Lee Drutman: Bush's divergent assessment of risk

Lee Drutman: Bush's divergent assessment of risk

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, October 16, 2005

BERKELEY, Calif.

AFTER HURRICANE Katrina, much was made of President Bush's tentative, stumbling reaction. In comparison with 9/11, when the president grabbed the bullhorn and won the nation's approval, Bush's Katrina response had a deer-in-the-headlights quality.

Even more striking has been his policy response to the natural disaster. This offers a disturbing insight into how the Bush administration applies one standard of risk assessment to the threats of terrorism, and quite another to the equally real threats of climate change -- global warming.

As we all remember, in the days after 9/11 it didn't take long for Bush to fixate on a specific enemy: Osama bin Laden and his not-so-merry band of Islamic fundamentalists had done this to us, and they would pay. And within weeks, the United States was on the offensive, relieving the al-Qaida-succoring Taliban of its brutal grip on Afghanistan.

Then, with bin Laden still on the loose and growing evidence that the Mideast was becoming a breeding ground for the kind of Islamic-fundamentalist anti-Americanism behind 9/11, President Bush and his advisers determined that to protect Americans from terrorism, the United States had to wage an open-ended struggle against Mideastern Islamo-fascism -- a goal that could take decades to accomplish.

Step one, of course, was the costly Iraq war, the first test of the controversial policy of "pre-emptive strike." Intelligence was admittedly murky, but Bush and his advisers insisted that there was reason to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and might use them on us. Sure, they said, we didn't know precisely how big a threat this was, but Bush was fond of reminding us of a lesson of 9/11: When you finally have all the evidence, it will always be too late. Better to act now, he said, on the best available information, than to risk more disastrous consequences later.

But now, in the wake of Katrina, and then Hurricane Rita, a very different long-term enemy has emerged. A growing number of people are asking a variant of the question recently posed by Time magazine: Are we making hurricanes worse? United Nations emergency-relief coordinator Jan Egeland has called the hurricanes a "wake-up call" on the dangers of global warming. Indeed, there appears to be solid evidence that the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes is increasing (though not the frequency). One likely cause is the rise in surface sea temperature, although there is also evidence that the growing intensity is just part of natural storm cycles.

The problem is that until recently, satellite data were not particularly good, so it's hard to assemble accurate long-term data. But less in doubt is that climate change is real and man-made; on this, near unanimity exists within the international scientific community.

What also seems clear is that, regardless of whether Katrina was caused by climate change, major climate disaster is coming soon to major cities (think Manhattan under water) unless action is taken now to reduce carbon emissions.

Nevertheless, even as President Bush has called for a "generational commitment" to building democracy in the Mideast, there's been nary a peep from the administration -- even after Katrina -- about waging a war on climate change.

Instead of going on the offensive against the possible forces behind this latest form of devastation, President Bush responded with a cowboy promise to rebuild New Orleans -- "higher and better" than before -- and a National Day of Prayer, on which he essentially told the nation that Katrina is part of God's plan: "Through prayer we look for ways to understand the arbitrary harm left by this storm, and the mystery of undeserved suffering. And in our search we're reminded that God's purposes are sometimes impossible to know here on Earth."

Even the presidential call to drive less and use public transit more made no mention of climate change.

Alhough no one has expressed surprise, the disparate responses to the two forms of disaster should seem strange. When it comes to terrorism, Bush was willing to engage in a major military mission based on far-from-definite intelligence. But when it comes to climate change, Bush is unwilling to take any economic risks to forestall disaster. He now demands ironclad proof that the threat of climate change is real, man-made, and correctable before he commits himself even to cutting carbon emissions.

Just as the tragedy of 9/11 created an opportunity for the administration to talk about building democracy in the Mideast, Katrina has created an even clearer opportunity to talk about combating global warming.

As for the 9/11 lesson that one can be certain about a threat only after it's too late: Regarding climate change, President Bush ignores it -- at great peril to us all.

Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy (Berrett-Koehler).

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/projo_20051016_16drut.32a685d.html

Miers And Roberts: A CEO's Dream Team

Miers And Roberts: A CEO's Dream Team

Lee Drutman

TomPaine.com

October 18, 2005

Lee Drutman is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.

For those trying to make sense of President Bush’s decision to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, here’s a question: What do Miers and John Roberts have in common, besides the fact that they were both nominated to the Supreme Court?

Answer: Both had substantial careers as corporate lawyers before being nominated.

Roberts spent 13 years a partner at Hogan & Hartson LLP, where he argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of such corporate clients as Digital Equipment Corp., Peabody Coal Co. and Toyota Motor Corp., Chrysler Corp., Litton Systems, WellPoint Health Networks, Fox and NBC, among others. He also served as a registered lobbyist for the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association before the Food and Drug Administration on commercial speech issues.

Miers, meanwhile “has a blue-chip résumé that would wow Wall Street,” as Business Week correspondent Lorraine Woellert put it in Sunday’s Washington Post . Miers was a managing partner of the Dallas law firm Locke Liddell & Sapp, where she handled consumer class-action lawsuits for Microsoft Corp., the Texas Automobile Dealers Association, and former mortgage industry giant Lomas & Nettleton. She has also defended Dupont, Disney and Miramax, among others. Additionally, Miers has served as a board member of Dallas' Better Business Bureau and the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce.

Such legal service to large corporations is not typically part of the resume of a Supreme Court Justice. As Bruce Josten, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s top lobbyist, told the Christian Science Monitor , “Having two justices, [Chief Justice John] Roberts and Miers, who we expect to join him shortly, that's adding two to nothing from the point of view of that kind of experience. That's big for the business community.”

In fact, you would have to go back to 1971, when President Nixon nominated corporate lawyer Lewis F. Powell Jr. to the Supreme Court, to find a justice who came to the court with that much experience in corporate law. Powell, of course, went on to become one of the most pro-corporate justices in modern Supreme Court history, helping to expand the legal rights of “free enterprise," especially when it came to commercial speech.

Unfortunately, this angle has been largely lost in the public debate over Miers. Instead, the media has focused on the infighting among conservatives about her credentials.

Indeed, it is newsworthy that many of the president’s hard-core social conservative supporters say they feel betrayed. They want to know: Where is the strict constructionist they were promised, the justice who would heroically restore America back to a shining theocracy on a hill, safe from the liberal scourges of pornography, homosexuality and abortion? Meanwhile, a small but influential group of conservative intellectuals has loudly complained that Miers is completely unqualified for a different reason—she has zero (Zero!) experience as a judge or as a constitutional scholar. As conservative pundit George F. Will wrote scathingly in a recent column, “If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers' name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.”

Yet, one lesson we should have learned from the Bush presidency by now is that while social and intellectual conservatives are nice to have on your side, it is the large corporations that write the checks. And if you can throw a bone to those other groups now and then (like, say, coming out for a gay marriage amendment that has no chance of passage, or giving elegant speeches about your Christian faith), you can keep them in line.

But if you look closely at Bush’s record, you’ll see plenty of words about family values and religion and the virtues of small government, but plenty of actions on behalf of things like tort reform and bankruptcy reform.

Hence, John Roberts and now Harriet Miers. “Together, they could be a CEO's dream team,” writes Business Week’s Woellert.

But here’s the real problem. While obviously important issues like affirmative action and abortion and the religion evoke all kinds of emotions and hence good copy, the Supreme Court also tackles a lot of mundane, technical stuff, including many business-relevant cases. And with Roberts and Miers on board, the court will be likely to tackle even more business-related cases. As Pat Cleary, the National Association of Manufacturers’ senior vice president wrote on the NAM’s website, “the reason we're in this fray at all is because a S Ct Justice will spend far more of their time on issues of interest to manufacturers than they will on the social issues that seem to dominate the debate.”

This fall, for example, Supreme Court has several cases on its docket that could have a big impact on business. In Texaco and Shell Oil v. Dagher, the court will determine whether a Texaco-Shell joint venture violated anti-trust price-fixing rules, a case that could have far-reaching impacts on the nature of joint ventures and the rules about price-fixing. In Volvo Trucks North America v. Reeder-Simco GMC, the court will determine whether companies that provide preferential discounts to some dealers are engaging in price discrimination against others, which could open the floodgates to lawsuits under the Robinson-Patman Act. In Illinois Tool Works Inc. v. Independent Ink Inc., the court will determine whether a company that forces customers to by a certain type of printer ink in its patented ink-jet printer is violating the Sherman Act, another case with broad impacts.

If your eyes glazed over the preceding paragraph, you are probably not alone. Few people without a direct stake in these type of cases pay attention to them, which is probably why the business angle in both Roberts’ and Miers’ nominations has been largely relegated to the background. Yet, over the last three decades, one of the most important but least-remarked upon changes in American jurisprudence has been the steady expansion in the presupposition that the rights of free enterprise should only be curtailed in extraordinary circumstances—as compared to, say, the importance of truth in advertising or the value of protecting endangered species, or other considerations that have the annoying habit of getting in the way of “business civil rights.”

By nominating not one, but now two Supreme Court justices with formative experiences defending the rights of large corporations to be free of pesky regulations and bothersome responsibilities to workers and consumers, Bush has demonstrated where his true loyalties lie. Unfortunately for the American people, it is, once again, not with them.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051018/miers_and_roberts_a_ceos_dream_team.php

Democracy DeLayed

Democracy DeLayed

Lee Drutman

October 03, 2005

Lee Drutman is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.

In the never-ending chatter that necessarily follows the indictment of any politician as important as Tom DeLay, much effort has gone into prognosticating the political ramifications: What does this mean for 2006? Can the Democrats take advantage? What does this mean for the GOP agenda?

These are the kinds of questions that are perhaps to be expected of the mainstream media, with its endless focus on the horse race of politics. Unfortunately, much less has been made of the law that DeLay actually stands accused of violating—a Texas statute that bans corporate money from statewide political campaigns—or the larger problems of corporate money in politics that supported the entire DeLay empire.

In the news coverage so far, the Texas law has generally been treated as an aside, the trap that finally snared Tom DeLay’s arrogance (what is important, it would seem, is that he was finally caught doing something illegal!). Corporate money, meanwhile, is treated as a given—a fact of political life.

But let’s consider, for a second, what we know about this case. We know that Tom DeLay stands accused of violating Texas law by laundering $190,000 of corporate money to support Republican candidates for the state legislature. We know that with the help of this money, Republicans in Texas were indeed able to take over the state legislature, and redraw the election maps so they could send five more Republicans to Congress, increasing the sycophantically corporate-friendly GOP majority in Washington.

Chalk it up as yet another bit of evidence that corporate money can have a major influence on political outcomes.

In the big picture, of course, we ought to know this by now. We know that in more than 90 percent of congressional elections, the candidate who wins is the candidate who raises more money. We know that the cost of running for Congress is now prohibitively expensive—about $1 million for a House seat, about $6 million for a Senate seat. We know that in the last election cycle, business spent $1.5 billion on politics, accounting for 74 percent of all campaign contributions. It follows that if you want to run for federal office, you'd better be good at raising money. And if you want to raise money, you'd better be good at appealing to corporate donors, because without big business donors, it’s awfully hard to raise that kind of money. No wonder that Washington is such a corporate-friendly place these days.

Of course, this isn’t “news.” DeLay’s alleged laundering of corporate money is just another example of how big corporations—who have exponentially more resources than average citizens—use those resources to shape political outcomes. This happens all the time. Perhaps we are desensitized to it.

Or perhaps there is a sense of collective frustration that makes it seem easier to ignore the problem. We passed McCain-Feingold, and little changed—corporate campaign contributions did not vanish off into the sunset. There are 17 other states that, like Texas, also ban corporate money in statewide political campaigns. We even have federal law, the Tillman Act, that has officially banned corporations from contributing to federal campaigns for 98 years. Yet corporate money keeps finding its way into politics, often in decisive ways. What gives?

There is, however, some hope. This fall, the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of a Vermont law that limits campaign spending and contributions. The point of the law is to make candidates less dependent on wealthy donors (e.g. large corporations) by putting a cap on the arms race of political spending.

Under current Supreme Court precedent, however, such an expenditure limit could be deemed unconstitutional. The precedent would be the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo ruling, which equates money with speech and therefore deems spending limits unconstitutional.

However, since Buckley was decided, we have amassed almost three decades of evidence demonstrating what happens when campaign expenditures are unlimited and the highest bidders are comfortable going quite high. It is also worth noting that while Buckley protected the speech of those few with countless resources to expend on politics, doing so effectively drowned out the speech of many others who might like to make their voice heard but can only offer small contributions.

In 2002, the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the Vermont law, writing that without expenditure limits, Vermont officials “have been forced to provide privileged access to contributors in exchange for campaign money,” and that “the basic democratic requirements of accessibility, and thus accountability, are imperiled when the time of public officials is dominated by those who pay for such access with campaign contributions.”

This fall, the Supreme Court will decide. If it upholds the Vermont law, it would be a major step forward in the fight against excessive corporate political spending, since spending limits by necessity reduce the amount of money in politics.

And as the Supreme Court considers this case this fall, we ought to keep in mind the antics of Tom DeLay.

No doubt, in the big picture, Tom DeLay’s alleged corporate money laundering amounts to just one more example in the countless litany of big corporate money making a mockery of democracy.

Yet, because it has grabbed the spotlight, it offers an important opportunity to talk about what role large corporations, with their disproportionate financial resources compared to ordinary citizens, should play in politics. And the more we talk about this now, the stronger a case we can make this fall for upholding Vermont’s expenditure limits.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051003/democracy_delayed.php