The 62,000 or so folks in that Upper East Side zip code who don’t rent live in domiciles worth, on average, just under a million bucks. And those people in 10128 have donated $1.7 million in the 2010 election cycle to federal candidates, national parties, or PACs. (Sorry, Rush: Your neighbors preferred Democratic entities.)

But the folks in 10128 are cheapskates compared with the real money farther south on Fifth Avenue. The 100,000-plus people who live in 10021 have given $3.3 million. In fact, eight zip codes surrounding Central Park rank in the top 20 zip codes nationally in political giving by individuals for this election cycle, their residents having coughed up $17.4 million. 10021, 10022 and 10024 are the top three individual donor zip codes in the nation.

I was going to tell you this a few months ago. I had intended to point out that zip codes in and around Washington, D.C., where the real money is, ponied up $22.9 million in this election cycle. I’d planned to tell you that individuals in the top 50 zip codes in the nation had so far contributed nearly $74 million to federal candidates or committees.

But these numbers summarizing individual donations direct to candidates or parties have become meaningless. That means I will likely end four years of writing about them.

The totals provided here, courtesy of the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that aggregates Federal Election Commission records to make them easier to understand, represents donations exceeding $200 by individuals. Federal election law limits individual candidate contributions to $2,400, up to an aggregate total of $45,600 per election cycle. Individuals may also give an aggregated total of $69,900 to national parties and PACs per cycle. Bottom line: An individual may make $115,500 in campaign contributions per election cycle.

Well, that’s chicken feed now, so there’s no reason to write about campaign contributions by individuals any more.

You all know why: The Supreme Corporate Court of the United States struck down provisions of campaign-finance law in its 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, overruling precedents. (So much for stare decisis.) The bottom line: The government may not ban corporations from spending unlimited amounts of money on broadcast political ads prior to primary or general elections. (This is not the first episode of judicial activism by the “pro-corporate wing” of the Roberts Court.) Says The New York Times:

For the first time, though, as a result of the [Citizens United] ruling, corporations will be able to spend unlimited amounts of money on “electioneering communications” (i.e., broadcast advertisements) expressly advocating for a candidate’s election or defeat. While the court upheld the ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidates, it also clears the way, for the first time, for corporations to donate money to nonprofit groups that place advocacy advertisements.

But, because the Supreme Court has not yet struck down the remainder of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, corporations may spend limitless money on ads supporting or opposing candidates while individual contributors continue to face limits on their donations direct to candidates or parties.

That means all those donations by folks in the top 50 zip codes for this election cycle — $74 million and counting — are small change now. Those who used to be big players in the Election Power Grab Sweepstakes are now bit players. Corporations — those newly minted artificial beings with more power than individual human beings — can outspend them.

In fact, perhaps many of those well-to-do folks in the zip codes surrounding Central Park, those able to afford that $115,500 aggregate limit, might be high-ranking executives of corporations. Maybe they’ll just stop donating as individuals and leave it to the corporation to pay the advertising freight charges to influence election outcomes.

The Screw Democracy Game™ — spend large amounts of money on behalf of political parties and candidates with expectations of a beneficial return on that investment — has changed, it seems. We’ll know for sure as the 2010 mid-term elections near. To what extent will corporations pour money into television advertising to support candidates they prefer? Will they overtly or covertly threaten candidates holding positions unfavorable to business and corporations by dumping millions into advertising support for those candidates’ opponents?

Will Congress require full, public disclosure of direct corporate (or union) spending on “electioneering communications” (even though they may be unlimited financially) and include immediate online disclosure? Will Congress mandate a “I’m the CEO, and I approved this message” tag for corporation-funded, televised political ads? Will Congress close the door that allows corporations (and unions) to hide massive financial support of political entities by passing corporate (or union) money anonymously through nonprofit civic leagues and trade associations? Says The Times:

That means that those nonprofit groups, which are not required to disclose their donors, can now use corporate contributions to buy political commercials, and the corporations can potentially operate behind the anonymity of their donations. [emphasis added]

The Court’s ruling means it has become useless for me to continue to root through the records in the FEC’s database of individual donations to candidates, parties or PACs. Similarly, how useful will be such data aggregated by categories provided by the Center for Responsive Politics? True, the center is “a clearinghouse for data and analysis on multiple aspects of money in politics—the independent interest groups called 527s committees, federal lobbying, Washington’s ‘revolving door’, privately sponsored congressional travel and the personal finances of members of Congress, the president and other officials.” It will continue to provide an important public service. Perhaps it will find a way to track this new, unlimited spending on “electioneering communications.”

But in light of five men’s decision to dramatically change the face of election financing, the role I’ve played — finding out what individuals gave how much to whom with what effect — appears pointless.

Political advantage is gained or lost through television advertising. Corporations can now spend unlimited amounts of money on such advertising to influence the outcome of elections with more effect than an individual’s maximum donation of $115,500 direct to candidates or parties can accomplish. More importantly, corporations have the legal means to hide that spending.

But, supporters of the Court’s decision argue, individuals can spend on broadcast political ads without limit, too. They are only constrained on direct donations to candidates or parties.

Yes, if you, as an individual, are sufficiently wealthy, you may spend unlimited money on “electioneering communications” just as corporations now can. But can you, the wealthy individual, match the political ad spending of the wealthy corporation? Or corporations, plural?

This means sorting through aggregations of FEC data on individual campaign contributions has lost interest for me.

Now I need ideas, new techniques, to track all this corporate money that will be spent on “electioneering communications.” Suggestions, dear readers?

But this gets funnier. First, House members determine the legal but unsavory and corrupt behaviors that keep them collecting that $174,000 paycheck with generous federal health and retirement bennies. Then they reverse-engineer the ethics code to make all those behaviors ethical. Every now and then they pass serious, consequential ethics reform and lard up a press release touting it, as Rep. Nancy Pelosi, freshly minted as House speaker, did three years ago:

House Democrats got straight to work this week by passing the toughest Congressional ethics reform in history. We have broken the link between lobbyists and legislation: banning gifts and travel from lobbyists and organizations that retain or employ them, banning travel on corporate jets, shutting down the K Street project, subjecting all earmarks to the full light of day …

Oh, don’t stop there, House felons solons. When public outrage rises again, given that Pelosi’s “serious and substantive steps to ensure Congress governs with the highest ethical steps” didn’t work out so well, pass even more ethics reform. This time, pass a bill in 2008 that creates what Common Cause said was “a monumentally important resolution to create an independent, bipartisan panel of non-lawmakers to help review and investigate possible ethics violations by House members.” [emphasis added]

That’s not working out so well either. The House now has two ethics panels that produce more conflict between them than censure or (better yet) strong cases leading to removal of corrupt House members.

Under its brief, the independent Office of Congressional Ethics can recommend to the House ethics committee (which consists of House members) either that “the matter requires the Committee’s further review or that it should dismiss the matter.” In other words, the independent ethics office is toothless. The House committee can ignore the ethics office’s “recommendations.” And it does.

In 2009, the ethics office told the House committee it should review further allegations that Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) asked a business associate of his wife’s to testify before the Small Business Committee. The House balked, dismissing the charge against Graves and criticizing the investigation of ethics office — the very panel the House created. The ethics office fired back, rebutting the criticisms.

What should be expected from a House panel of overseers comprised entirely of the overseen? The House ethics panel does not appear to be overworked: Its website lists only 12 reports dating back to the 105th Congress.

This past week, the House panel, formally known as the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, again chose not to act on more ethics office recommendations. So the hilarity continues: From a New York Times story last week by Eric Lichtblau and David D. Kirkpatrick:

The House ethics committee cleared seven members of Congress on Friday of official charges of wrongdoing in a lobbying scandal despite a separate, independent investigation that cast a harsh spotlight on the pay-to-play culture in Washington.

The ethics office, said The Times, found “that private contractors who received millions of dollars in defense industry earmarks from the seven lawmakers generally believed that their political contributions to the members facilitated the financing their companies received.” [emphasis added]

The House ethics panel, that “standards of official conduct” bunch, cleared all seven members of charges. Sayeth The Times : “All served on the powerful defense appropriations panel, which doles out billions of dollars in earmarks.”

Voters can conclude, of course, based on the House ethics panel’s actions, that House members are honest and above reproach. Heck, just ’cause the House ethics panel consists of the foxes watching the foxes, there’s no reason to suspect skulduggery among thieves, is there?

OpenCongress, a project of the Sunlight and Participatory Politics foundations, provides this “index of current and recent members of Congress currently under investigation by the congressional ethics committees, or under investigation, indictment, or conviction by law enforcement authorities, based on credible media reports” [emphasis added]. And there’s a similar list compiled by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Always fun reading is CREW’s annual lists of “the 15 most corrupt members of Congress.” Also delightful is the FAQ section of the House ethics panel’s Web site, apparently intended to guide members to appropriate ethical behavior.

Yep, it’s hysterically hilarious that so many members of Congress, who at one time probably thought that public service meant serving the public, made one little compromise, one small exchange of favor for favor, one itsy-bitsy, wink-wink deal … and look at them now — chasing money to pursue power, and cheating to do it.

Sadly, the joke’s on us.

He could not have imagined that the exorbitant and still-rising cost of electing the members of Congress would argue that not “all men are created equal.” Rather, men, and mostly men, of considerable financial substance worth in sum about $650 million would sit on Capitol Hill. Nor would he have imagined that the most powerful interests in this nation “conceived in Liberty” would be about to spend $3.7 billion to position those (mostly) men in November to immediately forget, polls might suggest, “the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

President Lincoln could not have imagined, at least on a 21st Century scale, how the enterprise of government would become precisely that – a business enterprise riddled with corruption brought on by the enticements of money primarily intended to lubricate the interests of the powerful who wish to remain that way.

President Lincoln could not have foreseen that a former member of Congress, already convicted and imprisoned for seven years for bribery and racketeering, would threaten to run for Congress again as an Independent, saying, “I have been a Democrat all my life, and quite frankly I am disgusted with both parties. I hate to say this. My father is rolling over in his grave, a truck driver.”

President Lincoln, a lawyer by trade, probably would suggest that it takes a crook to root out a drift of swine-minded crooks.

Polls of popularity generally assign Lincoln at or near the top of lists of “greatest presidents.” Despite whatever historical flaws he may have as a politician, military tactician or executive branch leader, his reputation for honesty and truth prevail scores of years later. His vision for the Republic was clear. But time and the misuse of money have eroded that vision, rendering it unrecognizable.

In his address of only 265 words, he directed a divided nation to heal the deep wounds brought on by such a divisive war. He said, “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion …” He sought freedom — and all the obligations and responsibilities that entails — as a defining characteristic of the Republic.

What would he think of a Congress so divided and held in such low regard by the voters who elected its members? How would he regard an industry surrounding Congress whose sole purpose is to prey on political and philosophical schisms on behalf of powerful clients who seek primarily to retain and expand their means of holding power? Would he be saddened by the decision of the Republic’s highest court to allow corporations the same rights as individuals?

As he sits in effigy, fatigued in appearance by artist’s intent, looking east toward the Reflecting Pool, he may be considering revising his remarks offered at Gettysburg:

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain— that this nation, under the god of Maximize Shareholder Income, shall have an enduring vision of Corporate leadership—and that government of the Dollar, by the Dollar, and for the Dollar, shall not perish from the Corporate Boardrooms.

Overturning key provisions of McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and flouting a century of precedent, the decision opens the floodgates to a torrent of spending by banks, insurance companies, energy companies, automakers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, chemical producers, agribusiness giants and media oligopolies — both domestic and foreign – to sway races by buying candidates. And to trash American democracy in the process.

“Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy — it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people — political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. The irony in Kennedy’s logic is profound, as the Court has in essence granted the status of personhood — of individual citizenship — to corporations, who are the least likely entities on earth to hold officials accountable to anyone but their own interests.

When Goldman Sachs, for instance, finds itself with a $16 billion (that’s with a “b”) bonus pool for top executives, what is the likelihood they are going to make campaign contributions to any political candidate who supports a tax on such bonuses, despite the government’s bailout for Wall Street?

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who was in the room for the Court’s announcement, condemned it as “the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case. It leads us all down the road to serfdom.”

Yet it may be that prospect that offers the only remaining hope to unite a nation so fractured by partisanship and anger. In the face of this ruling, average Americans will become disenfranchised laborers, with no access to any ability to affect the political system in their favor. The grassroots donations of $10 here and $25 there that Barack Obama credited with momentum for his victory will be so much chump change in the face of these new playing rules. While labor unions and other groups will also be exempt from previous spending limits, it is the staggering power of corporations to shout down ordinary citizens through an exponential ability to outspend them that poses the gravest threat to our common welfare.

The real divide in this country is not so much left vs. right as haves vs. have-nots. Most Americans want health care reform. We just disagree on the best route to get it. Most Americans are disgusted at Wall Street’s escape from the economic hardship average people face every day, losing their jobs and homes and worrying about feeding their kids. Some think Democrats should be punished for the banks’ bailout; others insist it’s a Republican legacy for which the right must bear blame. Today’s decision, however, cements the already-entrenched power of the ‘haves’ to control public discourse and thereby the political agenda toward their own ends.  But if anything can galvanize the populist base of this country – and that is our true, uniting base – it must be today’s catastrophic court decision, which threatens to undermine our jobs, our health, our safety, our environment, the air we breathe and the water we drink, our access to information, virtually every element of the quality of life and freedoms we jointly value as Americans.

In the wake of this decision, progressives have more in common with teabaggers than either of us ever dreamed possible. We’ll need a lot more strange bedfellows to come together to save our democracy, fractious and scarred as it is. Congressman Grayson has introduced a set of bills to bite back – learn more here.

They recognized long ago that those who control the definitions of words rule the conversation. They know that rigorous repetition of their memes is akin to selling any product — advertise, advertise, advertise. That meme machine, usually cranked up biennually, now operates full time. In 30-second, televised chunks, the memes spew forth in every market. The messages are paid for by political organizations and single-minded groups quietly but heavily underwritten by those who wield wealth and power as a blacksmith’s hammer, bending comprehension by the electorate over an anvil. In hour-long, prime-time, broadcast soliloquies, their public voices ritualistically denigrate that which does not serve The Meme.

They are not The Right. They are not The Left. But they perpetrate the meme that the struggle for political power and control is between Left and Right. That’s the remarkable cunning of their strategy: Take two entities that are essentially identical and paint them as vastly different, and one as preferred. Misdirection masquerades as clarity.

They have remarkable resources. They own media organizations that control television, radio, Web entities, and newspapers. They have highly paid minions whose divisive, hateful, meme-managing messages they control. They have massive databases that allow parsing of their memes for different audiences.

They have money. Lots of it. They spend it without reservation in the pursuit of winning. They know that well less than 1 percent of American adults contribute to political candidates. They can outspend those who oppose the meme — and did so, spending $23 billion on campaign contributions in the past decade.

Where will you find them? The paper trails of their political largesse lead to the finance, insurance and real-estate industries; lawyers and lobbyists; ideological and single-issue donors; the health-care, health products and pharmaceutical industries; communications and electronics firms; labor unions; agribusiness interests; energy and natural-resource extraction corporations; transportation; and the defense industry.

They have eroded efforts to reform campaign-finance laws and to curtail and control campaign spending. Now the Supreme Court of All The Land appears poised to remove the last shackles limiting their political spending in service of The Meme. They will be able to spend more money to achieve more power and control over … winning? (What is it, exactly, that they think they’re winning?)

They cannot control what people think. Free will has not yet been fully suppressed. But they can limit what people think about by dunning them with focus-grouped, direct-mailed, oped-paged, demographically diced, Facebooked, tweeted, news-storylined memes. In their world of continuous, mediated shouting, it is difficult to hear an opposing whisper.

They’re winning because they have bought representation — legislators and lobbyists galore. They’re winning because they do not face the electorate — their well-disguised, glad-handing, baby-kissing, well-coiffed, properly memed candidates face the voters.

They’re winning because so many watchdogs are no longer watching. Their natural adversaries are experienced journalists bred in vats of skepticism. But the ranks of professional reporters and editors, never high to begin with, have been thinned to the point of virtual ineffectiveness. They are winning because they can continue to hide in so many dark places.

They are winning. But have they won?

Contributions to all federal candidates for House and Senate seats and the presidency from the 2000 through 2010 election cycles totaled $9.7 billion, according to an S&R analysis of records aggregated by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Contributions to candidates and committees in all 50 states, from 2000 through 2009, totaled about $14.5 billion, according to records aggregated by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

In this decade, thanks to computerization of records and a few top-notch, non-partisan organizations, we’ve learned how to follow the money. Well, so what? Has vastly increased public visibility of political money changed the way politics operates?

The $24.2 billion spent on campaign contributions is only part of the story. Over the past decade, $23 billion has been spent by corporations, labor unions, and other special-interest entities to lobby Congress and federal agencies, according to records aggregated by the center.

More than $45 billion has been spent in the decade now ending to influence legislation and regulation at state and federal levels of government. It’s only conjecture, of course, but it’s hardly likely that the bulk of those billions of dollars was intended to improve the lot of the 99 percent of adult Americans who did not make campaign contributions or made gifts of less than $200.

Where did the $24.2 billion in campaign donations come from? Only a tiny fraction, generally in the tenths of 1 percent, of Americans over age 18 make campaign contributions of more than $200. Those who give more than $1,000 are even fewer — but the amounts given by those latter donors total significantly higher.

The bulk of the decade’s nearly $10 billion in donations to federal candidates came from special interests and individuals associated with specific special interests who gave $200 or more. According to the center, the top special-interest givers in the election cycles in this decade, generally in this order, were

the finance, insurance and real-estate industries; lawyers and lobbyists; miscellaneous business; ideological and single-issue donors; the health industries; communications and electronics; labor; agribusiness; energy and natural-resource interests; transportation; and the defense industry.

Corporations and individuals associated with these special interests donated more than $8 billion this decade to federal candidates. And the leader in campaign largesse for the decade and in each election cycle, at $1.62 billion, or more than 16 percent of all campaign contributions to federal candidates? The winner, by a wide margin, are the finance, insurance and real-estate industries.

The number of lobbyists has increased from 10,641 in 2000 to 13,426 this year. Now, that’s the number of people who have legally registered as lobbyists. There are plenty of revolving-door people (those who have left the Hill or the executive branch to become lobbyists and vice versa) who are not registered as lobbyists but are as influential. Consider the example of former Sen. Tom Daschle, who claims he’s a “resource” for his health-care industry clients and not a lobbyist.

Those interested in studying campaign finance and lobbing — who’s giving the money and who’s getting it — have two non-profit and non-partisan organizations to thank for ready, intelligible access to FEC and state election commissions data. They are the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics, which provides “free online access to public records in all 50 states, to document political donor and lobbyist contributions to policymakers.” Also helpful is Earmark Watch, a project of Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Sunlight Foundation, which helps expose what these billions of dollars can buy from legislators.

These groups have become technologically more savvy. Tracking campaign contributions and lobbying dollars can be narrowly focused on such data more easily than using the FEC’s website or state election data websites. The center and the institute now have talented staffers who frequently write analyses of donor data, especially when a particularly topic is in the news.

Congress irritated by the college football Bowl Championship Series? There’s the center’s Dave Levinthal on the Capital Eye Blog, detailing how much money the BCS, News Corp., the NCAA and major football universities are giving to whom for what purpose.

Wondering whether Congress will include legal importation of drugs from abroad (i.e., Canada) in health-care reform? There’s Levinthal again, pointing out that the pharmaceutical and health-products industries have spent nearly $200 million in 2009 to oppose it.

Want to know how much money the health-care industry has spent trying to influence state legislation and regulation? There’s the institute’s Anne Bauer, telling you “[i]n the last six years, major players in the health care industry gave $394 million to officeholders, party committees and ballot measure committees in the 50 states.”

When the short-term, high-vig payday loan industry sought to reinvigorate itself (i.e., screw the borrowers) through the ballot box, there was the institute’s Tyler Evilsizer to explain that in Arizona and Ohio, “donors from the industry gave more than $35 million to support ballot measures that would allow them to continue operating.”

Computerization of records and sophisticated staff allow an organization such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, aka CREW, to track robocall ethics complaints against Sen. John McCain, develop a list of the most corrupt members of Congress, and keep track of the revolving door moves of White House staffers and cabinet members.

Yes, the governed can quickly track donations to those who govern or seek to govern. Yes, the governed can track the money spent by individuals, corporations, PACs and unions to legally influence those who govern. Yes, the governed can easily see how easy and legal it is for big spenders to influence legislators and regulators.

So what have we gained because we can do this? Not much.

Over the decade, corrupt politicians have been imprisoned for a variety of crimes. Convicted of crimes such as fraud and bribery, they were selfish and for sale. What they did was illegal.

But what remains unabated in the American political system is legalized corruption. The heightened ability to track political money does nothing to prevent the dramatic increase in legal campaign giving and the host of ethical and moral conflicts that so much money places in front of incumbents, challengers, and regulators.

We’ve seen the amounts of money spent to legally attain and maintain political power grow to such amounts that billionaires now spend tens of millions of dollars to finance their own campaigns. Modern elections trivialize issues and maximize dependence on name recognition. That costs money, which forecloses the possibility that better-qualified candidates who are not as wealthy can prosper at the ballot box.

We’ve seen how those with money to spend and an agenda to enact gain access to the levers of power, as did players in the health-care reform debate behind closed doors in the Obama White House.

Consider the consolidation of media, its threat to competitiveness, its anti-trust implications, and its potential to maintain unreasonably high consumer prices for news and entertainment. When Comcast announced its intended $30 billion purchase of NBC Universal from General Electric, its lobbyists flooded the Hill. Through September of this year, Comcast has spent $9.1 million on lobbying. The Federal Communications Commission must approve the sale.

Comcast’s 20-member D.C. lobbying team, reports Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel, includes “former aides to Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), former Senate Majority Leader and Obama confidant Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Democratic Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps.” (Oh, look: There’s “confidant” Daschle acting as a “resource” again, “aides” notwithstanding …)

Continual increases in media consolidation by conglomerates reduce the likelihood that Americans’ monthly bills for cable, Internet, satellite, and telephone services will decrease.

Earlier this month, the House faced an impending vote on what Paul Krugman of The New York Times called “a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.” Three days earlier, wrote Krugman, “Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies” to sidestep banking reform. All Republicans and 27 Democrats voted against the measure. (Gosh, what wonderfully independent thinking from our members of Congress.)

That means it’s less likely that credit will flow readily and credibly to America’s small businesses and consumers, and that more Americans may lose their homes unfairly.

And the drug-industry lobbyists? We’ve seen how lobbyists for pharmaceutical giant Genentech have written statements that 42 members of Congress from both parties have “revised and extended” into the Congressional Record.

That means it’s likely the out-of-pocket cost (and that inherent in premiums) for prescription medications is likely to grow as a percentage of Americans’ expenditures even as their wages have remained stagnant through the past decade.

We continue to see the fruits of lobbying in which special interests reap financial reward at little cost, such as the American Jobs Recovery Act that provided no jobs but $100 billion in tax breaks for corporations.

Are Americans better off because of the ease with which they can track who gives how much money to the people who would represent them and propose and pass laws that may help or hinder Americans’ lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness? No. That’s because incumbents and challengers don’t care a whit that this system is so blatantly and transparently stacked toward the influence wrought by so much money.

We point fingers at the financially oiled, undue influence of special interests. Our legislators and regulators just shrug: “So what?”

No legislative intent lies on the horizon of the next decade that would stem the shameful influence of money on the conduct of legislators and regulators and what they do, or fail to do, in the public’s interest. There will be no sufficient, substantial changes in campaign finance laws or congressional ethics policies to end this system of legalized corruption.

No reform candidates exist on the horizon immune to the blandishments the crassly monied political system can promise or proffer.

From 2010 to 2019, expect more of the same. Another $45 billion will speak louder than you or me to those who govern us.

Back in the good ol’ days, you’d merely text your old pal I.B. Loaded, CEO of Amalgamated Rules Bender Inc. Loaded’s given you tons of cash over the years for your campaigns. He, his wife and children, his employees, his vendors — all have seen the wisdom of slipping dough to you, your official campaign committee, and, of course, your “Leadership PAC.”

And, of course, Loaded would have his Gulfstream V (I mean, rather, his corporate-owned private jet) fly into Reagan National to pick you up (after, of course, a taxpayer-paid car and driver deposited you, your luggage, and golf clubs there). Loaded himself would be on the plane to entertain you and see to your every need. After you’d both consumed a few hits from Loaded’s stash of 40-year-old Glen Garioch, he’d probably steer the conversation into an arcane tax-policy issue that would likely benefit Amalgamated Rules Bender Inc. to the tune of millions of dollars.

You’d be the only passenger on a sophisticated jet costing $59 million with an hourly operating cost of about $7,000. Yet, before 2007, you’d only pay the cost of first-class airfare to LA — maybe a grand or less, depending on discounts. Then Congress shut the door to corporate-provided air travel by passing the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.

And this week, those idiots at the Federal Election Commission reopened the door.

The act plainly states “a candidate for election for Federal office … may not make any expenditure for a flight on [a noncommercial] aircraft unless … the candidate, the authorized committee, or other political committee pays … the pro rata share of the fair market value of the flight.”

But the FEC changed that by redefining when a member of Congress is or is not a “candidate.” Here’s the explanation from The Campaign Legal Center:

Yet the FEC today adopted a final rule nonsensically declaring that a candidate is not a “candidate,” for the purpose of this statute, when that candidate “is traveling on behalf of another political committee (such as a political party committee or Senate leadership PAC).” Instead, where a candidate claims to be traveling “on behalf of” their own leadership PAC, or one of the many committees controlled by their political party, or any other political committee—the old rules apply, allowing that candidate to pay the price of a commercial air ticket instead of the price of the private plane the candidate is actually flying on.

To make matters worse, FEC Chairman Walther published a statement explaining his decision to provide the necessary fourth vote for the final rule put forth by his three Republican colleagues on the FEC. Preposterously, Chairman Walther cited comments filed in the rulemaking proceeding by the Campaign Legal Center, together with Democracy 21, suggesting that we support this new rule gutting HLOGA. Chairman Walther wrote: “The Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 agreed and indicated their support for ‘retain[ing] the existing reimbursement rate structure for non-candidate travel.’” (emphasis added). While we did support retaining the old rate for non-candidate travel, nowhere in our comments did we suggest that candidates should be considered to be engaging in non-candidate travel through the simple expedient of claiming that they are flying “on behalf of” their leadership PAC or other federal political committee. Chairman Walther should know better.

Candidate travel is candidate travel—period.

The FEC’s new rule illegally contradicts the plain meaning of the statute. Unfortunately, gutting or ignoring federal law—that Commissioners would have written differently themselves—has become a recurring habit for the FEC. In an earlier rulemaking, the FEC gutted the intent of another key aspect of HLOGA, allowing lobbyists to easily evade required reporting of bundled campaign contributions.

Provision of non-commercial travel by corporations (and unions) to members of Congress or federal candidates is simply more legalized corruption.

So I wonder how long it will be before enough members of Congress step up to close this loophole by updating the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act. Days? Weeks? Next century?

As a felon, Jefferson has had equally despicable company: Rep. Andrew J. Hinshaw, R-Calif. (accepting a bribe); Rep. Charles Diggs Jr., D-Mich. (payroll kickback scheme); Rep. Michael Myers, D-Pa. (accepting bribes from FBI agents impersonating Arab businessmen); Reps. John Murphy, D-N.Y., Frank Thompson, D-N.J., John Jenrette, D-S.C., and Raymond Lederer, D-Pa. (Arab businessmen bribery scandal, a.k.a. Abscam).

And Rep. Mario Biaggi, D-N.Y. (extorting money from a defense contractor); Rep. Mel Reynolds, D-Ill. (sex with underage campaign worker, bank fraud); Rep. Walter Tucker III, D-Calif. (accepting and demanding bribes); Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill. (felony mail fraud); Rep. James A. Trafficant, D-Ohio (bribery, conspiracy and racketeering); Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (accepting bribes from defense contractors) and Robert W. Ney, R-Ohio (Abramoff scandal). I’m sure readers can name more.

The collective misfortune of these men is that they got caught. Each undoubtedly said to himself, “I am invincible. I am a member of Congress.” They all assumed membership in the biggest-of-all-members-only clubs provided a get-out-of-jail-free card. But the real reason they believed they could get away with accepting bribes and committing extortion is that members of Congress have been doing it legally for years.

Jefferson may serve 13 years. Prosecutors say he probably earned less than $400,000 despite seeking millions in illegal bribes from “oil, sugar, communications and other businesses, often for projects in Africa,” said The New York Times. But he’s raked in about $6.45 million in campaign contributions since 1990, half from political action committees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics database. More than $600,000 came from lawyers and law firms. (Wonder if the sharks will return his calls now.)

Prosecutors focused on the $90,000 federal agents found in Jefferson’s freezer. The public should have been more focused on Jefferson’s legal sources of campaign bucks, in the same way it should have paid less attention to the penis of that other two-faced Louisiana legislative poseur, Sen. David Vitter, and more attention to the sources of his campaign funding.

We the voters, the people who have watched health-care costs starkly climb ever higher, who see taxes rising exhorbitantly at all levels, who witness the quality of education for our children wither, who watch jobs vanish overseas and unemployment rise, and who are frightened that decades-old safety nets are tattered beyond repair, have become so inured to the corrosive role of money in politics that we forget that politicians are continously but legally bribed by monied interests. And it should stop.

Ask Glenn Greenwald of salon.com. In a video for Larry Lessig’s change-congress.com, he explains how Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Evan Bayh, D-Ind., are threatening to filibuster any health-reform plan with a public option. Lieberman, says Greenswald, is “drowning in campaign contributions” from the health-care industry — more than $2.5 million — and his wife landed a cushy job in 2005 with PR flacksters Hill & Knowlton, representing pharma giant Glaxo. Several months later, Lieberman sought to steer incentives to Glaxo to develop vaccines.

“This is the kind of legalized corruption, legalized bribery, that runs the United States Senate,” says Greenwald. “Only in this case it is particularly sleazy and transparent because Lieberman is ready to gut the major initiative of the Democratic Party.”

Bayh’s wife, says Greenwald, “sits on the board of directors of WellPoint, one of the largest health-insurance companies in the nation. [The Bayhs] own, by their own disclosures, between $500,000 and a million dollars in WellPoint stock. … When Sen. Lieberman threatened to filibuster the public option … the value of the stock of the health-care industry skyrocketed … and personally benefited the finances of the Bayh family.”

Bayh’s wife was paid more than $2 million between 2005 and 2008. Bayh, in 2008, received $500,000 in campaign contributions from the health-care industry, says Greenwald.

“It’s really clear corruption,” says Greenwald.

Politicians defend their financial associations with large corporations (and unions) and wealthy individuals. They call it “campaign financing.” Sadly, we’re too accustomed to this shameless dance now, aren’t we?

A member of Congress, or someone who aspires to be one, gets on the phone and calls people who have lots of money. Often those people run very large enterprises, such as corporations (or unions). Those corporations, driven by the dictum “maximize shareholder income” (or, increasingly, “maximize CEO compensation”), would like members of Congress to make those tasks easier. Politicians say such donations only provide access to their ears, not their actions. The big corporate and PAC donors — or their hired lobbyists — say they’re only legitimately promoting the causes of their companies and clients.

Bullshit. It has been known for decades that lobbyists are often in the room, helping congressional staff write — or writing themselves — legislation. Earlier in this decade, tax-law experts from General Electric shaped an export tax reform bill that saved GE hundreds of millions of dollars.

Lobbyists’ dictation of politicians’ words and deeds has become even more blatant. New York Times reporter Robert Pear wrote Nov. 14 that lobbyists wrote and sought to have supportive statements about health-care reform placed by members into the Congressional Record prior to the Nov. 5 vote:

In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident. Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies. … Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists. [emphasis added]

A lobbyist created the messages and supporting documents and e-mailed them to members. Lobbyists denied any malevolent intent. Said one, quoted anonymously by Pear: “This happens all the time. There was nothing nefarious about it.”

In the past five years, Genentech has spent nearly $10 million on lobbying expenses. In the past decade, Genentech has contributed more than $1 million to federal candidates. Pear reports Genentech’s PAC has made contributions to some of the members who used its talking points and that company officials had hosted fundraisers for some.

And, of course, there’s no quid pro quo, right? Wrote Pear: “Evan L. Morris, head of Genentech’s Washington office, said, ‘There was no connection between the contributions and the statements.’” [emphasis added]

Bullshit again. It is, as Greenwald says, legalized corruption. Imagine if I, as an individual voter living in a rural district, had asked my congressman to insert under his name words I wrote about health-care reform into the Congressional Record. He would say no. (Or rather, the staff member I’d get shunted off to would say no.) But when Genentech said jump, 42 members of Congress asked, “How high?”

Don’t kid us. It’s legalized corruption. Remarks members of Congress revise and extend into the Congressional Record, we now see, have been actually written by lobbyists. So what do the clowns we elect to office do for the $174,000 we pay them (and with very nice health-care bennies, too)?

A handful of Republican senators, led by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C, think they have an answer — a constitutional amendment to limit how long a person may serve in Congress. Apparently, senators would get 12 years, while representatives would get only six years. (Imagine that bill’s conference committee, eh?) On his Senate website, DeMint writes:

As long as members have the chance to spend their lives in Washington, their interests will always skew toward spending taxpayer dollars to buy off special interests, covering over corruption in the bureaucracy, fundraising, relationship building among lobbyists, and trading favors for pork, in short, amassing their own power.

Don’t be misled. After all, what’s to prevent the current system of lobbyists, legalized corruption, and greed from buying new sets of politicians every six or 12 years? Being new, they’ll come cheap, too.

Members of Congress need mountains of money to obtain and retain political power. They spend hours each day dialing donors and asking for, or demanding, campaign contributions. That’s the extortion part of the equation. Donors demand at least an ear and now, we see, actual words printed in the Congressional Record. That’s the corruption part. All that separates many uncharged and unjailed members of Congress from Jefferson and his imprisoned pals is an FBI wiretap.

Changing the politicians through term limits has little merit. Instead, get rid of the current system of campaign finance. If members of Congress were willing to bail out banks with hundreds of billions of dollars, demand that they allow the public to outbid special interests. Lobby members of Congress (yep, I said lobby) to drastically and dramatically overhaul public election financing. Demand that members of Congress place in the federal budget each year sufficient billions of dollars to pay for every federal and statewide election in the country. Give incumbents and challengers alike plenty of public money. But cut them off at the financial knees if they accept a single dime of corporate, union, or PAC money.

If our politicians continue to insist on being bought, let the public do the buying.

• EPA Office of the Inspector General recommends EPA enforce Clean Water Act
• Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote
• New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion
• Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes
• First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational
• Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Last week, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the EPA’s internal monitoring organization, the Office of the Inspector General, found that the EPA’s current approach to controlling excess nutrient deposition into the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River was not working.

The OIG report described an EPA process that, after 10 years of recommending a set of procedures to the Mississippi drainage states, had resulted in the following:

the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico had become the second largest on record and the second largest dead zone in the world.

Further, the report found that, “[i]n the 11 years since EPA issued its strategy, half the States still had no numeric nutrient standards at the end of 2008.”

The states involved have claimed that the costs of creating their own numerical nutrient limits are onerous, and while the states could adopt the EPA standards, “many States viewed EPA’s criteria as overly protective.” And given that the largest sources of nutrients are agricultural states, the OIG report claimed that the political ramifications and costs to agribusiness were likely significant.

In 2001, the EPA published rules in the Federal Register which said that the EPA would force all states in the Mississippi River watershed would be forced to adhere to EPA standards if the states didn’t come up with their own standards by 2004. The OIG report found that “about one-third of the States did not have a nutrient criteria development plan or were not in the administrative phase of adopting standards.” Further, the report found that “States knew that EPA would not use its promulgation powers so the States were not pressured to accelerate progress” and that “EPA had not established measures to hold itself accountable for achieving the goals of its 1998 strategy” by a 2007 audit.

As a result of the findings of the report, the OIG recommended first and foremost that the EPA determine what waterways needed numeric nutritional standards to protect clean water downstream and that the nutritional standards be set according to the authority granted the EPA by the Clean Water Act. The EPA disagreed with these primary recommendations, claiming that:

“a strategic approach to leverage resources and existing authorities” for “waters of regional, local and multi-State value” is the best way to establish effective standards.

In response, the OIG report said “[h]istorically, EPA has said it would use its authority to set standards as a motivator and then failed to set standards…. These States have not yet set nutrient standards for themselves; consequently, it is EPA’s responsibility to act.”

———-

Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote

According to a new article in the Center for Public Integrity’s “The Climate Change Lobby” series, there are now 1150 companies and organizations registered to lobby Congress on climate disruption legislation. This represented an increase of 31% in the total number of organizations lobbying Congress on this single issue.

The article guessed that at least $27 million was spent lobbying Congress leading up to the House vote on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES).

———-

New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion

What do you think erodes land faster – glaciers, rivers, or human farming? According to new data from various glaciated regions around the world, this is a trick question. Specifically, a paper recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience shows that all three erode land at approximately the same rate.

Previously, glaciers were believed to erode landscape at a rate faster than rivers. New information presented in the paper shows that this is not the case. In fact, the rate of erosion appears to change in proportion with the stability of the land that the river or glacier is eroding – in highly tectonically active areas like the Himalayas, glaciers and rivers both erode the land faster than in tectonically stable areas like Australia or the Oregon coast. In addition, erosion from glaciers and rivers appears to roughly match the rate of tectonic change – areas that are uplifting at a rate of 10 mm per year tend to see glacial and river erosion cut through the terrain at roughly the same rate.

There are a couple of other interesting observations described in the paper as well. For example, glacial erosion appears to increase as glaciers are retreating. The paper describes a number of possible mechanisms for this (namely increased flow of meltwater washing away sediment from the base of the glacier and glacial acceleration scraping off more terrain).

the time-dependent variability in glacial erosion rates we are seeing instead suggests that the erosional impact of glaciers is far greater during periods of warming at the end of a glacial cycle than when averaged over a full glaciation (~10⁵ – 10⁶ yrs). Several studies have recently documented a synchronous increase in retreat, ice loss and acceleration of many of the outlet glaciers in Greenland and Patagonia. Such synchronous ice loss and flow suggests that, contrary to previous conclusions, sediment yields and thus calculated erosion rates are more rapid during glacial retreat…

This suggests that glacial melt as a result of climate disruption will cause a significant amount of additional erosion to those areas that are presently deglaciating, namely Greenland, Alaska, Patagonia, and similar regions of the world.

In addition, the authors point out that lowland erosion from agriculture is approximately the same as the fastest glacial and river erosion, and much faster than river erosion in the tectonically stable lowlands would normally be.

[I]f we compare these erosion rates with rates from overland flow associated with conventional agricultural practices, as compiled previously, we see that farming erodes lowland agricultural fields at rates comparable to glaciers and rivers in the most tectonically active mountain belts (Fig. 3). In other words, the relatively recent advent of farming practices has accelerated erosion of many lowland basins at rates on a par with alpine erosion, rates that far exceed long-term rates not only of uplift but also of weathering and soil formation.

The image below is the aforementioned Figure 3.

Thanks to lead author Dr. Koppes for a copy of her paper for my review.

———-

Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes

According to an Associate Press article, wind farms can be mistaken by Doppler radar as tornadoes. Specifically, the spinning blades at the top of a 200 foot tower look like the rapidly rotating winds of a powerful thunderstorm or a tornado. And in places like Texas, where there are lots of both wind turbines and tornadoes, turbines have generated erroneous tornado warnings.

As with all plans, the law of unintended consequences reigns supreme.

———-

First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational

The BBC reports that the first tethered deep water wind turbine is now operational in the North Sea off the coast of Norway. The Carboholic first covered the Hywind deep water wind project back in June, when it had been installed but was still undergoing testing. But now the turbine is adding 2.3 MW to the Norwegian electric grid when it’s windy out 10 km in the North Sea.

According to the BBC article, part of the reason that the turbine was placed in the North Sea was because of the severity of winter storms. The idea was to test how well the turbine withstood potentially damaging winds and seas over a two year test period. In the video that accompanies the BBC article, Hywind asset manager Sjur Bratland estimates that it’ll be at least another 10 years until deep water floating wind turbine technologies are advanced enough to deploy widely. According to the BBC article, part of that would be the development of turbines that are smaller, lower to the water surface, and that produce more electricity per turbine, up to 6 MW.

———-

Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Two new articles in Reuters last week pointed to a known but little publicized problem with hybrid vehicles and wind turbines – the large scale use of rare earth metals in the motors, batteries, and generators used in hybrid vehicles and turbines.

The first article points out that the Prius uses 1 kg of the rare earth metal neodymium, 10-15 kg of lanthanum, and trace amounts of terbium and dysprosium. These are used in the electric motor as a lightweight alternative to iron magnets and in the high capacity nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries. The problem is that the largest source of these elements is China, and the Chinese government is limiting exports specifically to ensure a supply of the rare earth metals to Chinese industry. As a result, Toyota and wind turbine manufacturers are looking to rare earth deposits in Canada, Vietnam, and a previously worked mine in California.

The second article is about the California mine. The mine used to be the largest source of rare earth metals in the world until Chinese mine production drove the price down so far that mining in California stopped being economical. According to the article, the mine not only has the largest known deposit of rare earth metals in the world, the ore has very little uranium or thorium, two elements that make extracting the rare earth metals more expensive. And with the development of a new extraction technology, the mining company expects to be able to start extracting 1,000 tons of refined rare earth metals from the mine per day by 2012. Just in time for the mine to fill in the expected gap left by Chinese export restrictions.

Given that the U.S. could possibly be trading a dependency on Middle East oil for a dependency on Chinese rare earth metals, a domestic source of elements critical to renewable energy would be a good thing to have.

Image credits:
Science Education Resource Center
Nature Geoscience
REUTERS/David Becker

In response, the ACCCE issued a bland statement that didn’t even mention Duke by name. It says, in part:

ACCCE is a broad and diverse coalition, composed of more than 40 members, who are working to advance the public policy dialogue on critical issues relating to energy, environmental, and economic policies. From time to time, individual coalition members may have different perspectives with regard to important policy positions.

Coming on the heels of letters forged by Bonner & Associates on the ACCCE’s behalf, a few websites have suggested that Duke’s departure was related to those letters. S&R put this question to Duke Energy spokesman Tom Williams, who said that the letters were not the cause. Instead, the official Williams claimed that it became clear that a number of other ACCCE members had no intention to support addressing climate change. Williams also said that he had himself observed this in some of the steering committee meetings that he attended.

Williams went out of his way to point out that not all of the remaining ACCCE members were against making progress in addressing climate change, only that, as the official talking points claim, certain “influential member companies who will not support passing climate change legislation in 2009 or 2010.”

Duke Energy remains part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business group that recently called for a “Scopes trial” hearing on the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change and that climate change is a threat to human health. When asked about Duke’s membership in the Chamber, Williams responded that the Chamber was “not a single-issue organization.”

According to Williams, Duke supports climate change legislation before Congress and is asking the Department of Energy for some funding to assist in commercialization of carbon capture technology on the scale of an large coal plant. Duke is currently constructing a large integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal plant in Indiana, and it’s this plant for which Duke is applying for federal financial assistance. According to Williams, Duke has also asked Indiana utilities regulators to allow Duke to pass some of the research and development costs for carbon sequestration on to Duke’s customers.

According to Duke’s official talking points, “coal must continue to be part of our nation’s power generation mix,” even though carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies are, according to Williams, “clearly not” commercial yet.

Duke will now have to work on developing those technologies without the cover of the ACCCE.

Other relevant links around the Web:

The Sierra Club’s response to Duke’s withdrawal from ACCCE.
The Wonk Room at ThinkProgress discusses other companies who might have similar conflicts to Duke’s
DeSmogBlog’s Kevin Grandia at HuffPo
Alcoa quietly abandoned ACCCE sometime in the not too distant past
Pete Altman at the NRDC

According to The New York Times, former Sen. Daschle has been spending quality time in the White House holding forth on health-care reform. Reports The Times: “He still speaks frequently to the president, who met with him as recently as Friday morning in the Oval Office. And he remains a highly paid policy adviser to hospital, drug, pharmaceutical and other health care industry clients of Alston & Bird, the law and lobbying firm.”

He says he’s not a lobbyist. He says he’s a “resource” for his clients and former legislative colleagues. “I do not tailor my views to any specific group or client.”

How believable — or unbelievable — is that claim?

The 900-lawyer firm he works for has received more than $5 million in lobbying fees so far this year, much of it from companies and associations with an abiding interest in influencing the outcome of health-care reform efforts. From 2005 (when the firm’s lobbying revenues nearly tripled) to 2008, the firm’s lobbying fees totaled $24.2 million, according to the lobbying database of the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Mr. Daschle joined the K Street firm after losing his Senate re-election bid in 2004 to Sen. John Thune. Mr. Daschle is an expert in health-care matters; Alston & Bird has numerous clients interested in health-care reform; and the firm’s annual lobbying fees skyrocketed. Surprise!

The Washington Post pegged Mr. Daschle’s salary at $2 million. He also received $2 million last year from business partner Leo Hindery, whose gift of a car and driver led to Mr. Daschle’s withdrawal from cabinet consideration.

“We know that many power brokers never register as lobbyists, but they are every bit as powerful,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation watchdog group.

Over his congressional career, Mr. Daschle has enjoyed considerable financial support from the health-care industries. Since 1998, he has received $1,517,020 in campaign contributions from PACs and individuals associated with the health-care fields.

After amending his tax returns for 2005 through 2007 for failing to disclose income (the car and driver) from Mr. Hindery, he paid $101,943 in back taxes plus interest. Then he withdrew from consideration for secretary of Health and Human Services. In this post, he would have served as point man for the president’s health-care reform plans.

But, reports The Times, he appears to have sufficient access to the president’s ear to be an effective advocate on health care. But for whose benefit?

White House officials say they appreciate his help. “He is one of a number of people that provides outside advice to the White House, and the president greatly appreciates that advice and Tom’s friendship,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a spokesman for the White House who previously worked for Mr. Daschle. Mr. Pfeiffer added that the former senator was “a recognized expert on health reform who knows more about the legislative process than just about anyone.”

Critics, though, say his ex officio role gives Alston & Bird’s health care clients privileged insights into the policy process. They say Mr. Daschle’s multiple advisory roles illustrate the kind of coziness with the lobbying world that Mr. Obama vowed to end. If he had been confirmed as health secretary, Mr. Daschle would have been subject to strict transparency and ethics rules. [emphasis added]

Mr. Daschle has not registered as a lobbyist. Nor does he have an enviable track record of disclosing the health-care clients in his portfolio when addressing public-policy issues — as he failed to do on Aug. 16 on NBC’s Meet the Press. He told host David Gregory this:

Well, David, I guess the, the basic question is, are we building this new system for the American people or for the insurance companies?  I mean, that’s really the key question.  How will they be better served?

But, complains Time’s Michael Scherer:

Left unmentioned was the fact that Daschle, in his capacity as a high-paid consultant at the law firm Alston and Bird, is once again working closely with lobbyists for UnitedHealth, the largest U.S. industry player, aiding the company’s effort to convince moderate Senate and House Democrats to, among other things, kill the public option and keep company profits high.

(BusinessWeek’s Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein think the insurers have already won.)

Here’s how his employer describes Mr. Daschle’s role:

Senator Tom Daschle is a Special Public Policy Advisor in Alston & Bird’s Washington, D.C., office, and is a member of the Legislative & Public Policy Group. As a non-attorney, Senator Daschle focuses his services on advising the firm’s clients on issues related to all aspects of public policy with a particular emphasis on issues related to financial services, health care, energy, telecommunications and taxes. In addition, he advises on trade and international matters. He spends a substantial amount of time providing strategic and policy advice to clients in renewable energy.

Mr. Daschle could not formally lobby for a year after leaving the Senate because of ethics rules. Five years later, he has not registered as a lobbyist. Yet he maintains a portfolio of health-care industry clients, gives paid speeches to health-care industry groups, and has, apparently, unlimited access to the White House and its decision makers — including President Obama.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. Mr. Daschle should register as a lobbyist.

Flip, from 2007:

I promise that when I am elected to Congress, I will always put the American public above everything else. Unlike 99.9% of Congressional Candidates, I have never accepted a single cent of Corporate PAC money … [emphasis added]

Flip, from 2007:

I believe if you’re going to talk about campaign finance reform, you have to be willing to do it to prove your point. And I did and I would not be able to look myself in the mirror if I took money from ExxonMobil. My opponent gets over 70% of his money from PACs… Of all the issues we face, the core issue has to be campaign finance reform because nothing will change til we get the Board Room out of the voting booth. [emphasis added]

Flop, from 2009:

I’m not going to go to the working families of the 29th Congressional District and ask them to fund a congressional campaign when my opponents aren’t willing to do the same thing. I believe in playing on a level playing field [emphasis added].

Rep. Massa argues that he must accept corporate PAC money because the GOP does. He hides behind the “level playing field” argument. Why now? He beat the GOP incumbent without it. His only announced Republican opponent, Corning Mayor Tom Reed, has yet to be offered serious money from the National Republican Congressional Committee — which heavily funded the incumbent he defeated.

Rep. Massa knows the GOP wants this seat back. He wants a fat war chest and he wants it fast to deter any serious GOP challengers (and, perhaps, a Democratic primary one). That’s what incumbents do. That reflects his swift, dramatic shift from principled challenger to Beltway insider.

To disguise this, he suggests he does not want to return to hitting up district voters who are hard-pressed economically, “the working families,” as he labels them.

But that argument is disingenuous. He didn’t depend heavily on the “suffering middle class,” those he now says he wishes to protect from being dunned for contributions.

Federal Election Commission records, aggregated by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, show that Rep. Massa raised $2,151,657 for the 2008 election cycle, $600,000 more than the GOP incumbent. He did not rely as heavily as he claims on the “suffering middle-class” district residents: His top 29 contributors gave him nearly $680,000. And ActBlue contributed nearly half of that. The list of these 29 contributors is dominated by labor unions ponying up $10,000 each.

Sliced another way — by industry totals— $1,292,621 of his total $2.1 million came from the usual suspects of campaign finance: Democratic and liberal organizations; leadership PACs; retired individuals; other candidate committees, lawyers and law firms; industrial, building trade, public sector and transportation unions; the securities and investments community; real estate and health professionals; and others.

As of the June 30 FEC quarterly filing deadline, Rep. Massa has raised $515,119 for the 2010 election cycle. More than half — $284,975 — has come from PAC contributions. His leading contributor is, again, ActBlue, with $73,000. The list of top industries for 2010 is similar to that for 2008. Those industries have given $310,772 so far.

Rep. Massa will need much more than the $2.1 million he raised for 2008. The national GOP wants that seat. And 2010 will be the year that New York state loses one seat in the House due to redistricting. Rural districts like the 29th are always convenient targets to be cut. If the 29th gets whacked, he’d have to run against, perhaps, longer-term New York congressional incumbents. Perhaps that influenced his change of financial heart.

Rep. Massa has said that he would not take corporate PAC money from harmful interests, such as cigarettes and Big Oil. Perhaps he’ll post a clear definition of “harmful” on his re-election website — if and when he announces for 2010.

Congress is taking a vacation from its hard work of fixing health care (yes, sarcasm intended). All the members are town-halling like mad, trying to divine the will of the electorate. Which Rep. Massa will tour District 29 this month?

This one, from June 2007:

I believe that we also need to address the problem of lobbyists in Washington, and as such, I do not accept Corporate PAC money. Thus I am reaching out to all of you to support my grassroots campaign. I am asking for 1000 people to step up and donate $100 to my campaign so we can tackle the issue of global warming in Washington. I need you to join me. Together, we can change the world.

Or this one, from February 2009:

[GOP critics] want to attack me for taking legitimate political action money that they are taking 10 times more of. I don’t quite get why the pot is calling the kettle black.

photo credit: Esquire

• ACCCE hired Bonner, but didn’t notify Congress of forgeries when they were discovered
• Cash for Clunkers doesn’t do much for climate
• National Academy of Sciences: we need independent GHG emission confirmation
• Climate disruption may, or may not, make disease worse

Before the House voted on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) earlier this year, someone hired Bonner & Associates (hereafter Bonner) to manufacture some grassroots opposition against ACES. At least one employee did so by forging letters from non-existent people to Representative Tom Perriello of Virginia. These letters were discovered, Bonner claims to have fired the employee, and a partner at Bonner apologized to the two minority groups from which the letters were supposedly sent. The apologies were, it’s fair to say, emphatically not accepted.

Since the Bonner story broke last Friday, there have been a lot of new information about who hired them, whether there were other Congresspeople who received forged letters, the legality or lack thereof, and an official response from a House committee with subpoena powers.

We now know that Bonner sent at least 12 letters to three different Congresspeople – the aforementioned Rep. Perriello, Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, and Rep. Christopher Carney, both of Pennsylvania. We also know that these 12 letters were identified by Bonner and brought to the attention of the clients. And, as of Wednesday, we also know that two more letters have turned up in Rep. Perriello’s office – these forged on letterhead belonging to the Jefferson Area Board for Aging and the American Association of University Women. We don’t presently know if these two additional letters are part of the 12 discovered by Bonner or whether they represent two additional letters, for a total of 14 forged letters.

We also know that the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) was the end client (via another PR company, the Hawthorn Group, which has released its own statement) who had hired Bonner to create the grassroots backlash against ACES – they admitted so in a statement by ACCCE president Stephen L. Miller on their Website. It reads, in part:

We are outraged at the conduct of Bonner and Associates. Bonner and Associates was hired by the Hawthorn Group – our primary grassroots contractor – to do limited outreach earlier this year on H.R. 2454. Based upon the information we have, it is clear that an employee of Bonner’s firm failed to demonstrate the integrity we demand of all our contractors and subcontractors. As a result, these egregious actions led to falsified letters being sent to Members of Congress.

ACCCE has always maintained high ethical and professional standards. In this case, the standards and practices that we require for grassroots advocacy outreach were not adhered to by Bonner and Associates. In this sense, the community groups involved, the Members of Congress who received the fraudulent letters, as well as ACCCE, were all victimized by this misconduct.

However, we also know that the ACCCE knew about the forgeries at least two days before the House vote and did not inform Congress of that fact. This comes from an ACCCE document describing the relationship between the ACCCE and Bonner:

Based upon information ACCCE received from the Hawthorn Group, it was Bonner & Associates’ own internal that identified these false letters and it was Mr. Bonner who first brought this to the attention of the Hawthorn Group. ACCCE was then made aware of the situation by Hawthorn on July 24, 2009.

The House Roll Call vote on ACES occurred on July 26, 2009.

The Sierra Club announced on Monday that it had mailed a letter to Attorney General Holder asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether Bonner’s actions were legal or not. The letter from Patrick Gallagher, Sierra Club Legal Counsel, reads in part:

First, the Department of Justice should ascertain whether forged letters were sent to other Representatives or Senators…. Second, the Department of Justice should investigate whether other community organizations were similarly misrepresented…. Finally, the Department of Justice should pursue criminal charges against Bonner & Associates.

At a minimum, Bonner & Associates, acting through its employees or representatives, appears to have violated 18 U.S.C. 1343 (“Fraud by wire, radio, or television”) and 19 U.S.C. 1346 (“Definition of ’scheme or artifice to defraud’”).

Representative Edward Markey, Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, sent a letter to Jack Bonner with a list of 14 questions to be answered by August 12, 2009. S&R obtained a copy of the letter – you can read it here. Some of the more interesting questions from the letter can be summarized as follows:

1. Who did you do your lobbying for, is your client a registered lobbying firm, and how much did did they pay you?
2. Did Bonner lobby other Congresspeople on ACES and for what clients?
3. Give us details (compensation, contractor vs. employee status, etc.) about the employee you claim to have fired.
4. If you script your employees, give us copies of those scripts.
5. We want copies of all faked letters Bonner sent to any Congressperson, and we also want to know how you got ahold of actual letterhead from the two minority groups from which letters were forged.
6. Explain how you caught the fakes and what methods you used to ensure that you found all the faked letters and their recipients, and if you destroyed anyting, we want to know that too.

Rep. Markey has also sent a letter to the ACCCE demanding answers to questions similar to those posed to Bonner. S&R has also obtained a copy of this letter and you can read it here. It says, in part:

Press reports indicate that ACCCE may not have told the other affected offices that they too had received fraudulent letters until Monday, August 3, 2009.

The deliberate inaction prior to the House vote and the extended silence after the House vote – some 40 days after the ACCCE knew what had happened – raises serious concerns.

This story is still developing, and S&R will bring you periodic updates as the become available.

———-

Cash for Clunkers doesn’t do much for climate

According to an Associated Press article, Cash for Clunkers (C4C) has not had an appreciable effect on U.S. consumption of oil or its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. According to the article, C4C reduced oil consumption by about 72 million gallons of gas per year, or the amount of gasoline consumed by Americans every 4.5 hours. Similarly, the GHG savings equates to about saving 57 minutes of GHG emissions per year.

The problem is that the estimated number of clunkers removed from the roads is only 250 thousand, compared to at total of approximately 260 million cars in the U.S.

There are certainly benefits to this program, but according to the individuals interviewed for the AP story, the benefits aren’t GHGs. Instead, the benefits are to the economy as a whole and the reduction of standard pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide. But two climate experts interviewed for the article had this to say about it:

“As a carbon dioxide policy, this is a terribly wasteful thing to do,” said Henry Jacoby, a professor of management and co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT. “The amount of carbon you are saving per federal expenditure is very, very small.”

and

“It’s not that it’s a bad idea; just don’t sell it as a cost-effective energy savings method,” [Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University,] said. “From an economic standpoint it seems to be a roaring success. From an environment and energy perspective, it’s not where you would put your first dollar.”

It’s also entirely possible that these complaints are actually the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. As S&R reported last month, GHG and pollution emissions vary with the total lifecycle of that transportation method. For this reason, replacing “clunkers” that aren’t truly clunkers could actually increase GHG and pollution emissions as a result of the emissions created in the process of manufacturing the new vehicle.

Whether this is actually so remains for someone else to determine.

———-

National Academy of Sciences: we need independent GHG emission confirmation

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Methods for Estimating Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the National Research Council sent NASA administrator Charles Bolden a letter expressing their support for the replacement of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) that failed to reach orbit earlier this year. The letter says that a replacement OCO is necessary for independent verification of carbon emissions reports that are presently self-reported by nations on an irregular basis.

National emission inventories, required under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are self-reported and are not required regularly for all countries. Verification requires checking these self-reported emissions estimates. However, independent data against which to verify the statistics used to estimate CO2 emissions, such as fossil fuel consumption, are not available.

In addition, while the Japanese GOSAT has the ability to monitor CO₂, the letter claims that GOSAT’s spatial resolution is too low and it’s accuracy insufficient to measure the emissions of a power plant against the background CO₂.

The letter points out that, while OCO’s short on-orbit lifetime and poor global coverage makes OCO unsuitable to observe trends, but that OCO would be an ideal testbed for the technologies that could monitor the entire globe for years or decades at a time. And given the significant limitations of terrestrial monitoring of GHGs, satellites will be necessary to confirm the self-reported national emissions.

———-

Climate disruption may, or may not, make disease worse

It’s long been a tenet of climate disruption that increasing global temperatures will result in a wider range for tropical diseases and thus greater incidence of disease. But a feature article in Conservation Magazine asks a number of questions about the accuracy of this understanding and ultimately concludes that there are too many unknowns at this point to really know how diseases will respond to a warming world.

The basic problem is this: when there are so many other possible factors in the spread of disease, how can you accurately attribute the wider spread of a disease to climate disruption? The examples provided in the article illustrate this difficulty.

According to the article, tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) increased in the Baltics at the same time that the region warmed up significantly. But the Soviet Union collapsed over the same period as well, and the rate of poverty rose as a result. Since poorer people are less likely to get vaccinated and are more likely to forage for food in areas where ticks are more common, TBE researcher, Sarah Randolph concluded that “the disease surge probably had far more to do with human actions than planetary changes.”

Mosquitoes are some of the most prolific disease vectors in the world, spreading malaria and West Nile Virus among dozens of other pathogens and parasites. According to the article, West Nile cases in the U.S. appear to have more to do with the lifecycles of the mosquitoes that carry the virus than with climate change. Specifically, in the western U.S., West Nile cases spike the year after a dry year, while West Nile cases spike in wet years in the eastern U.S. These differences result from the relationship between different mosquitoes and their predators. Hot years in the West kill off mosquito predators and the mosquitoes recover before the predators do, leading to an increase in mosquitoes and accompanying West Nile cases. In the East, however, mosquitoes breed in standing water (water-filled tires, for example), and so rainier years produce more mosquitoes and more West Nile cases.

However, the data is only over a few short years, and whether this relationship holds for longer periods is, as yet, undetermined. But the observed reaction of West Nile to precipitation and heat illustrates that whether the disease gets more common and widespread or not will vary from region to region.

The questions are not limited just to human disease and parasites – how animal parasites, and the animals afflicted, will change as a result of climate disruption is also uncertain. According to the article, monarch butterflies are often afflicted by a parasite that makes the butterflies less able to fly long distances. Because so many monarchs migrate to Mexico, the migrating butterfly population remains healthy. But non-migrating monarchs in Florida have a much higher incidence of parasite infection than the migrating monarchs do. And so it’s possible that, if monarch wintering sites move further north out of Mexico and into Texas, the incidence of parasitic infection in monarch butterflies could rise.

But other parasites, such as those that infect musk ox in the Arctic, may respond differently, according to the article. The parasites infect the musk ox via accidental ingestion of slugs. If climate disruption kills off the slugs, then musk ox may actually get healthier as a result of climate disruption.

At this point there’s not enough information to know.

Image credits:
PhotoCarsOnline.com
NASA/JPL

According to the article, six letters ostensibly from two minority groups within Rep. Perriello’s district were forged by one or more employees within Bonner & Associates. One letter was on letterhead from Creciendo Juntos, a nonprofit group devoted to solving Hispanic issues in Charlottesville. The other five were supposedly from the Albemarle-Charlottesville NAACP. All six letters were from people who did not work at the groups and two claimed organizational titles that do not exist. S&R has obtained copies of the letters in question: Creciendo Juntos forgery and NAACP forgery.

The Daily Progress article reports that a partner with Bonner & Associates traveled to Charlottesville to apologize for the “mistake” and to inform Creciendo Juntos that the employee responsible had been fired. However, Creciendo Juntos executive committeemember Tim Freilich wrote in a letter to Rep. Perriello that:

This was not a “mistake.” This was a deliberately and carefully forged letter that used the logo, address and name of Creciendo Juntos without authorization. (from Daily Progress article)

Given Bonner & Associates’ history of astroturf lobbying and outright deception, it’s difficult to dismiss Mr. Freilich’s concerns.

According to the Daily Progress article:

The AARP Bulletin reported in 2006 that the “60 Plus Association” hired Bonner & Associates in 2003 to manage what it called an “Astroturf” campaign against prescription drug legislation in Minnesota and New Mexico, meaning that it was an artificial version of a grassroots campaign.

Bonner & Associates hired callers to identify themselves as members of the 60 Plus Association and urge residents to ask their governors to veto the legislation. Pharmaceutical company Pfizer later admitted that it had paid Bonner & Associates to undertake the campaign, AARP reported.

Furthermore, in an article originally published by the Baltimore Sun and reprinted at Common Dreams, Bonner & Associates was exposed as using similar tactics to oppose the prescription drug plan on behalf of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry trade group.

Although the tactics outraged some supporters of the prescription drug bills, those behind the campaign defended their actions as legitimate.

Welcome to the big leagues, they said.

“It’s a great exercise in the First Amendment,” said Jack Bonner, founder of Bonner & Associates, the Washington lobbying firm hired by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) to kill the legislation.

The Baltimore Sun article goes on to describe the basic way the campaign worked: Bonner & Associates faxed misleading letters on Consumer Alliance letterhead to people in various purchased databases and the returned signatures were then attached to a petition against the drug benefit that was presented to legislators. Furthermore, the contact that supposedly worked for Consumer Alliance was revealed to be a Bonner & Associates employee – after he lied to a reporter about his employer.

In a response to a request for PhRMA to be honest, the Sun article quotes Jack Bonner as saying “It’s democracy. That is what this is about.”

Since this story broke in the Daily Progress this morning, there has been a widespread and growing uproar about it.

Carl Pope of the Sierra Club issued a press release that said, in part, “the alleged forgery of letters from organizations dedicated to protecting their communities forces one to question who is really behind the efforts to block America’s progress towards a clean energy economy.”

Paul Blumenthal, blogged at the Sunlight Foundation that “this story was worth flagging as I’d imagine it is the clearest cut argument for [grassroots lobbying disclosure]” and “Bonner & Associates has not filed a lobbying disclosure report since 2001, so we have no clue which client is paying the firm to forge letters and lie to lawmakers.”

Senator John Kerry wrote a diary entry at Daily Kos that reads in part:

Nothing should surprise us anymore after we’ve seen powerful interests mislead about the science, twist the facts about climate change, resort to a whole host of tactics to try to hide a simple fact: the earth is in trouble because of manmade greenhouse gasses, our planet is getting closer and closer to a dangerous tipping point, and we must do something about this immediately.

But I have to say, this appears to be a desperate distortion too many….

This moment is too important, the crisis is too grave, to let our debate be distorted by under the radar screen gutter moves – this one the most egregious example yet reported.

A blog post at Blue Virginia compared Bonner & Associates to the Tea Party Patriots, who told their members to call legislators and lie about their residency. And the blog It’s Getting Hot In Here made their opinion of the tactics abundantly clear just by the title – “Fraud? Identity Theft? Impersonation? All In A Day’s Work.” And Wonkette is most assuredly not amused.

This story has also started to get some legs in the legacy media. Keith Johnson, writer of the Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital blog, said the following: “The fight over impending climate-change legislation in Congress appears to be getting dirtier.” Johnson also pointed out that Bonner & Associates has worked against climate disruption policies in the past, specifically organizing a “web-based grassroots campaign ahead of the U.S. vote on the Kyoto Protocol in the late 1990s.” Mention of this has also shown up in The Hill’s Briefing Room blog.

Ultimately, though, whether Bonner & Associates will be punished for lying and forging letters on official letterhead will not be determined by activists, bloggers, or reporters. Jack Bonner and Bonner & Associates were accused of ethics violations for the group’s activities on behalf of PhRMA, but the charges were dismissed by the Maryland State Ethics Commission. If, as TPMMuckraker blogger Zachary Roth believes, additional letters turn up in other Representatives’ offices, then the probability that this was a single rogue, overzealous employee (as Bonner & Associates has claimed) goes way down. Similarly, there’s a chance that Bonner & Associates might potentially face one or more legal actions as a result of these letters. A case could probably be made for fraud and impersonation, possibly for trademark infringement. And I feel confident that lawyers could find more charges as well.

In that same vein, Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachussetts, Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, has taken an interest in this story:

My Select Committee will immediately begin an investigation of the extent and scope of this activity.

President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to change the way Washington works and curb the influence of lobbyists. … During the campaign, federal lobbyists could not contribute to or raise money for the campaign. … [T]he president-elect is taking those commitments even further by announcing the strictest, and most far reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history.”

Presumably, that means President Obama wishes to end the pay-to-play philosophy that pervades the practice of politics. Well, he’s got some explaining to do, because what he promises is not always what he does.

Case No. 1: Yes, the president said he’d nominate some of his financial backers as ambassadors. But the number’s growing. According to the Center for Responsive Politics:

President Obama announced another 10 names for ambassadorships last week, and in doing so, he awarded another set of big donors and bundlers with plum positions representing U.S. interests abroad. The new nominees for ambassadors to Belize, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Romania and Switzerland — along with their spouses and dependent children — have contributed at least $637,800 to federal candidates, parties and committees since 1989, CRP has found. Nearly that entire sum has gone to Democrats, including $32,775 to Obama himself and $8,300 to former primary opponent and now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. These individuals also brought in at least $1.1 million for Obama’s presidential bid as bundlers, and at least another half-a-million as bundlers for his inauguration.

To date, this brings the contribution histories of Obama’s ambassador nominees to roughly $1.8 million in donations since 1989. The 19 ambassadors that CRP has found in our campaign contribution database, along with their spouses and children, have given more than $98,200 to Obama personally, bundled at least $3.4 million for his 2008 presidential run and bundled another $1.4 million for his inauguration.

Do these nominations transgress on his promise of change? Well, these people paid — and now they get to play. To be fair, however, presidents have rewarded financial backers with ambassadorships since the birth of the Republic. Let’s wait a bit and see how his record stacks up against the nomination histories of Presidents Bush I and II and Clinton. But President Obama’s nominations of financial backers are troubling in light of his promise of change.

Case No. 2: Jeff Zeleny, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, reported this earlier this week:

When President Obama arrived at the Mandarin Oriental hotel for a fund-raising reception on Thursday night, the new White House rules of political purity were in order: no lobbyists allowed.

But at the same downtown hotel on Friday morning, registered lobbyists have not only been invited to attend an issues conference with Democratic leaders, but they have also been asked to come with a $5,000 check in hand if they want to stay in good favor with the party’s House and Senate re-election committees.

The practicality of Mr. Obama’s pledge to change the ways of Washington is colliding once more with the reality of how money, influence and governance interact here. He repeatedly declared while campaigning last year that he would “not take a dime” from lobbyists or political action committees.

So to follow through with that promise, Mr. Obama is simply leaving the room. [emphasis added]

I have written about campaign finance for years. I never expected any politician, including President Obama, to live up to any promise to curb the influence of money in politics. Is he following the letter or spirit of his promise of change with regard to political money? Or has he merely developed a system of sidesteps to maintain the appearance of sticking to a promise?

Does this matter? Should we care that the president of the United States promises reform over the influence of money in politics but balks at bold, transparent steps to achieve it? Yes, on both counts.

Surely he will seek re-election. Recall, please, that presidential candidates in the 2008 cycle spent $1.8 billion. That’s more than double the $883 million presidential candidates spent in the 2004 cycle.

Is there any reason to believe — with out-of-power Republicans wanting back in and a Democratic president seeking re-election — that the cost of the 2012 election won’t be twice as high as 2008?

President Obama will need a boatload of bucks. He may philosophically wish to curb the influence of money in politics, but he will continue to be ruled by the need for the money to maintain power … as his opponents will be in their attempts to regain power.

On the president’s “Ethics” page at the White House website, this phrase is repeatedly used: “in the spirit of transparency …” So far, it’s mere fiction.

He will continue the charade of “stepping out of the room” because he needs the money. Can’t say I blame him … but I expected better.

• GPS degradation to affect climate measurements too
• Secretary Chu suggests white roofs to combat climate disruption
• Ecuador wants cash to leave carbon underground
• Subsidies, quotas warping “renewable” definition

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the the Global Positioning System (GPS) could degrade significantly as early as next year. The GAO report says that the existing GPS satellites are aging and need to be replaced, but new satellites are years late and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. For this reason, the constellation of 31 GPS satellites has a chance of falling below the minimum number needed (24 satellites) to provide the required accuracy for military uses starting in 2010.

Normally, the trials and tribulations of the GPS system might not be considered a climate issue, given that most people only know about the everyday items that use GPS signals – smart phones and car navigation systems for starters. But GPS is used for thousands of lesser known applications. For example, many telecommunications central offices use GPS receivers as the master clock that enables them to efficiently transmit data and voice communications across the country. And survey equipment uses GPS to plot road locations and elevation.

GPS is also used to track the 3000 Argo ocean probes that monitor temperature and salinity in the global ocean, and the movement of glaciers on Greenland and the amount of post-glacial isostatic rebound are both measured by very accurate GPS receivers. A less accurate GPS system would make these measurements less accurate as well, possibly resulting in related climate science data (on sea level rise, ocean heat content, etc.) becomming less reliable.

In a Twitter “press conference,” Air Force spokesman Col. Dave Buckman downplayed the risks found by the GAO. According to the IDG article, Col. Buckman said that it was “very unlikely” that users would even notice the reduction in accuracy. That may be true for the average person driving a car around town, but scientific users, like military users, need position to be as accurately determined as possible, especially for things like glaciers that move (generally) very slowly, or for sea level rise where the changes could be millimeters per year.

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Secretary Chu suggests white roofs to combat climate disruption

According to The Independent, Energy Secretary Steven Chu suggested that buildings have their roofs painted white in order to reduce climate disruption. The rationale is simple – white reflects energy. A white roof would reduce the amount of solar energy absorbed by the building, improving its energy efficiency by reducing the amoung of electricity required to cool the building. Less air conditioning means fewer carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from fossil fuel power plants.

In addition, white roofs (and lightly colored walls and streets) would increase the amount of energy reflected from the surface back into space. This is called “albedo,” and the more energy is reflected, the less is absorbed and kept within the Earth’s climate system. In fact, as the Carbo mentioned back in 2008, the albedo effect is huge – the energy reflected alone could save the equivalent of 44 billion tons CO₂. The Independent article quotes Sec. Chu as saying it would be like removing every car in the world from the road for 11 years.

This idea is relatively intuitive to anyone who owns a dark-colored car or who uses a windshield sun shade – dark-colored cars or cars without the sun shade get much hotter in the summer sun than light-colored and/or shaded cars do. But there’s another beneficial side effect too – light colors not only reflect energy from the sun back out into space, but also reflect the building’s own energy back into the building. As a result, lightly-colored buildings will not only need less energy for cooling in the summer, but they’ll also need less energy for heating in the winter.

All that for the cost of a couple million coats of paint.

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Ecuador wants cash to leave carbon underground

Oil is carbon that hasn’t been burned yet. At least, that’s the argument that the government of Ecuador is making. According to the Washington Post, Ecuador is trying to get carbon market credit for leaving the 410 million tons of CO₂ in the ground instead of extracting it and selling it (in the form of 850 million barrels of oil) on the oil market.

While there has been some discussion around the Web that paying nations and companies to leave fossil fuels in the ground might be a viable method to quickly reduce CO₂ emissions, the Post reports that the Ecuador proposal is the first of its kind. This partly due to the fact that the Kyoto Protocol specifically prohibits claiming energy reserves left untouched as a carbon credit. The Post quotes Ecuadoran environmentalist Roque Sevílla as saying Ecuadorans hope that the Copenhagen meeting this December might loosen the rules and allow the Ecuador proposal to become a “pilot project.”

There is one major problem, however. The land above the oil reserves is a National Park and is supposedly already protected from drilling. This means that Ecuador is asking to be paid for not extracting oil that shouldn’t be extracted in the first place, and this could be considered fraudulent. As such, the Ecuadoran proposal may fail even if carbon credit payments for fossil fuels not extracted are approved in Copenhagen. Time will tell.

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Subsidies, quotas warping “renewable” definition

What do the following things all have in common: trash pellets, nuclear reactors, coal mining waste, and microwaved tires? According to the NYTimes, depending on what state you’re in, they’re all considered as renewable as solar power or wind energy.

According to the article, companies are lobbying the state and federal governments to include their particular energy source in the definition of what is renewable.

“A banana is renewable — you can grow them forever,” said Bob Eisenbud, a vice president for government affairs at Waste Management, which receives about 10 percent of its annual revenues of $13.3 billion from waste and landfill energy generation. “A banana that goes into garbage and gets burned,” he added, is “a renewable resource and producing renewable energy.”

But is it really? The article says that many environmentalists disagree with Waste Management’s characterization, or with the inclusion of other sources of energy that emit CO₂ via burning something.

The environmentalists have a point. Burning tires that have been microwaved in an effort to make them burn more efficiently is a great idea because millions of tires take up huge amounts of space and can harbor insects that are vectors for disease (especially mosquitoes). But tires are petroleum products, a carbon-intensive fossil fuel, and so burning tires isn’t a whole lot different from burning oil directly.

Similarly, converting waste to electricity and burning it reduces the waste stream, but is solid waste a “renewable resource” or a byproduct of modern civilization? I’m personally inclined to say “byproduct,” at least until you consider landfill gas emissions (mostly methane). However, when carbon capitalism finally comes along, landfill emissions of methane will become ~20x more expensive than the CO₂ emitted from burning the methane, so the methane “renewable” question will likely take care of itself.

The NYTimes article points out that the problem of defining “renewable” goes beyond whether burning waste should qualify or not. Hydropower is certainly renewable, but it’s already heavily subsidized by the government. So should the government give hydropower utilities even more money than they’re already getting?

Graham Mathews, a lobbyist representing Covanta Energy, summarized the first part of this problem for the NYTimes article by saying “Energy policy is balkanized by region, and that dictates the debate. The politics become incredibly complicated.” In essence, since there is no federal law defining what is and, just as importantly, what is not “renewable,” state politics will define what does and does not qualify for federal credits and what technologies apply to state renewable electricity standards.

But Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), chairman of the Senate energy committee, said that defining too many questionable technologies as “renewable” throws the numbers “way out of whack,” and then “the whole purpose of the renewable electricity standard is defeated.”

I’m sure that companies lobbying for including nuclear or coal mine waste as “renewable” would never want to defeat a renewable electricity standard….

After thinking about it for a while, I’ve concluded that it’s just not worth driving myself crazy trying to determine whether ACES is “better than nothing” or whether it “sucks so bad it must be killed.” We’re less than a week into a process that could make ACES unrecognizable by the time it’s done, and so tearing my hair out over whether it’s enough today is an exercise in futility.

The GOP wants this bill dead – just looking at the insane list of amendments the GOP offered makes that abundantly clear. There’s seven supposedly different “jobs offramp” amendments job counts for Colorado alone, eight for California, five for Kentucky, and so on – all of which would automatically shut down the law if 1000, or 2000, or 10,000 or more jobs were lost in a state as a result of ACES. These aren’t serious amendments in the spirit of “lets make this bill better,” they’re “poison pills” specifically designed to make the bill so stupidly bad that even Waxman and Markey themselves would vote against it.

The fact that the GOP wants ACES dead is a good thing, actually, just as the fact that Greenpeace can’t support it because it doesn’t go far enough is a good thing. Generally, I figure that if both the left and the right hate the same legislation, that’s probably a good sign that the bill strikes the right compromises.

But this time I’m not so sure.

You see, the bill as it is today is almost certainly as strong as it’ll ever be. After passing E&C, it’ll probably go on to Ways and Means since that committee has jurisdiction over government debts, tariffs and so on. After Ways and Means, however, ACES may go through any or all of the following House Committees: Agriculture, Appropriations, Budget, Foreign Affairs, Natural Resources, Science and Technology, and/or Transportation and Infrastructure. Maybe those committees offered their input between the draft hearings and the official introduction on March 18, but then again maybe not. I certainly hope so, considering how much weaker the introduced version of ACES is than the initial draft version was.

And that’s all before ACES hits the House floor, where anyone who hasn’t already offered amendments on it will have the opportunity to do so in an attempt to weaken ACES even further.

Then the bill hits the Senate. Does anyone really think that, after going through as many as ten more committees, ACES will be strengthened in the Senate, especially given the number of conservative and moderate Democratic Senators that have to be mollified to reach a filibuster-proof 60 vote majority? If you do, I’ve got an collateralized debt obligation you could take off my hands too. (The ten committees I think could have jurisdiction over ACES are as follows: Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry; Appropriations; Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; Budget; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; Energy and Natural Resources; Environment and Public Works; Finance; Foreign Relations; Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.)

After some form of ACES passes both the House and the Senate, there will almost certainly be a conference committee to work out the differences. It’s theoretically possible that the bill could be made stronger here using the same kind of bullshit measures the GOP used to screw with legislation during the Bush years, but I doubt it. Not because I think the Democrats too moral or ethical to try the same tricks, but rather because doing so will probably make the final form of ACES unpassable in the Senate.

And so, when all is said and done, the ACES that gets to President Obama will probably be even more bloated than it already is and will probably be significantly weaker than the version that just passed out of the E&C committee.

Whether I’ll support it by that point is impossible to predict. Will it still be better than nothing? Probably. Will it still be woefully insufficient as compared to what the science says is necessary? Almost certainly.

So I’m taking a wait and see approach. If ACES stay’s in the “better than nothing” column, great – I’ll publicly support it and suggest that everyone else do the same as well. If ACES finds its way into the “sucks so bad it must be killed” column, however, I’ll publicly oppose it and suggest that everyone else also do the same.

Until then, however, writing letters to your congresscritters asking them to strengthen ACES is probably a good idea. After all, there’s definitely a very slim chance that I’m totally off base and the bill can be made stronger through the legislative process instead of devolving to the least common denominator as I expect.

Right now it’s impossible to know. Well, impossible without a MisterFusion and flux-capacitor-equipped DeLorean, anyway….

Image Credit: AFP/Getty Images, via NYTimes GreenInc blog

That’s the conclusion of three University of Kansas professors who undertook an empirical analysis of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 to study rates of return for money spent on lobbying, reported The Washington Post in an April 12 story by Dan Eggen.

This law — this shady excuse for a law with a name only charlatans could love — allowed companies that had earned profits overseas to inexpensively bring that money back into the States. The customary tax rate on such profits was 35 percent. But this elegantly named process — repatriation of profits — gave companies a one-time chance four years ago to haul the money home, paying only 5.25 percent.

The act was a tax holiday sought by a coalition of companies, primarily big pharmaceutical and high-technology corporations, all because they sought to pay little or no taxes on profits generated overseas — and they concocted a successful scheme to pull it off.

Mr. Eggen summarized the Kansas professors’ study:

The largest recipients of tax breaks were concentrated in the pharmaceutical and technology fields, including Pfizer, Merck, Hewlett Packard, Johnson & Johnson and IBM. Pfizer alone repatriated $37 billion, representing 70 percent of its revenue in 2004, the study found. The now-beleaguered financial industry also benefited from the provision, including Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, all of which have since received tens of billions of dollars in federal bailout money. [emphasis added]

Critics argued that the act would benefit multinational corporations to the detriment of domestic firms, reported Jonathan Weisman of the Post in August 2005. Even the Bush White House was dubious over the alleged economic benefits of the bill:

“There will be some stimulative effect because it pumps money into the economy,” said Phillip L. Swagel, a former chief of staff on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, which had opposed the tax holiday. “But you might as well have taken a helicopter over 90210 [Beverly Hills] and pushed the money out the door. That would have stimulated the economy as well.”

In 2006, Washington Post business columnist Allan Sloan wrote of Ford Motor Co.’s abuse of the misnamed act:

It’s almost enough to make you laugh — bitterly, of course. Here was Ford Motor Co. announcing yesterday that it had cut 10,000 jobs last year and that it will cut up to 30,000 more. But shedding jobs at muscle-car acceleration rates didn’t stop Ford from pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars courtesy of the American Jobs Creation Act. … Hello? How can you simultaneously cut jobs and benefit from the American Jobs Creation Act? Welcome to the wonderful world of Washington nomenclature. [emphasis added]

Mr. Sloan estimated that Ford saved $850 million in taxes, not the $250 million the company suggested in its press release.

So how did corporations that don’t believe in paying their appropriate share of taxes finagle this?

Here’s one story, as reported by Mr. Eggen:

The provision was championed in part by the Homeland Investment Coalition, a group of companies and trade associations that was formed to push for the repatriation holiday. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), one of the disbanded coalition’s members, said in a statement Friday that “repatriation of profits provided a new source of investment for American companies.”

“PhRMA supported the legislation four years ago as part of a broad business coalition because of the additional economic benefits the bill would provide,” senior vice president Ken Johnson said. “It meant jobs and skilled training for American workers, as well as a shot in the arm for local economies.” [emphasis added]

This coalition of multinationals had worked on getting its profits home earlier— and falsely articulated its intent regarding jobs. In 2003, seeking support for the then-named Invest in the U.S.A. Act of 2003, the coalition sent a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Max Baucus, ranking member. The letter said that “The $135 billion currently offshore that would be invested in America would benefit the U.S. economy by increasing domestic investment in plant, equipment, R&D and job creation” among other benefits, including investments in emerging technologies, funding for pension plans hurt by stock market declines, and, especially:

“[i]mproving the long term financial strength of U.S.-based companies by reducing domestic debt loads, strengthening corporate balance sheets, and lowering corporate bond rates; increasing dividends to shareholders (which can be productively redeployed); and raising equity market valuations by increasing funds available for share repurchases.”

Parse it any way you wish — creating jobs was the intended political cover for any member of Congress to sign on as a co-sponsor of the legislation.

But did the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 actually lead to a net gain in jobs? Nope. Did it provide “a new source of investment for American companies”? Not even close. And supporters of this tax holiday tried to get another such tax break. Reported Mr. Eggen:

… the Congressional Research Service and others have since found that many companies cut jobs in the wake of the tax break and that nearly all the money was used for stock buybacks or dividends. Supporters failed in a bid to include a similar tax break in this year’s stimulus legislation, and a Senate subcommittee has launched an investigation into how companies used their tax savings under the 2004 program. [emphasis added]

Any congressional investigation lags reporting by The New York Times by four years. An August 2005 Times editorial said:

A month ago, Hewlett-Packard announced it would lay off 14,500 workers by November 2006. Meanwhile, the company is about to repatriate $14.5 billion in profits it has in overseas accounts at a measly tax of 5.25 percent — an 85 percent discount off the normal corporate rate. The cut-rate repatriation, offered by Congress to American companies that bring profits held in foreign lands home in 2005, was sold to the public as a one-shot deal to generate cash for new hiring. But as its critics warned, the tax cut is functioning instead as a handout for America’s most profitable companies.

Hewlett is just one example. Normally, the tax on a $14.5 billion repatriation would be about $5 billion. Because of the bargain rate in 2005, Hewlett expects to pay roughly $800 million. Hewlett also expects its layoffs to cost the company about $1 billion. Thus, in Hewlett’s case, the tax holiday has not only failed to create jobs, but has also more than covered the cost of cutting workers from the payroll.

Dozens of other companies are also bringing billions home with no mention of new hiring. [emphasis added]

Drug companies especially needed to bring the overseas profits home — but not, as the act’s name suggests, to create jobs. They had big financial problems looming. Patents on brand-name drugs worth billions in sales were about to expire, leading to competition by companies producing generic versions.

Upcoming patent expirations for [Pfizer] include Lipitor in 2011, ‘the little blue pill’ Viagra in 2012, and the allergy medicine Zyrtec in 2012 as well. The loss of these patents would see Pfizer losing more than $14 billion in revenue. [emphasis added]

During the last six months of 2004, as the bill was manuevered successfully through Congress, the stock prices of drug companies were falling, in part because of scandals over the safety of drugs that had long been approved by the FDA. For example, government regulators said Merck & Co.’s arthritis drug Vioxx may have led to more than 27,000 heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths before it was pulled from the market in October 2004.That happened just two weeks before the American Jobs Creation Act was signed into law by President Bush. Merck badly needed its overseas profits, if only to deal with what might be a litigation bill of $10 billion to $15 billion.

Merck, like other companies, also had developed what Motley Fool columnist Robert Steyer in February called

a version of Pfizer’s “Lipitor disease” — a best-selling drug with limited remaining patent life accounting for a huge percentage of revenue:
• Merck lost protection on Fosamax early last year.
• Merck is seeing protection disappear by 2012 on the two drugs that made up 40 percent of revenue through the first nine months of 2008 — Cozaar/Hyzaar and Singulair.
• Bristol-Myers’ Plavix, creating 27 percent of 2008 revenue, gets chopped in 2011.
• Lilly’s Zyprexa, bringing in 23 percent of last year’s revenue, is also done for in 2011.

Big Pharma knew long before 2004 it needed to get every last dollar of overseas profits back into the States — at the lowest tax rate possible. It had to shore up declining revenues and dividends to stockholders — and to fuel big mergers, which it saw as the best cure for Lipitor disease.

But job creation? Merely a fig leaf for public consumption to make this tax holiday palatable to politicians. Jobs were lost, not created.

By August 2007, as the AP graphic shows, pharmaceutical companies had announced thousands of jobs cuts just two years after the repatriation of overseas profits.

Four years ago, Mr. Weisman of the Post reported others were lining up at the tax-break trough:

Procter & Gamble Co. intends to bring home $10.7 billion, and Johnson & Johnson Inc. has an $11 billion plan. Schering-Plough Corp. could bring back $9 billion. This week, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced it will repatriate $14.5 billion in the second half of the year, mainly for “strategic acquisitions,” said Ryan Donovan, an HP spokesman.

Strategic acquisitions made possible by a jobs creation act? More than 800 companies took advantage of the tax break.

Here’s another way to examine passage of the 2004 act. Cui bono politically?

Apparently, the congressional sponsor and 40 co-sponsors did. Let’s look at how just one member of the coalition — the pharmaceutical industry — sought to influence members of Congress through donations to their campaigns.

The Ways and Means Committee, by constitutional fiat, is the chief tax-writing committee of the House of Representatives. The 2004 bill was primarily a creation of the House.

Former congressman Bill Thomas (R-Calif) served as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee during the run-up to the bill’s passage. He’s listed as the prime House sponsor of the American Jobs Creation Act. During his congressional career, the pharmaceutical industry gave his campaign more than $407,000.

The bill had 40 sponsors. All but one were Republicans. A review of the campaign contributions records of these 40 men and women aggregated by the Center for Responsive Politics showed that since 1998, the pharmaceutical industry has given their campaign committees $4.49 million. Of those 40 co-sponsors, 14 served on the Ways and Means Committee: They have received, since 1998, $2.5 million from Big Pharma.

Recall that, thanks to the act’s tax break, Pfizer repatriated $37 billion.

Former Rep. Nancy L. Johnson, Democrat of Connecticut (where drug-maker Pfizer has a significant research and development presence), received more than $692,000 from Big Pharma between 1998 and her departure from office. She is now a senior public policy adviser (er, lobbyist) for Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz and serves on the Pfizer U.S. Health Advisory Board.

The bill had no serious opposition in Congress. The Senate voted 69-17 on the bill; The House, 207-16. Their acquiesance allowed an average rate of return of 22,000 percent for the corporations who lobbied for this bill, say the Kansas professors.

If $1 invested in lobbying earns a $220 return, as the Kansas study suggests, then the pharmaceutical industry has invested, for the 41 sponsors and co-sponsors of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, about $4.5 million. That’s a return of $990 million. That’s pretty good ROI for buying only 7 percent of the members of Congress.

According to Paul Kane and Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post, donations are down — way down. Consider the first two months of 2005, 2007, and 2009: $48.8 million in ‘05; $41.6 million in ‘07; and a paltry $30.7 million this year. That’s expected, write the Post reporters, in the early months of odd-numbered years after presidential or mid-term contests.

It’s known as “donor fatigue.” It’s particularly bad at the moment because so many candidates dunned so many donors in an election year that saw the presidential election cost more than a billion dollars.

Toss in a nasty, hundred-year storm of a recession and whew, you’ve got trouble raising money for the mid-term political wars to come in 2010. Remember, the money needed for mid-term elections is needed now, not a year from now. Name-recognition efforts of challengers must begin now if they expect to have a prayer toppling incumbents.

Meanwhile, lobbying is a growth industry. According to the Center for Responsive Politics:

While companies across the board were losing record amounts of money and laying off employees last year, at least one industry seemed to weather the recession: lobbying. Special interests paid Washington lobbyists $3.2 billion in 2008, more than any other year on record and a 13.7 percent increase from 2007.

So what’s this mean? Big dollars aren’t flowing to politicians; they’re flowing to K Street lobbying firms. The federal government is handing out bailout money like candy. If you’re a deep-pocket corporate donor awash in recession blues, how would you invest your money?

Yep — lobby for part of that bailout bonanza. You can always buy a politician with the ROI later.