The Devil’s Advocate
If the Chamber of Commerce really runs Washington, how did we get Dodd-Frank, the EPA, the CFPB and ObamaCare?
By George Melloan
Aug. 6, 2015 7:27 p.m. ET
Of the 11,000 or so Washington lobbyists, not many are looking out for the broad public interest. They earn their pay trying to wangle special government favors or protections for client organizations. The right to petition government is enshrined in the First Amendment. In a forest of acronyms—AARP, ACLU, AFL-CIO, etc.—there is a lobby for just about everyone.
New York Daily News journalist Alyssa Katz has troubled to write a book about one particular lobby, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She says in her subtitle that the Chamber has fostered “the corporate capture of American life.”
But by Ms. Katz’s own account, the Chamber has lost, not won, most of the political battles she cares about. “In the nation that the Chamber seeks,” she writes, “carbon dioxide would not be regulated as a pollutant, even though science has proven its devastating impact on the environment beyond any doubt. The United States would remain the only developed nation without universal health care, and agents of U.S. companies would be free to bribe officials overseas. Homeowners would not have easy-to-read disclosure forms to explain their mortgages’ true costs or enforcers to respond when they’re bilked, courtesy of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Risky financial derivatives would trade with high leverage and without outside scrutiny, but with potentially catastrophic consequences for the larger economy. The federal health agency would not even be able to inform the public that reducing salt consumption lowers blood pressure for most people.”
If the Chamber sought that world, it sure didn’t get it. Carbon dioxide is regulated by an EPA going full steam to shut down coal-fired energy. A modified version of universal health care (ObamaCare) became law in 2010. Congress banned the bribing of foreign officials in 1977.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren levered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, making it largely free of oversight by Congress. The CFPB can stomp on financial practitioners all the way down from Michael Corbat, who manages $1.8 trillion in Citigroup assets, to any grandmother in Pocatello who dares to seek a small living selling financial advice.
Derivatives are subject to the Volcker rule, an addition to Dodd-Frank that limits the speculative trading of commercial banks. Dietary advice? Are you kidding?
So what’s the problem? The puzzlement begins to clear when you see that Ms. Katz is spending a lot of words complaining about the Chamber’s fight with class-action lawyers, specifically its efforts to win legal caps on product-liability settlements. That long-running fight has been conducted on behalf of all corporations, not just the hated tobacco industry as she implies.
Companies often choose to settle out of court rather than take their chances before a jury that will be swayed by horror stories from plaintiff lawyers, who cherry-pick clients, seek out sympathetic venues and wildly exaggerate product risk. Settlements usually provide a big payday for the lawyers with very little going to the plaintiffs when their share is divided among the members of the “class.” Plaintiff lawyers have had great success in recruiting populist politicians to block tort reform.
Ms. Katz stands with the lawyers. Her brief for the Mississippi bar might sound to Chamber members like an account of the sacking of Rome told from the point of view of Alaric the Visigoth. Because of a friendly judiciary in parts of the state, Mississippi was for years a favored venue for class-action suits. The ardor cooled a bit in 2008 when Richard F. “Dickie” Scruggs, the state’s richest and most prominent class-action lawyer, got seven years in prison for trying to bribe a judge.
Ms. Katz nukes Chamber CEO Tom Donohue by associating him with a 2010 tragedy on the Ohio Turnpike. A truck driver named Douglas Bouch fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his semi into the rear of a Ford Focus, killing Susan Slattery and badly injuring her two young sons. What connection to Mr. Donohue? As a lobbyist for the American Trucking Association, he once opposed a bill that would have reduced the federally regulated maximum number of hours that drivers can be at the wheel.
Use of a family tragedy to tar an opponent is a powerful plaintiff-lawyer tactic, and its employment by Ms. Katz rang a bell. Sure enough, in the acknowledgments at the end of her book she offers her gratitude to Public Citizen, which “generously shared research and observations.” Ralph Nader founded Public Citizen in 1971. He had won fame when he goaded General Motors into a mud fight by declaring in a 1965 book that one of its products, the rear-engine Chevrolet Corvair, was “unsafe at any speed.” GM hired detectives to check out Mr. Nader and was greatly embarrassed when he won a lawsuit charging the company with invasion of privacy.
Mr. Nader’s success in felling a corporate giant in court told America’s hungry lawyers that there was money to be made in “consumer advocacy,” forcing deep-pocketed corporations to share some of their cash by hauling them into court on behalf of aggrieved customers. Over the years that discovery has tagged corporate defendants for trillions, which of course has been a business cost passed on to consumers. If Ms. Katz’s book proves anything, it is not that the Chamber of Commerce wields excessive influence in Washington but that Naderism is alive and well 50 years on.
Mr. Melloan, a former columnist and deputy editor of the Journal editorial page, is writing a book on the Great Depression, to be published by Simon & Schuster.
New York Daily News journalist Alyssa Katz has troubled to write a book about one particular lobby, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She says in her subtitle that the Chamber has fostered “the corporate capture of American life.”
But by Ms. Katz’s own account, the Chamber has lost, not won, most of the political battles she cares about. “In the nation that the Chamber seeks,” she writes, “carbon dioxide would not be regulated as a pollutant, even though science has proven its devastating impact on the environment beyond any doubt. The United States would remain the only developed nation without universal health care, and agents of U.S. companies would be free to bribe officials overseas. Homeowners would not have easy-to-read disclosure forms to explain their mortgages’ true costs or enforcers to respond when they’re bilked, courtesy of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Risky financial derivatives would trade with high leverage and without outside scrutiny, but with potentially catastrophic consequences for the larger economy. The federal health agency would not even be able to inform the public that reducing salt consumption lowers blood pressure for most people.”
If the Chamber sought that world, it sure didn’t get it. Carbon dioxide is regulated by an EPA going full steam to shut down coal-fired energy. A modified version of universal health care (ObamaCare) became law in 2010. Congress banned the bribing of foreign officials in 1977.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren levered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, making it largely free of oversight by Congress. The CFPB can stomp on financial practitioners all the way down from Michael Corbat, who manages $1.8 trillion in Citigroup assets, to any grandmother in Pocatello who dares to seek a small living selling financial advice.
Derivatives are subject to the Volcker rule, an addition to Dodd-Frank that limits the speculative trading of commercial banks. Dietary advice? Are you kidding?
So what’s the problem? The puzzlement begins to clear when you see that Ms. Katz is spending a lot of words complaining about the Chamber’s fight with class-action lawyers, specifically its efforts to win legal caps on product-liability settlements. That long-running fight has been conducted on behalf of all corporations, not just the hated tobacco industry as she implies.
Companies often choose to settle out of court rather than take their chances before a jury that will be swayed by horror stories from plaintiff lawyers, who cherry-pick clients, seek out sympathetic venues and wildly exaggerate product risk. Settlements usually provide a big payday for the lawyers with very little going to the plaintiffs when their share is divided among the members of the “class.” Plaintiff lawyers have had great success in recruiting populist politicians to block tort reform.
Ms. Katz stands with the lawyers. Her brief for the Mississippi bar might sound to Chamber members like an account of the sacking of Rome told from the point of view of Alaric the Visigoth. Because of a friendly judiciary in parts of the state, Mississippi was for years a favored venue for class-action suits. The ardor cooled a bit in 2008 when Richard F. “Dickie” Scruggs, the state’s richest and most prominent class-action lawyer, got seven years in prison for trying to bribe a judge.
Ms. Katz nukes Chamber CEO Tom Donohue by associating him with a 2010 tragedy on the Ohio Turnpike. A truck driver named Douglas Bouch fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his semi into the rear of a Ford Focus, killing Susan Slattery and badly injuring her two young sons. What connection to Mr. Donohue? As a lobbyist for the American Trucking Association, he once opposed a bill that would have reduced the federally regulated maximum number of hours that drivers can be at the wheel.
Use of a family tragedy to tar an opponent is a powerful plaintiff-lawyer tactic, and its employment by Ms. Katz rang a bell. Sure enough, in the acknowledgments at the end of her book she offers her gratitude to Public Citizen, which “generously shared research and observations.” Ralph Nader founded Public Citizen in 1971. He had won fame when he goaded General Motors into a mud fight by declaring in a 1965 book that one of its products, the rear-engine Chevrolet Corvair, was “unsafe at any speed.” GM hired detectives to check out Mr. Nader and was greatly embarrassed when he won a lawsuit charging the company with invasion of privacy.
Mr. Nader’s success in felling a corporate giant in court told America’s hungry lawyers that there was money to be made in “consumer advocacy,” forcing deep-pocketed corporations to share some of their cash by hauling them into court on behalf of aggrieved customers. Over the years that discovery has tagged corporate defendants for trillions, which of course has been a business cost passed on to consumers. If Ms. Katz’s book proves anything, it is not that the Chamber of Commerce wields excessive influence in Washington but that Naderism is alive and well 50 years on.
Mr. Melloan, a former columnist and deputy editor of the Journal editorial page, is writing a book on the Great Depression, to be published by Simon & Schuster.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario