Equal Justice Society News

"We are the party of ideas," Karl Rove told a rapt audience at the New York State Conservative Party convention during the 2004 presidential campaign. "We are seizing the Mantle of Idealism."

Today, as some of the right's top activists inside and outside government plead guilty to corruption and influence peddling charges, face indictment and trial, and probably jail, idealism is hardly the first word that springs to mind. Rove helped build the conservative movement by bringing together the big money people on the Right with the conservative ideologues who staffed its extensive network of think tanks and media capacities, and connecting them with key Republican politicians. But the chickens of Rove's fusion of high ideas, dirty politics and corporate cash are coming home to roost.

The Abramoff affair is worrying the right wing. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist who recently said that undocumented immigrants come into the U.S. with a “culture of criminality” has warned of the corrosive effects of the Abramoff and other scandals on the conservative movement, though he didn’t use the same term to describe them. The Abramoff corruption scandal now roiling Washington is bound to produce a number of right wing casualties in Congress and in the K Street lobbying world. It may do more damage to the Right in the longer term, however, by exposing one of its core vanities as a fraud: that it owes its success to the power of its ideas rather than its usefulness to corporate power and access to cold cash.

There is much concern on the right wing that the movement has sold its soul. But the ideological Right’s soul has long been on shaky ground when it comes to corporate money.

This is especially clear in the stark difference between its private view of the role of government—that it exists to serve the interests of corporations and their imperial-minded strategists—and its drumbeat message designed for public consumption of getting rid of big government. The Bush administration’s crusade to downsize and privatize government social and economic programs is the culmination of a decades-long campaign by the right wing to undermine government’s active role in addressing the problems that face most Americans.

The Best Ideas Money Can Buy

Corporations have long backed think tanks that oppose an energetic government role in addressing social needs, while at the same time profiting from the government contracts, tax breaks, and bloated bureaucracies that serve their own interests. In the 1930s the National Association of Manufacturers funded a vicious “ideas” campaign against Roosevelt’s New Deal, especially Roosevelt’s efforts to overcome the Supreme Court’s obstruction of Congress’ efforts to tackle the Great Depression (see "Corporate Think Tanks Then and Now" in EJS's Spring 2005 newsletter).

Today NAM was one of the key backers of the corporate-friendly Samuel Alito’s rise to the Supreme Court. Similarly, the American Enterprise Association (later the American Enterprise Institute) was formed in 1943 to oppose public works projects and redistributive policies, and scale back the role of government in corporate regulation. In the 1950s and 1960s, the right wing’s early think tanks and publications were backed by corporate fortunes. William F. Buckley, Jr., the high minded champion of conservative philosophy, relied on support from the Allen-Bradley electronics company to sustain National Review, the cornerstone magazine of the Right. Allen-Bradley money also formed the basis for the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which went on to bankroll the rise of the Right’s think tank and policy machine.

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), one of the seedbeds of limited government ideology in the 1950s and 1960s, had Roger Milliken of the anti-union Deering Milliken textile empire on its board of trustees. The Welch candy company funded the John Birch Society during the same period. The Vicks Vapo Rub fortune financed the rise of the anti-government “supply side economics” trend in the 1970s through the Smith Richardson Foundation, and also funded the American Enterprise Institute. The Coors beer and Mellon banking fortunes enabled Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife to scale up the Heritage Foundation; the Walton Foundation, heavily involved in the move to privatize public education, is based on Wal-Mart money. These foundations all champion the radical downsizing of social programs and cutbacks of government regulation of corporate behavior. Reagan’s budget director David Stockman used to describe his program of defunding government social services, from which major corporations stood to gain, as “starving the beast.” Stockman’s political career received major boosting from Irving Kristol (one of the original funders of the Federalist Society), who served on the boards of the Citizens Utility Company, Warner-Lambert pharmaceutical company and Lincoln National insurance company.

Complaining about the size of the Federal government while angling to get in on the action, as the Right has done under the Bush administration, is also an old right wing tradition. In his infamous 1964 book The Politician (infamous for charging Eisenhower with treason), the Birch Society’s founder Robert Welch, attacked Eisenhower and Truman for massively expanding the Federal budget, then on the next page grumbled that the Eisenhower administration was “not giving jobs to Republicans.” Welch, a Harvard Law School alumnus, served on the board of directors of the National Association of Manufacturers and regularly spoke at Allen-Bradley sales meetings The Dean of Notre Dame Law School, Clarence Manion, served on the editorial advisory board of the Birch Society’s magazine.

From the late 1970s until today, by spawning and funding numerous “government downsizing” think tanks the Koch foundations, based on the multibillion dollar Koch Oil fortune, have changed the terms of policy debate in the areas of environmental protection, corporate regulation and civil rights enforcement. These think tanks include Americans for Tax Reform, the American Legislative Exchange Council (the “ideas” home of state level corporate pork barrel spending and deregulation), the Cato Institute, FreedomWorks, Institute for Justice, National Center for Policy Analysis, and the Reason Foundation and Claremont Institute in California (for more on the latter two see my report just published by the Center on Policy Initiatives in San Diego, Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Government).

Cato Institute budget guru Chris Edwards has proposed “terminating” (his word) Federal programs for elementary and secondary education support; the Department of Education’s innovation and improvement program; the Federal English language acquisition program; student aid; the substance abuse and mental heath service of HHS; low income housing assistance; homeless assistance grants; drug elimination grants; the Department of Justice’s antitrust investigations budget; the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training, Welfare to Work and Community Service for Seniors programs, and many more social programs. Doug Bandow, perhaps the leading libertarian intellectual at the Koch-funded Cato Institute, resigned after it was revealed that he took money from Jack Abramoff to write op-eds. So did Peter Ferrara, the long-time Cato policy Godfather of social security privatization.

Targeted Feeding of Big Government

Grover Norquist famously said we need to redefine the role of government by cutting it “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist, a guru of the Right and a former close associate of Abramoff, is currently fighting efforts by the Senate committee investigating the disgraced lobbyist to disclose his donors list. But far from starving the government where its friends are concerned, the conservative-controlled Congress has presided over a colossal program of billions in government giveaways to the energy and pharmaceutical industries and passed a massive $300 billion pork-filled highway bill. In the decade since the Gingrich-DeLay “government downsizing” revolution, earmarked spending by Congress (i.e., pork) has increased 873%. Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates in a new report that Bush’s Medicare drug plan, now tossing sick people off prescription rolls around the country, will cost $113 billion as against the $42 billion that a well-run single payer system would cost. Wall Street is already salivating over the millions in fees and profits to be made from the Bush administration’s proposed creation of a system of private health care accounts, and has created a lobbying group, the H.S.A. Council, that will be spending millions to push the plan. The think tanks have weighed in on cue: Norquist has enthusiastically backed the idea of health savings accounts.

The conservative-corporate lobbying nexus also reaches down into state government. While backing state and metropolitan level think tanks that produce endless research and media spin on wasteful government, corporations run a multibillion dollar system of subsidies that loot state and local government budgets at the expense of social services, education funding and responsible urban planning. For details visit the Good Jobs First website and check out the Greg LeRoy’s excellent new book, The Great American Job Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation.

The Right is also presiding, of course, over a massive expansion of bureaucracy in the military and security areas, beefing up the National Security Agency to better engage in an illegal program of domestic spying, pouring billions into a dead-end war in Iraq that is a wild profit center for private contractors, and building the mother of all ineffective bureaucracies in the Department of Homeland Security (to which Grover’s younger brother David L. Norquist has just been appointed chief financial officer), which has become a happy hunting ground for private contractors and consultants. At the same time, the Bush administration has “downsized,” i.e. eliminated, 230,000 buyers, auditors and contract managers at the Defense Department and outsourced or cut back on oversight. “There is a let’s-give-away-the-government-as-fast-as-we-can attitude,” one former defense department official commented.

Starving Needed Government Services

The starving government part comes in with vast tax cuts for the wealthy that have resulted in a projected $337 billion Federal deficit (the Congressional Budget Office estimates the expiration of the Bush tax cuts could return the budget to a surplus of $38 billion by 2012). This deficit is being used by the Right to justify over $40 billion in looming cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, the Student Loan program, and other critical program areas where a strong Federal role is essential. Despite its failure to privatize social security, the Right’s efforts to privatize Medicare and scale back Medicaid continue at a time when escalating health care costs are sending the poor and middle class into bankruptcy.

Then there’s the question of Katrina reconstruction, where an understaffed and incompetently-led frontline agency, FEMA, failed in its legal responsibility to treat the citizens of the Gulf Coast, especially in New Orleans, fairly and equitably. On January 25, the Bush administration announced its rejection of a bipartisan Congressional measure to provide $30 billion in financing to purchase storm-damaged homes in Louisiana, reconstruct them and resell them to the original owners or developers (some estimates of the real additional cost of reconstruction top $80 billion). The administration announced it would provide instead $11.5 billion spread over five states and massively favoring Mississippi, (which would get $5 billion to Louisiana’s $6.2 billion)—far short of the amount needed to help the estimated 200,000 displaced residents return and rebuild their communities. The Bush plan would help only 20,000 homeowners who lived outside the flood plain (i.e., outside places like the lower 9^th Ward in New Orleans) relocate. “What happened to the other 185,000?” the congressman who sponsored the original bill asked.

Clearly, Trent Lott’s influence and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s days as the government-bashing former chairman of the Republican National Committee and top conservative lobbyist in Washington haven’t hurt. Barbour, who knows the ropes in Washington, was himself the subject of an earlier Senate investigation of possible campaign money laundering through a think tank he founded called the National Policy Forum. The think tank-corporate money nexus clearly wasn’t invented by Jack Abramoff. Perhaps he will one day resurface as a state governor with tight political connections in right wing Washington who can bring home the bacon.

The real beast that needs to be starved is the nexus of corporate greed, public officials and the right wing think tank infrastructure.

Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing movements and organizations. He is the author of The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Rowman & Littlefield), and can be reached at rightnotes@earthlink.net.

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