The Corruptible “Free Market”

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The Washington Post has a front-page report on the growing number of lobbyists thronging the nation’s capital. But here’s an important passage that, I think, misleads:

In the 1990s, lobbying was largely reactive. Corporations had to fend off proposals that would have restricted them or cost them money. But with pro-business officials running the executive and legislative branches, companies are also hiring well-placed lobbyists to go on the offensive and find ways to profit from the many tax breaks, loosened regulations and other government goodies that increasingly are available.

“People in industry are willing to invest money because they see opportunities here,” said Patrick J. Griffin, who was President Bill Clinton’s top lobbyist and is now in private practice. “They see that they can win things, that there’s something to be gained. Washington has become a profit center.”

Judging from the way the Post tells it, the story goes like this: In the good old noble days—i.e. the 1990s—corporations and other business groups were simply interested in preserving the “free market” and fending off those meddlesome government regulators and pesky bureaucrats. But now, alas, businesses have abandoned their good old conservative ways and have decided that taxpayer dollars are just one big cookie jar to be raided as quickly and as greedily as possible. Whereas once we had free markets, now we have businesses strewn about, pale and withered, hooked on corporate welfare and hiring legions of lobbyists to help them get another fix.

It’s a depressing little tragedy, but it’s also not entirely true. There was never a hallowed time when business interests were just trying to avoid the burden of government regulation and enjoy the free market. They’ve always, since the dawn of time, viewed Washington as a “profit center,” where they can “win things,” where there’s “something to be gained.”

Take the oil industry. Oil executives, Dick Cheney among them, love to rail nowadays against government regulation and/or funding for alternative energy sources, arguing that if an industry can’t earn its way in the marketplace, it doesn’t deserve to live. Sadly, that was never true for the oil industry: government, not markets, created oil’s success. As Paul Sabin has described in Crude Politics, the oil boom essentially started when the federal government started granting oil rights to whoever can reach it from their lands. Fearing that their neighbors would start slant drilling, owners of oil-lots tried to pump out as much oil as they could reach from their land as quickly as they could, thus flooding the market with cheap crude. Low prices and thin profit margins then spurred oil industry leaders in the 1930s to beg the California government to set statewide production limits, which were granted. They clamored for tax breaks on drilling; granted. Meanwhile, vast government spending on highways ensured that demand for oil would continue to rise. (Not to mention the hundreds of billions we now spend stabilizing oil-producing regions of the world.) Washington has long been a “profit center” for the industry. Corporate handouts have always been with us.

This is why the so-called Gingrich “revolution” in 1994 was always a fraud. That fresh generation of conservative Republicans—who claimed to champion free markets and small, out-of-the-way governments—simply didn’t understand how business works. Industries have always thrived off heavy-handed regulations and government intervention, and so long as businesses exist, lobbyists will flood the capital. It’s not that the GOP philosophy of government has been “corrupted” by high-spenders and corporate welfare hounds like George Bush and Tom DeLay; that philosophy was corruptible right from the start. What we’re seeing now is, sadly, the only logical conclusion to “free market” conservatism.

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“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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