Quote of the day: Thomas Frank ponders the irony of Bob Ney, who disgraced himself serving K Street, being thought unfit to take his place there

"K Street's bright young men fill the top posts at federal agencies; K Street's money keeps wages low and prescription drug costs high; K Street's 'superlawyers' fight to make our retirement insecure; K Street's deregulation gurus turn our electric utilities into the plaything of Wall Street. What K Street wants from government is often the opposite of what the public wants."
--NYT guest columnist (for the month of August) Thomas Frank, in "What Is K Street's Project?,"* taking off from House Majority Leader John Boehner's threat to Jack Abramoff stooge Bob Ney that if he lost his House seat for the GOP, he "could not expect a lucrative career on K Street"

"This is one of those remarkable moments," Frank [right] writes, "when the rhetoric falls away and the mysteries of conservative government are briefly revealed: K Street, synonymous with the corporate lobbying industry, will not abide a man whose reputation imperils the Republican majority, even though he has earned that reputation in the service of K Street's leading personality."

Why should we care about the business of K Street? Let's turn the floor over to Mr. Frank:

K Street is not neutral. From all its complex machinations emerges a discernible political project best described by Joseph Goulden [left] in "The Superlawyers" back in 1972, when the lobbying business was so many acorns beside today's forest of towering oaks. The "Washington lawyers," Goulden wrote, had over the years "directed a counterrevolution unique in world economic history. Their mission was not to destroy the New Deal, and its successor reform acts, but to conquer them, and to leave their structures intact so they could be transformed into instruments for the amassing of monopolistic corporate power." (Goulden, by the way, is no radical: he is a former director at the very conservative press watchdog Accuracy in Media.)

K Street's bright young men fill the top posts at federal agencies; K Street's money keeps wages low and prescription drug costs high; K Street's "superlawyers" fight to make our retirement insecure; K Street's deregulation gurus turn our electric utilities into the plaything of Wall Street. What K Street wants from government is often the opposite of what the public wants. And yet what K Street wants, far too frequently it gets--if not by the good offices of Bob Ney [right], then by the timely disappearance of the now useless Bob Ney.

Whether we are Republicans or Democrats, we are all aware of how much more power corporations hold over everyday life than they used to. "Those who own the country should govern the country," John Jay used to say, and thanks in large part to K Street they do.

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*As usual, under our Free the NYT Op-Ed Hostages program, the full text of the column will be posted in a comment.


A VERY UNFORTUNATE UPDATE: K STREET LOVES DEMS TOO-- ESPECIALLY THE ONES LIKE JOE LIEBERMAN AND AL WYNN

A few days ago The Washington Post ran a story by Jeff Birnbaum called Democrats' Stock Is Rising on K Street. I started doing a piece about that but then it just got too depressing. I mean, K Street is absolutely, positively a creation of the Newt Gingrichs and Bill Frists and Rick Santorums and Tom DeLays and John Boehners. It is a part of the Republican Machine. Unfortunately, there is a not so insignificant part of the Democratic Party-- the DLC and Friends-- which is also part of the Republican Machine. No doubt the Inside the Beltway Democratic apparachicks are rejoicing at Birnbaum's first paragraph: "Washington lobbying firms, trade associations and corporate offices are moving to hire more well-connected Democrats in response to rising prospects that the opposition party will wrest control of at least one chamber of Congress from Republicans in the November elections. In what lobbyists are calling a harbinger of possible upheaval on Capitol Hill, many who make a living influencing government have gone from mostly shunning Democrats to aggressively recruiting them as lobbyists over the past six months or so."

Believe me, regardless of how happy the people around Rahm Emanuel, Al From and Chuck Schumer are, this is not good news-- not for American workers or consumers-- and not for grassroots Democrats who believe in what Howard Dean referred to as the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."

-Howie