Well, that didn’t take long.

This is being posted here as an example of how organized resistance paid off!

Wednesday, January 4, 2017 copyright The New York Times NYTimes.com/Opinion »

Opinion

On the very first day of the new Congress, the Republican majority suffered its first embarrassing setback. It abandoned its plan — which it had tried to shield from public scrutiny — to eliminate the independent House ethics office. It did so after a firestorm of outrage on Monday night and Tuesday morning, much of it on social media. There is a lesson here, and it’s related to the one about grass-roots politics that I mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, playing off an Op-Ed by Ezra Levin, Leah Greenberg and Angel Padilla.

In the coming age of Trump, Democrats and progressives may not hold much political power, but they can still have influence, much as the Tea Party did even while the Republicans were in the political wilderness, in 2009 and 2010. The key is being passionate, organized and focused. The protests against the brazen elimination of the ethics office worked — for now, at least — because they had a clear message that resonated with a lot of people, including Republican and independent voters. Ultimately, even Donald Trump half-heartedly came out against the move. Republican leaders were embarrassed, and they decided that a retreat was their best option.

Most fights won’t be so easy. They will require more organization and sustained effort. They will require making phone calls and attending meetings and marches, rather than merely posting outrage on Twitter and Facebook. And they won’t always succeed.

But it’s important to remember this fight, because there is reason to expect that even bigger ones are on the way. Congressional leaders have announced plans to take health insurance away from millions of people. Those leaders have announced their intention to shower huge tax cuts on the wealthy and to cut benefits for the poor. They have also announced plans to increase pollution, damaging the health of Americans today and the state of the planet tomorrow. They have even signaled their intention to eliminate the ethics office when fewer people are paying attention.

Every one of these issues will be worthy of the passion sparked by this week’s fight, sustained over days and weeks rather than hours.

The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including several pieces covering the ethics-office fight. “Is it any wonder that House Republicans felt O.K. about trying to slip free of some of their own ethical shackles, no matter how ugly the optics?” asks Frank Bruni in his column. “It’s the tone that Trump has set and the culture that he’s creating.”

The Editorial Board also weighs in, noting that both Trump and Paul Ryan, the House speaker, seem sympathetic to change, but wish it had been done more subtly.

David Leonhardt
Op-Ed Columnist

Texas Legislators Violate One Vote Rule

Teacher Retirement System investment chief could make $904,500 under proposed pay plan - Board meets this week to debate changes that would raise payc

By Robert Elder - AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF - Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Talk about salary creep.

Under one pay plan the Teacher Retirement System will consider this week, its chief investment officer, Britt Harris, could make $904,500 a year in salary and bonuses next year.

That is about $200,000 more than Harris can make under the system's current plan, and it probably would make him the highest-paid state pension fund manager in the country.

A handful of other high-level investment managers at the teacher system could pull down $500,000 annually.

The retirement system's trustees are scheduled to meet Thursday to consider a new compensation plan for its investment staff. Although the current pay plan is just 14 months old, Harris says a more generous plan is needed to attract the talent he needs to continue reshaping the $111 billion pension fund.

"This is the seventh-largest fund in America," Harris told trustees at their July 27 meeting. "And we have the fiduciary responsibility to provide the best possible staff to the Texas teachers."

Harris told trustees in July that he needs the right staff to implement the ongoing overhaul of the fund's portfolio. It is shifting 29 percent of its assets out of traditional investments and into hedge funds, venture capital, real estate, buyout firms and other private equity investments.

The timing and cost of a new pay plan is drawing static from the two educators on the nine-member board, who say they are uncomfortable with the retirement system edging into private-sector pay territory.

"Even though these are highly successful investment personnel, they are working for the public and for teachers' and educators' money," said Mark Henry, superintendent of the Galena Park Independent School District. "But maybe my biggest concern is I'm not sure we gave the plan we put in place about a year ago time to work."

A draft plan released Tuesday would dramatically increase pay and bonuses for the investment staff. It would would allow the top 27 investment professionals to earn bonuses of between 100 percent and 125 percent of their base pay.

At a current annual salary of $402,000 a year, Harris would be eligible for a $502,500 bonus.

Harris is already the state's highest-paid employee, with potential bonuses that could push his total to $700,000 annually.

(Higher education employees and state university athletic coaches aren't included in state payroll figures.)

The retirement system's senior-level investment managers, some of whom make between $200,000 and $300,000 a year, could make more than $500,000 under the new plan.

Exact pay figures aren't available for the teacher fund or for many public pensions because of a recent court decision that exempts those figures from the state's Public Information Act.

Harris said the total maximum bonuses paid under the draft plan would be $9.4 million — and that's only if the fund meets all its investment benchmarks, which would translate into an extra $1 billion of revenue for the fund.

Under the current compensation plan, the fund will pay about $1.5 million in bonuses over three years — about 40 percent of the possible maximum. The proposed new plan has different benchmarks.

Henry, the school superintendent, said that while the system's focus is on the investment staff, a more expensive pay plan threatens to divide the work force at the agency.

"A quality internal auditor has just as much to do with the success of TRS as its investment division," Henry said. "Or a benefits counselor. Where do you draw the line?"

The system's draft plan is more generous than those of other public pension giants. The $169 billion pension fund for retired California teachers pays its investment chief a base salary of $300,000 and an equal amount in potential bonuses.

The $22 billion Employees Retirement System of Texas instituted a bonus plan in January that pays investment staff a maximum bonus of 25 percent of base salary.

Its top investment official makes $300,000 a year in base pay.
Read more

Edwards Goes After the 'Corporate Democrats' -- Is This a Turning Point for His Campaign?

By Joshua Holland - AlterNet - August 26, 2007
In a dramatic speech, John Edwards fired a major broadside against corporate America and, more significantly, "corporate Democrats," -- the likes of which hasn't been heard from a viable candidate with national appeal in decades.

Last week, John Edwards fired a broadside against corporate America and, more significantly, "corporate Democrats," the likes of which hasn't been heard from a viable candidate with national appeal in decades.

Edwards is en fuego right now, and if he keeps up the heat, his candidacy will either be widely embraced by the emerging progressive movement or utterly annihilated by an entrenched establishment that fears few things more than a telegenic populist with enough money to mount a credible campaign.

"It's time to end the game," Edwards told a crowd in Hanover, New Hampshire. "It's time to tell the big corporations and the lobbyists who have been running things for too long that their time is over." He exhorted Washington law-makers to "look the lobbyists in the eye and just say no."

Real change starts with being honest -- the system in Washington is rigged and our government is broken. It's rigged by greedy corporate powers to protect corporate profits. It's rigged by the very wealthy to ensure they become even wealthier. At the end of the day, it's rigged by all those who benefit from the established order of things. For them, more of the same means more money and more power. They'll do anything they can to keep things just the way they are -- not for the country, but for themselves.

[The system is] controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it's perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to seriously cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed. This is the game of American politics and in this game, the interests of regular Americans don't stand a chance.

It's a structural argument, and Edwards didn't pull punches in calling out his fellow Democrats, saying: "We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other." The rhetoric was a clear signal that Edwards is going to beat the drums of reform as a contrast to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

About a third of the speech focused on the trade deals that Bill Clinton championed, and his argument that those "wedded to the past" can't provide the answers was a barely-veiled rebuke of the Clintonian arm of the party, and the media's chosen "front-runner" for the nomination.

If Democrats are engaged in an existential struggle between the party's establishment and its grassroots, Edwards is obviously betting that the grassroots' passion and energy will trump the Machine Democrats message' apparatus -- this was a speech that was not written by the usual coterie of Beltway consultants.

The most striking aspect of Edwards' speech was his implicit argument that class still exists. For years, both parties have obscured the divisions that are so prominent in modern American society, painting a picture of a country in which we're all part of an entrepreneurial class with more or less similar interests -- a key ingredient in the false "center" to which politicians and Beltway pundits kow-tow. "Let me tell you one thing I have learned from my experience," Edwards said last week. "You cannot deal with them on their terms. You cannot play by their rules, sit at their table, or give them a seat at yours. They will not give up their power -- you have to take it from them."

It was an explicit rebuke of Obama's "new politics" -- Obama recently told the Washington Post that "the insurance and drug companies can have a seat at the table in our health-care debate; they just can't buy all the chairs." Obama's approach to "cleaning up Washington" is not bad, but ultimately tinkers around the edges of a corrupted legislative system.

Edwards is not so conciliatory on the subject. "For more than 20 years, Democrats have talked about universal health care," he said. "And for more than 20 years, we've gotten nowhere, because lobbyists for the big insurance companies, drug companies and HMOs spent millions to block real reform."

Contrast that naked confrontation of corporate power with the tepid appeals to working Americans that were a trademark of John Kerry's 2004 campaign. In announcing his candidacy, Kerry offered a bit of demagoguery about CEOs -- he segued from bashing Cheney and Halliburton --and boldly promised to end tax breaks "that help companies move American jobs overseas." Also in his plan for corporate accountability: "No more contracts for companies, no matter how well-connected they are, until they decide to do what's right."

Hillary Clinton's economic proposals track with the thinking popular among the ostensible "progressives" at the DLC and the Third Way -- policies that give Americans the "opportunity" to save for retirement, a decidedly centrist approach to spiraling college costs and other familiar policies from the 1990s. She's not a fair trader nor a free trader, she says -- she's for "smart trade," "pro-American" trade.

Edward's speech about the economy isn't the only time that he's strayed from the bounds of "respectable" discourse in Washington. In May, he said that the "war on terror" was a political "bumper sticker" that the administration used to "justify everything [Bush] does: the ongoing war in Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, spying on Americans, torture."

Edwards isn't the only candidate in the race making such bold statements, of course. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has long spoken of economic issues in the kinds of terms Edwards used last week. But John Edwards was the vice presidential nominee on a presidential ticket that won 59 million votes and he's raised $23 million in the current cycle (20 times what Kucinich has raised), and that means that corporate media is forced to cover him. So far, they've mocked him, written stories about his haircuts, pushed shadowy innuendo about his personal business dealings and suggested his focus on poverty is disingenuous or hypocritical, but they simply can't write him off as a member of the fringe. Unlike Kucinich, they can't ignore him.

John Edwards is becoming a very different kind of candidate, and his growing message of empowerment and attack on the corporate class may prove to be the most interesting story of campaign 2008.

Comparative look at two ethics bills

By The Associated Press - Mon Jul 2, 2007
Similarities and differences in House and Senate lobbying bills that have to be merged into one before becoming law.

Both bills would:

_Require lobbyists to report when they "bundle" campaign contributions for one candidate from multiple donors.

_Forbid lawmakers from pressuring lobbying firms to hire employees based on political affiliations.

___

The Senate bill, but not the House bill, would:

_Require former lawmakers to wait two years, rather than one, before becoming lobbyists.

_Prohibit lobbyists from throwing parties for specific lawmakers at national conventions.

___

The House bill, but not the Senate bill, would:

_Require lobbyists who try to place "earmarks" — special home-state projects — in spending bills to identify their efforts.

_Require lobbyists to report bundled donations given to political action committees — or PACs — set up by unions, corporations or special interest groups, as well as to candidates.

___

The Senate bill is S 1.

The House bill is HR 2316

See Article

Ethics reform bogged down in Congress
By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer - Jul 2, 2007
WASHINGTON - Toughening ethics laws, once a priority of Democrats, has bogged down in Congress as party leaders find their campaign promises colliding with lawmakers' re-election concerns.

Two months have passed since a task force was supposed to have recommended how an independent panel might look into ethics complaints before they go to the House ethics committee. A key sticking point is opposition in both parties to letting outsiders file complaints against members of Congress.

Currently, only House members can initiate an ethics probe. Public watchdog groups call the restriction self-serving and unreasonable.

Some of the same groups, however, are balking at a second proposal floated by task force members. It would require any group that lodges an ethics complaint against a House member to reveal its donors.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said the demand for donor lists from groups that file complaints "is what has tied this thing up for now."

The nonprofit groups call it intimidation. Lawmakers say it's a way to ascertain whether such groups are backed by right- or left-leaning forces with partisan motives.

Meanwhile, a Senate spat over rules governing senators' requests for special projects in their home states is blocking efforts to merge into one bill separate House- and Senate-passed measures to restrict lawmakers' dealings with lobbyists. The Senate passed its version in January, and the House passed its bill in May.

"I find it distressing that they haven't dealt with these issues," Craig Holman of Public Citizen said, referring particularly to the House task force.

For years, self-described government-reform groups have denounced the House ethics committee, which is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, as listless and largely toothless. Unlike the Senate ethics committee, the House panel no longer accepts complaints from nonmembers. And it sometimes says little or nothing about its inquiries, leaving the public unsure whether serious investigations took place.

On Jan. 31, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., appointed a bipartisan task force to recommend whether an independent panel of nonmembers should investigate ethics complaints and play a role in enforcing rules of conduct. That report was due May 1.

Long past the deadline, task force members privately briefed colleagues on a plan in which the speaker and minority leader would each appoint three members to a panel that would look at complaints — from members or nonmembers — and recommend whether the House ethics committee should pursue them. The independent panel's findings, in most cases, would eventually become public.

The proposal immediately drew fire from seemingly every direction. "They have problems inside and outside," said Meredith McGehee, policy director of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

Several House members said political adversaries could use an open-complaint system to file dozens of frivolous allegations and then cite them in campaign attack ads. The concern is understandable, McGehee said, but senators have long allowed nonmembers to file ethics allegations "and they're not in peril."

Watchdog groups called the plan weak, especially because the new panel would lack subpoena powers to compel testimony and demand documents. The panel "would have a free hand to recommend the dismissal of a complaint and would be greatly restricted in recommending anything else," lawmakers were told in a letter last week from groups including Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters, Public Citizen and the Campaign Legal Center.

They also objected to the donor-disclosure proposal, which they called unprecedented for the House, Senate, Justice Department, Federal Election Commission and other agencies that receive public allegations of official wrongdoing.

"Now they want your donor base," if a group tries to file an ethics complaint, said Sarah Dufendach, chief of legislative affairs for Common Cause, which on balance supports the House proposals. "It may chill some groups from actually filing," she said.

Many lawmakers are insisting on such disclosures, saying the public should know as much as possible about people behind allegations that could hurt a politician's career. Some Republicans particularly like the disclosure proposal because they believe groups such as Common Cause are heavily financed by Democrats and liberals.

Dufendach shrugged off the concern. "Whatever kind of information you give is going to be spun," she said.

Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass., the chairman of the House task force, said its tentative recommendation to consider ethics complaints from outside groups remains a sticking point.

"We've had some push-back" from House members and outsiders, he said in an interview last week. "We're plugging ahead. The goal is to get something meaningful that can pass."

Capuano added, however, that could not predict whether the task force can settle on a plan that would win House approval.

___

The Senate lobbying bill is S 1.

The House lobbying bill is HR 2316.
Read article

Ethics issues confront Calif. politicians

By Erica Werner - Associated Press - June 9, 2007

WASHINGTON — Hollywood party girls don't have a monopoly on trouble in California. A disproportionate number of the state's congressional Republicans are facing ethics questions that threaten to sink their careers and their party's political fortunes too.
Of 201 House Republicans, at least six are known to have attracted the attention of federal investigators — and four are from California. Their woes come in the wake of the lurid corruption scandal that sent ex-GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham of San Diego to prison last year for taking $2.4 million in bribes.
Although their situations have a few common threads, some analysts attribute the cluster of California cases to coincidence, plus the state's large size and district lines drawn to protect incumbents.
"When your seat is so safe that you're not concerned about perception, you become too wedded to Washington and you lose touch with your constituency, and you lose touch with your real purpose," said Karen Hanretty, a Republican strategist and former California Republican Party spokeswoman.
Rep. John Doolittle, a nine-term Northern California conservative under investigation in the influence-peddling scandal around jailed GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, has his own theory about why federal corruption investigations seem to be concentrated in California.

Read more

Bill Moyers Journal - Cleaning House

Today is Bill Moyer's birthday. Bill Higgins posted a tribute to him on epluribusmedia

He included this UTUBE video of Moyers coverage of lobbyist!
Higgins wrote:
Born on this day in 1934

"America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own, they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits, the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up."
Bill Moyers

I happened to be reading Moyer's Blog early this morning looking for his interview with Public Citizen's Joan Claybrook which I missed when it aired on PBS last Friday on "Bill Moyers Journal."

The subject of the segment was lobbying and lobbyists and their pervasive influence on our political system.

I have a large measure of respect for both Moyers and Claybrook and an enormous loathing for lobbyists and their destructive influence on MY country and I was disappointed to have missed the program.

I responded:

Bill Moyers continues to serve
He's from my hometown, Marshall, Texas, and although he was in Washington before I was aware enough to care deeply about the issues he champions and the dark corners he brings to the foreground through intellectual examination and discussion, I like having ties to him, however remote.
Lobbying is not evil in itself. We have laws that can monitor it. However, the way that much of it operates today is out of acceptable boundaries.

We have seen Transportation Codes of states and the Federal Government changed through sophificated change management re-engineering strategies funded by international business and US firms who smell dollars they can transfer from public coffers and private citizens pocketbooks into their corporate bottom lines.

Kansas City Southern (de Mexico) RR, Carter Burgess, Zachry Construction, BSNF Railway, Ross Perot, Jr and the Alliance group, Ed Bass and others involved in the Texas Pacific Group (who are negotiating to buy TXU electric), and other international player (all members of NASCO) helped underwrite legal, educational, lobbyist and other logistical initiatives resulting in more changes to the Texas Transportation Code in two legislative sessions than had been enacted in 50 years plus major changes in US Transportation Code.

Identical language migrated into many bills in both houses of the Texas Legislature during the 78th and 79th sessions. They were accepted by the Legislative Counsel office and the parties presenting the language are legally allowed to remain hidden, protected behind the attorney client priviledge of the attorney who carried the language to the Legislative Counsel. Despite lobby disclosure laws and rules which require lobbyists to disclose their clients, amounts of money spent on contacts with legislators, most of the heavy hitting special influence peddleing is done without ANY DISCLSOURE REQUIRED because of such practices.

Now it is apparent where much of the funding came from for these far sweeping iniatives which have literally changed how America funds public infrastructure. This past weekend in Fort Worth NASCO held its annual conference. Confident that they have succeeded in enacting enough changes that there is little chance that America will revert to practices which have sustained our system for generations, they are now listing resumes of their board members on their websites and taking credit for their efforts.

It was apparent that change agents, opinion leaders, stakeholders were identified about a decade ago. Along the corriders they anticipated developing, they identified local elected officials, courted them, and incorporated them into their organizations. Contacts with folks with very deep pockets are very enticing to ambitious city commissioners and county commissioners. They established a number of non-profit educational 501s. (Educational 501s can act similar to PACS but do not have to comply with the same financial disclosure laws).

They invited Universities, local governments, transportation planning groups, and corporations to join their non-profit educational organizations and attend their seminars. Local and county governments began to help finance the "change management" initiatives by paying membership fees and fees to attend the seminars.
Local elected officials in key counties were invited to join the board of directors. No one yelled about City Council people and County Commissioners holding offices in these educational 501 non-profit transportation organizations (even though their mission statement was lobbying) because the county or city was also a member. No one stopped to consider the responsiblity that an elected official accepts when accepting an elected office: To give fair and impartial consideration to issues coming before the body.

There is no way a person can give fair and impartial consideration to an issue before the local city council or county commission if they are an officer or board member in an organization with a stated mission to adopt one of the alternatives placed before that body for consideration!

In the past decade we have seen formulation of transportation policy move out of the elected bodies and into the private non-profit forums funded by for profit corporations.

Now we are seeing our gas tax money and city tax money used to fund transportation projects where private partners will charge citizens tolls for 50 years to ride on what was previously state or Federal highways. Citizens no longer can control what gets funded by refusing to approve a bond initiative at a bond election. (American rarely vote down transportation bond initiatives --- even though the toll proponents try to create that illusion).

Bill Moyers understands how the process works, how it used to work and how it should work. I'm thankful that he continues to stimulate discussion, inform the people, and question the holes in the system which is designed to protect citizens and preserve Constitutional government in Texas and the USA.