Connor here: Thomas Neuberger focuses on the plight of lobbyists in Washington, D.C., in his next article. If you zoom out a little bit, I think what he’s talking about is a two-tiered justice system for the economic elite and for us ordinary people. It seems to me that powerful lobbyists crafting legislation that benefits the ruling class is a symptom of a broader problem with an entire social system centered around exploitation and mongering. And the primacy of capital has led to fundamental changes (albeit not of the type Neuberger calls for), with increasingly undemocratic systems everywhere, from workplaces to universities to all levels of government.
One of the hopes that the Trump accelerationists will move quickly and turn things around is that unless people are once again seduced by “hope and change,” they may be able to bring about the kind of fundamental change that Neuberger is calling for when deregulated casinos crash and burn, perhaps even bigger than just getting rid of lobbyists.
Written by Thomas Neuberger. Originally published in God’s Spies.
Today is a day of reflection. On the topic of amending the Constitution without passing an amendment bill, I offer the following text. I wrote this in 2015, when the world was young, the Russians weren’t so irredeemably evil (see Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol and X-Men: First Class), and we thought Sanders might do what Obama wouldn’t.
This is from a Time magazine article by Gary Hart, a centrist left-wing Democratic politician from the 1980s. Hart ran for president in 1988, but lost due to an extramarital affair scandal. (Those of you who are not that young may remember Donna Rice. By the way, Hart appears to have been set up no less than the infamous Lee Atwater. See this article about Atwater’s deathbed confession involving Hart.) In the article, Hart claims that lobbying has become “the fourth branch of government,” using 2014 data (updated below).
But Hart also raises the larger issue of what corruption is. That question is why I wrote the original piece. In doing so, I also tried to solve corruption in the United States. It turns out that our answer is the same as the one chosen by Hercules – Noah’s flood. I still think that’s the best solution and someone alive will see it. Not entirely good news.
The following is a cropped and lightly edited version of what I wrote at the time. This book was originally published in Howie Klein’s Down With Tyranny. enjoy.
***
First of all, there are two definitions. The Stable of Augeus is a reference to the fifth labor of Hercules, one of the Twelve (click to read context). The mission was to clean the king’s stables, which housed 1,000 cows and had not been cleaned in 30 years, at the risk of the owner’s life. What did you clean? Surely you know:
[T]His livestock was divinely healthy (immortal) and therefore produced vast amounts of dung. These stables had not been cleaned in over 30 years and over 1,000 cows lived there. However, Hercules managed to reroute the Alpheus and Peneus rivers to wash away the filth.
The second definition is corruption. Most people think of corruption as the result of perversion for money. Hart says correctly, but not:
Since Plato and Aristotle, corruption has been defined as actions or decisions that prioritize narrow, special, or personal interests over the interests of the public or commonwealth. Corruption didn’t even require stooping to money under the table, buying votes, or renting out Lincoln’s bedroom. In the governance of the republic, corruption took precedence over everyone’s interests, the public interest.
Corruption is “placing one’s own interests above the interests of all” and, in some cases, is an individual’s legal or contractual obligation. [Hart’s work comes a year after Zephyr Teachout wrote her book on the subject, reaching the same idea.]
So, for example, some college football referees and officiating organizations are clearly corrupt. Officiating is corrupt when Conference A plays Conference B using Conference B umpires and bad calls go in Conference B’s direction every year, especially when games are on the line.
Are they betraying their obligations to money? Probably not. Are they betraying that obligation to satisfy their hostility toward Conference A or to ensure the “home team” wins? That’s an obvious explanation, and by his definition (and mine), it’s certainly corrupt.
Or consider another situation. By this definition, the Supreme Court has been corrupt since at least 2000, and probably even earlier. If the definition is “prioritizing one’s own interests over the interests of all.” The legal analysis of Bush v. Gore fails the “supporting everyone’s interests” test. Republicans on the court simply put a Republican (home team candidate) in the White House because they could. The same goes for major money and corporate rights decisions such as Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 Berger Court decision that lifted limits on campaign contributions, and its follow-up, Boston First National Bank v. Belotti, in which Lewis Powell wrote the majority opinion in the infamous Powell Memo.
By this definition, skewing the outcome to benefit a group with a personal interest, the Supreme Court would be considered to have acted unfairly in each of the cases listed above. It was likely corrupt in Buckley, Citizens United, and Boston First National Bank, and certainly corrupt in Bush v. Gore, where a Republican judge favored the Republican presidential candidate over the Democratic presidential candidate for indefensible reasons.
The courts were not figuratively “corrupt.” By definition, it was corrupted.
Systemic corruption in the US government
Hart’s article is both an interesting essay in Time magazine and a long section from his new book, The Republic of Conscience (I don’t support Amazon, so I don’t have an Amazon link). The main argument is probably well known to you, so I will not quote its tone. However, he presents his points systematically in a way that seems original. That is, he puts the pieces together to create a whole that is bigger than most of us realize. For example, the “lobbyist army” we all hate is probably the government, not a perversion of the government.
Some notable sections (all my focus):
Since Plato and Aristotle, corruption has been defined as actions or decisions that prioritize narrow, special, or personal interests over the interests of the public or commonwealth. Corruption didn’t even require stooping to money under the table, buying votes, or renting out Lincoln’s bedroom. In the governance of the republic, corruption took precedence over everyone’s interests, the public interest.
By that standard, does anyone seriously doubt that our republic, our government, is corrupt? Throughout our country’s history, there have been teapot domes and financial scandals of one sort or another. But never before has the U.S. government been so perversely and systematically devoted to special interests, destinations, side deals, log rolling, vote trading, and sweetheart deals of all kinds.
What made us this way? A sinister system that combines staggering campaign costs, political contributions, political action committees, special interest payments for access, and, above all, the rise of a lobbying class.
Worst of all, what began as a relatively small army of lobbyists in the mid-20th century has now grown into an army of law firms and lobbying firms of the right, the left, and a mix of both. And that vast, if not reptilian, industry now includes former members of the House and Senate, their staffs, and committee staffs. And they’re all getting incredibly wealthy.
A huge number of lobbyists with huge sums of money – there is a point at which government corruption on this scale systematically changes the government itself.
Fourth Department of Government
For Hart, the movement of officials and their staff between lobbying firms and government is not a “revolving door” into government. That revolving door is the government. Hart uses the example of WPP, the largest of the three large lobbying conglomerates, to make his case. WPP is not just a lobbying firm, it is an international conglomerate that wields enormous power and wealth. When one lobbying firm’s bill is nearly $75 billion, it can “buy committees” as well as individual votes. And they can “set the agenda” and not just pass laws.
[Recent numbers: According to Open Secrets, $4.4 billion was spent on lobbying in 2024, another new high. There are 525 members of Congress. That’s over 8 million each, and it doesn’t count additional spending to defeat opponents. AIPAC alone spent over $100 million defeating candidates in 2024; this isn’t counted as lobbying.]
Let’s think about the “revolving door” again. Is it a door out of government and back into government, or is it a door into another branch of government where policy decisions are also made?
Another way to amend the constitution
All constitutions and all legal systems are amended in two ways: by formal agreement (legal process) and by informal agreement. In the UK, the second method is actually the main way to amend the Constitution.
In the United States, when both parties enforce a law in the same way, even if that method deviates from the way the law was written, the law is actually amended until it is forced back to its original form. therefore:
▪ We nullified the Fourth Amendment by bipartisan agreement. Neither party will enforce it, so it’s gone. Do you think you’ll see it enforced in your lifetime? It’s possible. Do you think that is likely to happen, absent further fundamental changes?
▪ We changed the Rule of Law and added the Ring of Impunity modifier. It started with Nixon. The circle of “persons who cannot be prosecuted” included one person: the president. It was created by the Gerald Ford pardon – it was corrupt. With that, Ford became president and was later confirmed by Obama. Obama declined to indict Bush II for violating anti-torture laws. (And on top of all this, do you see Obama being charged with extrajudicial killings, really assassinations, of Americans? Some of them were just propaganda workers, some of them were completely innocent.)
Under the Reagan-Bush I administration, that circle expanded to include top government officials such as Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Under Bush II and the Obama administration, this scope was expanded again to include all money center bankers and former senators like Jon Corzine (and outright fraudsters).
▪ Regarding the above comments about Obama and his drone killings, we are now amending the Sixth Amendment’s jury trial clause to allow executive assassinations and executive misconduct deaths. We’ll just have to wait for a Republican president to follow suit and approve it, but Congress has already approved it.
and so on. Now you can add one more fix besides the fix.
▪ Big lobbying companies are the fourth branch of government. Policies are set by these companies and passed to Congress and the executive branch for “debate.” Once these policies are debated and passed, the people who passed these policies return to their companies to set further policies and often receive the biggest rewards of their lives.
It was TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama’s NAFTA of the Pacific] Will it be first drafted in these giant corporations before being negotiated between nations? There’s not much else to bring together 600 lobbyists (pdf).
Cleaning the Ozian stables
Let’s return to Hart’s essay and our starting point, the Ozian stable. If Greek mythology is any indication, the way out of this mess is not gradual. You can’t force your way out. Remember, that’s a stable of 1,000 cows, and in our case, a literal army of lobbyists. A mere shovel would have buried us up to our necks before the filth was thrown out the window for the fourth time.
How did Hercules clean the stables? He redirected two rivers and swept the entire mess into the sea. Today, the equivalent word is “fundamental change,” which gets to the root of the problem. Both then and now.
