Elizabeth Warren has bold ideas about how to drain the swamp - By Katrina vanden Heuvel
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
Columnist
August 28 at 8:03 AM
President Trump is likely to be remembered as running the most corrupt administration in history. But Washington corruption didn’t begin two years ago. Pervasive, bipartisan and blatant,corruption is business as usual, exemplified by the hours legislators spend each day dialing well-off donors for dollars, by the evening soirees where lobbyists befriend legislators, and by the proliferation of high-priced “expense account restaurants” and million-dollar condominiums in the nation’s capital. Americans know the rules are rigged for the rich and the powerful. Trump campaigned on the pretense that his money made him independent, but that was just another lie.
Now Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has released a reform bill that, if passed, is bold enough to begin cleaning up the Beltway cesspool’s stench. She hasn’t offered transparent half measures — such as President Bill Clinton’s gesture toward “reinventing government” — or perverse evasions such as Newt Gingrich’s term limits. Warren doesn’t pretend that Trump was the sole problem. Her Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act — like Medicare-for-all, tuition-free college and the emerging jobs guarantee — defines a central plank in the sweeping reform agenda that insurgent progressives are pushing into the political debate. Taking on corruption is a cause that will be a centerpiece of the next presidential political campaign.
Introducing the bill, Warren summarized reality, “Our government systematically favors the rich over the poor, the donor class over the working class, the well-connected over the disconnected. This is deliberate, and we need to call it for what it is — corruption, plain and simple.”
Warren’s bill would strike directly at the heart of this problem. It “padlocks the revolving door” between jobs in government and in lobbying. It bans top elected or appointed federal officials from becoming lobbyists after they leave office — for the rest of their lives. It bans any corporate lobbyist, or any executive of a company found guilty of breaking the law from taking a job in the federal government for six years. It outlaws the “pre-bribes” — the golden parachutes that banks and companies give executives who are headed into government, such as the more than $280 million that Goldman Sachs gave Gary Cohn when he left to become Trump’s chief economic adviser. (As Warren noted, Goldman got an amazing return on its investment: Cohn then helped “quarterback a tax package that included giveaways worth just over a quarter of a billion to Goldman — in the first quarter of 2018 alone.”)
Warren’s bill ends corporate lobbying as we know it. Warren calls for banning Americans from getting paid to lobby for foreign governments — period. It would prohibit lobbyists from writing campaign checks or giving personal gifts to anyone running for or holding federal office. She would slap a tax on corporations that gear up lobby campaigns that cost more than $500,000. This would be complemented by her separate bill, the Accountable Capitalism Act , which would require the largest corporations to take all stakeholders into account, empower workers to elect 40 percent of corporate boards, and gain approval of three-fourths of the board before the corporation can use money for political purposes.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warren-has-bold-ideas-about-how-to-drain-the-swamp/2018/08/28/73b76b20-aa0f-11e8-b1da-ff7faa680710_story.html
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Elizabeth & Bernie 2020!!!
