking to
learn that the revolving door continues to turn. By the end of
Trump’s term, Manafort had already won a presidential pardon. His
unwillingness to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s
investigation had earned him Trump’s unstinting admiration: “Such
respect for a brave man,” he tweeted. Now it seemed that
Manafort’s loyalty would be rewarded with the lobbyist’s most
valuable tool: the perception of access, at an opportune moment.
In early May, under growing media scrutiny for international
consulting work that he’d reportedly been involved in after his
pardon, Manafort said that he would “stick to the sidelines
[[link removed]],”
playing a less visible role in supporting Trump. (He’d recently been
in Milwaukee, part of meetings about this summer’s Republican
National Convention programming.) But if Trump wins the election,
Manafort won’t need 2024 campaign work officially on his résumé to
convince corporations and foreign regimes that he can bend U.S. policy
on their behalf—and he and his ilk will be able to follow through
on such pledges with unimpeded ease. A second Trump term would mark
the culmination of the story chronicled by the brothers Luke and Brody
Mullins, a pair of energetic reporters, in their absorbing new
book, _The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money
Took Over Big Government_
[[link removed]].
As Trump dreams about governing a second time, he and his inner circle
have declared their intention to purge what they call the “deep
state”: the civil service that they regard as one of the greatest
obstacles to the realization of Trump’s agenda. What they don’t
say is that the definition of the deep state—an entrenched force
that wields power regardless of the administration in the White
House—now fits the business of lobbying better than it does the
faceless bureaucracy. This is the deep state, should Trump emerge the
victor in the fall, that stands to achieve near-total domination of
public power.
Lobbying, like Hollywood and Silicon Valley, is a quintessentially
American industry. The sector took root along the K Street corridor of
gleaming glass-and-steel buildings in downtown D.C. during the 1970s.
Though accurately capturing the scale of its growth is hard, a study
by George Mason University’s Stephen S. Fuller Institute reported
that, in 2016, the “advocacy cluster” employed more than 117,000
workers in metropolitan Washington
[[link removed]] (that’s
more than the population of Manchester, New Hampshire). In theory,
lobbying is a constitutionally protected form of redressing
grievances. Businesses have every right to argue their case in front
of government officials whose policies affect their industries. In
practice, lobbying has become a pernicious force in national life,
courtesy of corporate America, which hugely outspends other
constituencies—labor unions, consumer and environmental
groups—on an enterprise now dedicated to honing ever more
sophisticated methods of shaping public opinion in service of its own
ends.
In the late ’60s, only about 60 registered lobbyists were working in
Washington. Most businesses, during the decades of postwar prosperity,
didn’t see the point in hiring that sort of help.
The forerunners of the modern lobbyist were Tommy “The Cork”
Corcoran, a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust,
and Clark Clifford, who ran President Harry Truman’s poker games.
Both men left jobs in government to become freelance fixers, working
on behalf of corporate behemoths (the United Fruit Company, for
example, and General Electric). Mystique was essential to their
method. Corcoran kept his name out of the phone book and off his
office door. If a company was bothered by a nettlesome
bureaucrat—or wanted help overthrowing a hostile Central
American government—they were the men ready to pick up the phone and
make it so.
But Corcoran and Clifford were anomalous figures. In the late ’60s,
only about 60 registered lobbyists were working in Washington. Most
businesses, during the decades of postwar prosperity, didn’t see the
point in hiring that sort of help. Management was at peace with labor.
Corporations paid their taxes, while reaping ample profits. Then along
came Ralph Nader, a young Harvard Law School graduate who ignited the
modern consumer movement. By dint of his fervent advocacy, he managed
to rally Congress to pass the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle
Safety Act in 1966, which led automakers to install headrests and
shatter-resistant windshields. Nader, a scrappy upstart,
single-handedly outmaneuvered the great General Motors.
Slow to register an emerging threat, corporate America sat
complacently on the sidelines while an expansive new regulatory state
emerged, posing a potential obstacle to business imperatives: The
Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, followed by
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration the next year, and
the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1972. Meanwhile, in 1971, a
lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, named Lewis Powell urged a
counterrevolution [[link removed]],
writing a memo that called on the corporate world to build the
infrastructure that would cultivate pro-business intellectuals and
amass political power to defend the free market. Later that year,
Richard Nixon named him to the Supreme Court.
A figure from outside the conservative orbit became the ground
commander of the corporate cause in the capital. Tommy Boggs was the
son of the legendary Hale Boggs, a Democratic congressman from
Louisiana. The Great Society was, in no small measure, Hale’s
legislative handiwork, and Washington was in Tommy’s blood. (As a
boy, he ran House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s private elevator in the
Capitol.) He saw how he could become a successor to Corcoran and
Clifford, but on a far grander scale. After a failed run for Congress
in 1970, he devoted himself to expanding the lobbying firm Patton
Boggs.
Boggs mobilized a grand corporate alliance (including television
networks, advertising agencies, and food conglomerates) to roll back
the liberal state—and then ferociously used his connections on his
clients’ behalf. M&M’s and Milky Way (he was working for the Mars
candy company) were among the beneficiaries of a major victory. Jimmy
Carter’s Federal Trade Commission had threatened to regulate the
advertising of candy and sugar-heavy cereals directed at kids. Boggs
sent the deputy editor of _The Washington Post_’s editorial page,
Meg Greenfield, material about the horrors of this regulation. The
newspaper then published an editorial with the memorable headline
“The FTC as National Nanny
[[link removed]].”
Senators thundered against the absurdity of the new vigilance. The FTC
abandoned its plans.
Boggs ignited not just a revolution in American government, but a
cultural transformation of Washington. Before his ascent, patricians
with boarding-school pedigrees sat atop the city’s social hierarchy,
disdainful of pecuniary interests and the ostentatious flaunting of
wealth. Boggs, very highly paid to work his wonders, rubbed his
success in Washington’s face. He would cruise around town in one of
the firm’s fleet of luxury cars with a brick-size mobile phone
plastered to his face, a cigar dangling from his mouth.
The story that unfolds in _The Wolves of K Street _features an
ironic twist: Liberal activists figured out how to mobilize the public
to care about important issues and how to inspire them to become
democratically engaged. K Street fixers saw this success, then adapted
the tactics to serve the interests of corporations. In the
Mullinses’ narrative, this evolution found its embodiment in Tony
Podesta. An activist who came of age during the anti-war movement of
the 1960s and a veteran of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential
campaign, Podesta made his name running the TV producer Norman
Lear’s group People for the American Way, a progressive
counterweight to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. In 1987, Podesta
helped rally the left to sink Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s Supreme
Court nominee.
Not long after, Podesta left the world of public-interest advocacy and
began to sell his expertise—at first primarily to liberal groups,
then almost exclusively to businesses. Using the techniques he learned
while working with Lear, he specialized in deploying celebrity figures
to influence public attitudes, counting on citizen sentiment to in
turn sway politicians. To block the FDA from regulating vitamins in
1993 (his client was a group of dietary-supplement manufacturers), he
cut an ad with the actor Mel Gibson that depicted a SWAT team busting
him at home for possessing vitamin C. “Call the U.S. Senate and tell
them that you want to take your vitamins in peace,” Gibson said in a
voice-over.
With stunning speed, Podesta—a bon vivant who went on to amass one
of Washington’s most impressive private collections of contemporary
art—had gone from excelling in impassioned advocacy to becoming
promiscuous in his choice of client. To fund his lifestyle, the
Mullinses write, he helped Lockheed Martin win approval of the sale of
F-16s to Pakistan, even though the Indian government, another client
of the Podesta Group, opposed the deal. He represented the tire
manufacturer Michelin and its competitor Pirelli. Over the objections
of his staff, he joined forces with Paul Manafort to polish the image
of Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt pro-Kremlin politician who ruled
Ukraine until a revolution ousted him in 2014.
As K Street boomed, the Mullinses show, its denizens remade American
life well beyond Washington culture. They report that the firm Black,
Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, also a central player in their book, aided
the Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch in overcoming regulatory
obstacles and extending his corrosive media empire in the United
States. In the ’80s, the firm became masters at deregulating
industries and securing tax breaks for the powerful—$130 million for
Bethlehem Steel, $58 million for Chrysler, $38 million for Johnson &
Johnson—helping to usher in an age of corporate impunity and gaping
inequality.
_T__he wolves of k street__ _is full of cautionary tales about the
normalization of corruption. Revolving-door practices—leaving
government jobs and parlaying insider connections into lucrative
lobbying work—became part of the system. Meanwhile, the culture
fueled fraudulent self-aggrandizing of the sort on lurid display in
the sad case of a relatively fringe figure named Evan Morris. A kid
from Queens who first arrived in town as a college intern in the
Clinton White House, he quickly grasped that K Street represented the
city’s best path to power and wealth. He scored a coveted job at
Tommy Boggs’s firm while in law school, arriving just as lobbyists
became essential cogs in a whole new realm: the machinery of
electioneering.
The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002—campaign-finance legislation
intended to wean the political system off big donors—prevented
corporations and individuals from writing massive checks to political
parties. Unable to rely as heavily on big donors, campaigns were happy
to outsource to lobbyists the arduous job of rounding up smaller
contributions from the wealthy: Lobbyists became “bundlers,” in
fundraising parlance. As a 20-something, Morris proved to be one of
the Democratic Party’s most exuberant solicitors, promising donors
VIP access to events that he couldn’t provide, or intimating that he
was asking on behalf of Boggs himself, which he wasn’t. Despite his
relative inexperience, he managed to schmooze with the likes of Chuck
Schumer and Hillary Clinton.
He went on to work for Roche, a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, and
hatched a kind of campaign that he described as “black ops.” Amid
the bird-flu outbreak of 2005, the Mullinses write, he began urging
the government to stockpile the antiviral medication that Roche
produced. He hired consultants to promote news stories that stoked
public panic about the bird flu. He compiled studies touting the
benefits of the drug, including some written by people who had at one
point received money from Roche. The government bought more than $1
billion worth of the antiviral.
Morris’s job was to bend perception—and he also tried to bend the
way that Washington perceived him. In 2009, he was hired to head the
Washington office of Genentech, a Roche subsidiary. He became
relentlessly acquisitive: three Porsches, multiple Cartiers and
Rolexes, humidors filled with the finest cigars. Apparently, many of
Morris’s extravagant purchases were bought with Genentech’s money,
including a condo in San Francisco and a GMC Yukon.
Such a brazen scheme didn’t escape his superiors’ notice. While
being presented by investigators with damning evidence of his
malfeasance, Morris left the room to take a bathroom break and never
returned. That afternoon, he went to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club
in Gainesville, Virginia, which he had paid a $150,000 initiation fee
to join. That night, he retreated to a quiet corner of the club
grounds and shot himself with a Smith & Wesson revolver. He was 38.
Yet such downfall narratives feel strangely dissonant. Although a
handful of lobbyists may suffer a dramatic tumble from grace, the
industry itself does nothing but boom. Each time a new reform
surfaces, aimed at curtailing K Street’s power, influence peddlers
figure out how to exploit the rules for greater influence and profit.
Although Trump promised to drain this swamp, the swamp flourished.
From 2016 to 2018, spending on K Street increased 9 percent
[[link removed]], rising to $3.5
billion.
Washington lobbying firms have ballooned into conglomerates,
resembling the multinational corporations that hire them. K Street
currently consists of data analysts, pollsters, social-media mavens,
crisis managers, grassroots organizers. Lobbying firms are one-stop
shops for manipulating opinion—and are experts at image management,
including their own: Their employees’ business cards identify them
as “consultants” and “strategists,” now that everyone
associates lobbying with sleaze.
Lobbying has disguised itself so well that it is often barely visible
even to savvy Washington insiders. The Mullinses tell the story of Jim
Courtovich, the head of a boutique public-relations firm and a close
collaborator of Evan Morris’s. Courtovich’s business plan featured
splashy parties that attracted top journalists and other prominent
figures with whom he hoped to trade favors. Mingling with the media,
the Mullinses write, Courtovich encouraged stories that might help his
clients; in one case they cite, the goal was to damage a Saudi
client’s rival. Starting in the fall of 2015, many such gatherings
were hosted at a house his firm owned on Capitol Hill; presumably, the
reporters who attended them had no idea that Saudi investors had
financed the purchase of the building. In 2016, the authors note,
Courtovich began working for the Saudi-government official who would
later allegedly orchestrate the murder of _The Washington Post_’s
Jamal Khashoggi, a colleague of the journalists he assiduously
cultivated.
As lobbying has matured, it has grown ever more adept at turning
government into a profit center for its clients. Even Big Tech, which
once treated Washington with disdainful detachment, seems to have felt
the irresistible, lobbyist-enabled pull of chunky contracts with the
feds. Such possibilities were part of the pitch to Amazon, for
example, to erect a second corporate headquarters in Crystal City,
Virginia, enticed by the prospect of pursuing multibillion-dollar
contracts with the likes of the CIA and the Pentagon. (Amazon has said
that political considerations played no part in the company’s
decision.)
For eager beneficiaries of government largesse—not to mention for
their equally wolfish facilitators—a second Trump administration
would represent a bonanza, unprecedented in the history of K Street.
Trump’s plan to overturn a bureaucratic ethos that has prevailed
since the late 19th century—according to which good government
requires disinterested experts, more loyal to the principles of public
stewardship than to any politician—opens the way to installing
cronies who will serve as handmaidens of K Street. The civil service,
however beleaguered, has acted as an imperfect xxxxxx against the
assault of corporate interests. Its replacement would be something
close to the opposite. The hacks recruited to populate government
departments will be primed to fulfill the desires of campaign donors
and those who pay tribute to the president; they will trade favors
with lobbyists who dangle the prospect of future employment in front
of them. This new coterie of bureaucrats would wreck the competence of
the administrative state—and the wolves of K Street will feast on
the carcass of responsible governance.
_FRANKLIN FOER is a staff writer at The Atlantic._
_This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition of the
Atlantic with the headline “The Industry That Ate America.”_
__
The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over
Big Government
By Brody Mullins and Luke Mullins
_BUY THIS BOOK _
Bookshop.org [[link removed]]
Amazon [[link removed]]
Tertulia
[[link removed]]
Apple Books
[[link removed]]
When you buy a book using a link on this page, the Atlantic receives a
commission. Thank you for supporting THE ATLANTIC.
Support the Atlantic [[link removed]]
* lobbyists
[[link removed]]
* corporate power
[[link removed]]
* corruption
[[link removed]]
* McCain-Feingold Act 0f 2002
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT
Submit via web
[[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]
Twitter [[link removed]]
Facebook [[link removed]]
[link removed]
To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]