Politics

Dummies Guide to Buying Legislators and Public Opinion

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• Tuesday 3rd July 2007

How is it that op-ed pieces in favor of dictatiorial governments become featured in national newspapers? How do “Congressional fact-finding tours” wind up in Stalinist hellholes like Turkmenistan?

Ken Silverstein decided to find out. He printed up a few sheets of stationery representing The Maldon Group, a fictional consulting firm allegedly representing the government of Turkmenistan, a country on a governmental par with North Korea and Ceauscescu’s Romania. Silverstein rang up a few major lobbying firms inside the beltway and let them pitch their services.

The result is a long, enlightening article describing the reach and depth of lobbying firms. Abramoff may have been the most visible of these goons, but there are thousands more.

These people speak and act with a certain assurance that there will never, ever be any legislation by a Democratic (or Republican) Congress that inhibits them in any substantive way.

And they know what they’re talking about

American lobbyists have worked for dictators since at least the 1930s, when the Nazi government used a proxy firm called the German Dye Trust to retain the public-relations specialist Ivy Lee. Exposure of Lee’s deal led Congress to pass the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), which required foreign lobbyists to register their contracts with the Justice Department. The idea seemed to be that with disclosure, lobbyists would be too embarrassed to take on immoral or corrupt clients, but this assumption predictably proved to be naive.

Edward J. von Kloberg III, now deceased, for years made quite a comfortable living by representing men such as Saddam Hussein of Iraq (whose government’s gassing of its Kurdish population he sought to justify) and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (for whose notoriously crooked regime he helped win American foreign aid). Two other von Kloberg contracts – for Nicolae Ceauscescu of Romania and Samuel Doe of Liberia – were terminated, quite literally, when each was murdered by his own citizens. In the 1990s, after Burma’s military government arrested the future Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi and cracked down on the pro-democracy movement she led, the firm of Jefferson Waterman International signed on to freshen up the Burmese image.

Although there are distinct limits to what they can achieve, lobbyists are the crucial conduit through which pariah regimes advance their interests in Washington. “It’s like the secret handshake that gets you into the lodge,” as one former lobbyist told me.

Occasionally, firms will achieve spectacular successes for a client: one particularly remarkable piece of lobbyist image management, for example, occurred in the mid-1980s, when the firm of Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly helped refashion Jonas Savimbi, a murderous, demented Angolan rebel leader backed by the apartheid regime in South Africa, as a valiant anti-communist “freedom fighter.” Savimbi visited Washington on numerous occasions, where the lobby shop had him ferried about by limousine to meetings with top political leaders, conservative groups, and TV networks. Black, Manafort checked repeated threats by members of Congress to cut off aid to Savimbi’s rebel group, which was burning and raping its way through Angola with the help of American taxpayers.