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Common Ground

By Jeremy Miller

"I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it's [sic] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country."

- Thomas Jefferson, 1816

Roughly three years ago – amidst the financial catastrophe that cost taxpayers trillions of dollars to bailout, the growing foreclosure crisis and the continued hemorrhaging of jobs – a growing chorus of ordinary Americans began doing something they had never done before: speak up.  Although quickly exploited by special interests for political gain and dubbed the Tea Party, endemic to the movement were legitimate and palpable grievances against not only crony capitalism, but the bought and paid for politicians who let it all happen on their watch.

Today, a new movement is sweeping the country voicing similar frustrations.  Among other things, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) complains of the same audacious corporations and banks - still seemingly bottomless pits of greed - and their abettors in Congress, despite a nation reeling from the financial collapse.  Setting aside political ideology and partisan motives, there seems to be a lot on which both sides can agree.  Most significantly: the loudest voices in the room are not ordinary Americans, but big, rich corporate actors.

To wit:

Despite sitting on roughly $2 trillion dollars in corporate coffers, business lobbyists and the Chamber of Commerce (“Chamber”) are pushing hard to enact another “tax repatriation holiday.” History and facts show clearly that a tax holiday allowing corporations to pay sharply reduced taxes on profits they bring back to the United States would only further our long term deficit, fill corporate treasuries, and do little to create jobs.  Sadly, certain members of Congress aren’t interested in these facts.

They oppose sensible legislation that would put end to the outrageous drain on the U.S. treasury caused by offshore tax abuses.  Robbing taxpayers of roughly $100 billion a year in revenue, offshore tax abuse not only undermines public confidence in our tax system, but widens the deficit and increases the tax burden on middle America.  

The Chamber is seeking also to eviscerate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), one of the most important and effective post-Watergate anti-bribery laws prohibiting corporations from bribing foreign officials abroad to retain business.  Enacting the Chamber’s so-called “reforms” would only undermine the integrity of foreign governments and tacitly allow bribery.  As always, the Chamber has the ear of many in Congress.

Public officials are even hesitant to hold themselves accountable.  After a string of wrongheaded court decisions striking down critical domestic anti-bribery statues such as the illegal gratuities and honest services statutes, it remains an uphill battle to convince some lawmakers that public official malfeasance merits sanction.

Meanwhile thanks to Citizens United, corporate treasuries have been unleashed to flood our elections with millions of dollars in secret money to elect politicians to further serve their interests rather than the public interest.

It’s a pity the OWS and Tea Party movements have yet to move beyond their political differences and find common ground on these and other issues.  We should all be working in concert to press our public officials for more responsible and ethical policy decisions.

Even Tea Party cause célèbre Sarah Palin has been striking a remarkably populist tone of late. Just this September, Palin gave a stump speech in Iowa railing against the Washington establishment.  Some of the language she employed caught my attention.  She lashed out against the “capitalism of connections and government bailouts … influence peddling and corporate welfare … the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys.”  Sounds a lot like what we are hearing from the OWS movement.

Recently, while waiting for a meeting with a Senate staffer, an elderly couple from the Midwest arrived for their scheduled tour of the Capitol Building.  I peered up from my Blackberry while they waited for their tour guide and thought fondly of the days when it was my job to escort visitors from back home. 

I then noticed the gentleman eyeing me when all of the sudden he asked, “Who are you peddling for?  Wall Street?  Pharmaceuticals?”  I chuckled instinctively.  It’s actually the same question I ask myself when I see fancy suits roaming the halls of Congress (I should add my suit is from H&M … very cheap). 

“No,” I responded and said the first thing that came to mind, “I work for you.”  I handed him my card and he read aloud, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.  “Well I’ll be damned,” he replied, clearly surprised.  “We need an army of people like you.”  Indeed.

Senator Dick Durbin spoke the hard truth about Washington during deliberations over financial reform legislation in 2009:  “And the banks – hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created - are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."  It’s still true.  And it’s not just the banks.  Pharmaceutical companies, big oil and gas, powerful hedge fund and investment firms, etc.  This is where the OWS movement, the Tea Party and CREW all see eye-to-eye.  All across the country citizens are protesting decades of greed on Wall Street and the politicians who put corporate interests above average Americans.  Yet, even after one of the greatest financial disasters since the Great Depression it seems Congress isn’t done serving corporate interests. 

When will Congress press as hard to protect the rest of us?