Every now and then a history book tears away the veil of ignorance that saves us from looking at the way political decisions are really made. One example is Robert Caro’s multi-volume description of Lyndon Johnson’ secret use of oil money to control Congress. Now there is a new book, “The Wolves of K Street,” that offers what it calls “The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government” which charts the history of Washington, D.C. lobbying since 1980, and the picture is not pretty.
Two brothers, Brody and Luke Mullins, both journalists in D.C., wrote the book. It is Mississippi’s good fortune that they will be in Jackson for the Mississippi Book Festival on Sept. 14, where they will join State Auditor Shad White in discussing ‘Power and Influence” in the New Capitol’s Old Supreme Court Room at 1:30 p.m. They certainly know a lot about that topic.
They describe the period from 1930 to 1970 as a one in which industrial corporations battled with unions, consumer and civil rights groups in the kind of battle of “factions” that James Madison thought would produce good government. That led to reforms like the minimum wage, insurance for bank deposits, Medicare, and the creation of safety and environmental regulatory agencies.
They say the movement that upset that balance, and made corporate opponents largely irrelevant, began with a secret memorandum Richmond, Virginia, lawyer Lewis Powell wrote in 1971 saying that corporations needed to organize to “save capitalism from extinction.” In fact, Powell was even more responsible for the change than they realize. After President Nixon appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court, he wrote the opinion that first equated political money with the “speech” protected by the First Amendment. Using that logic, the court struck down limits on the amounts of money politicians could spend in their campaigns, and later eliminated limits on certain types of corporate political donations.
The movement Powell advocated kicked into high gear when President Ronald Reagan in 1980 declared that the “government is the problem,” not the solution.
As a measure of the change, in 1967 there were five or six dozen registered lobbyists in Washington and by 2007 there were 15,000. In 2012, for every $1 unions, consumer groups and environmental activists spend on lobbyists, corporations spent $86. At the same time, the distribution of wealth in the country has become one of the most unequal in the world.
The book, which takes its name from the street in Washington, K Street, where many lobbyists have their offices, traces the careers of a handful of lobbyists and tracks the evolution of the industry from “inside” personal lobbying of individual Congressmen and government officials, to “outside” phony “grass roots” campaigns, to attempts to get the attention of President Donald J. Trump by, among other things, advertising in New York newspapers he might read.
The stories are colorful. In 1977, the FTC proposed to restrict food producers’ advertising of sugary foods to children. The Mars candy company hired Tommy Boggs, the son of deceased Congressman Hale Boggs, who put together a war chest of $30 million from candy companies and television networks. Knowing that he could not argue with the FTC on the merits, he got a newspaper to describe the FTC as “ National Nanny,” and then persuaded Congress to cut off FTC money for the proposed rulemaking. The FTC gave up.
In 1993, Boggs put together a $70 million war chest and a coalition of small insurers and trial lawyers to defeat President Bill Clinton’s plan for national health insurance. He got the bill referred to the House Judiciary Committee, whose members had received generous trial lawyer donations, rebranded the proposal as “government health care,” and ran a national campaign of “Harry and Louise” commercials decrying government interference. The bill died. It was, the authors say, a “landmark moment” in the rise of corporate power in Washington.
Much of the book is devoted to the career of President Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and the firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Atwater formed in the 1980s. They adopted the tactic of managing politicians’ campaigns to enhance their lobbying fees if their candidate won. One of them ran the 1988 George H.W. Bush campaign and in 1988 they were paid by a private mortgage insurer to defeat an expansion of the lower-cost program of federal guarantees. Manafort developed a specialty as the “go-to fixer for problematic foreign countries.” He signed on to give Washington help to an Angolan warlord, a corrupt Nigerian government, and the Philippine dictator, Ferdinand Marcos.
When he was caught swindling his own firm, he took up the cause of the pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, work for which he was eventually paid $60 million. Among other things, Manafort concealed the fact that money being paid to lobbyists in D.C. was coming from the Ukrainian government. When the country revolted and his candidate fled to Russia, Manafort signed on to manage President’ Trump’s campaign in 2016. He charged Trump nothing because he expected future profits “on the international side.” He later was convicted or pled guilty to bank and tax fraud and failure to register as a foreign agent. He went to prison, but President Trump pardoned him.
In 2024, President Trump told his campaign staff he wanted to bring Manafort back into the fold, but so far he has not done so.
Luther Munford is a Northsider
