Saturday, August 19, 2006

The Waning Days of the Republic? -2

Hidden from the non-paying in TimesSelect there is an article by Thomas Frank 'What is K Street's Project?'

K Street is where the lobbying business has its offices.

These three sentences will give you a sense of the article

From all its complex machinations emerges a discernible political project best described by Joseph Goulden in “The Superlawers” back in 1972, when the lobbying business was so many acorns beside today’s forest of towering oaks. The “Washington lawyers,” Goulden wrote, had over the years “directed a counterrevolution unique in world economic history. Their mission was not to destroy the New Deal, and its successor reform acts, but to conquer them, and to leave their structures intact so they could be transformed into instruments for the amassing of monopolistic corporate power.” (Goulden, by the way, is no radical: he is a former director at the very conservative press watchdog Accuracy in Media.)