{"id":530,"date":"2004-02-06T14:48:47","date_gmt":"2004-02-06T18:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=530"},"modified":"2007-03-17T10:35:39","modified_gmt":"2007-03-17T14:35:39","slug":"peddling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=530","title":{"rendered":"Peddling"},"content":{"rendered":"

“In his first 100 days as President, John Kerry will sign an executive order to end influence peddling and secret deals,” Kerry spokesman Mark Kornblau said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Senator John Edwards proposes<\/a> new restrictions on lobbyists in an effort to end “the nasty business of influence peddling” in Washington.<\/p>\n

Howard Dean doesn’t like<\/a> influence peddling either. Neither does Bush<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Whatever influence peddling is, everyone’s against it. But what is it?<\/p>\n

peddle<\/b>, v.t.<\/i>, To sell or offer for sale from place to place. Dope peddlers sell dope, toy peddlers<\/a> sell toys, ribbon peddlers<\/a> sell ribbons. Pushcart peddlers sell out of pushcarts. “Influence peddlers,” uniquely, buy<\/i> influence.<\/p>\n

“Influence” is also a euphemism, for “bribe.” “Special interests” offer bribes, in the form of campaign contributions; politicians accept them. Lobbyists broker the transaction.<\/p>\n

“Special interests” is itself a nice turn of phrase. Where the State can arbitrarily redistribute wealth, where virtually every federal law robs Peter to pay Paul or vice versa, every interest becomes “special” and politics becomes a Hobbesian war of all against all, a race to stick your snout in the government trough. Grandpa Charlie’s interest in free prescription drugs is as special as Archer Daniels Midland’s interest in ethanol subsidies — more so, really, since ADM employs thousands of people while Grandpa Charlie’s operating solo. Oddly, though, ADM is a “special interest” and Grandpa Charlie is not. I have no love for ADM, an especially vile corporate welfare recipient<\/a>; but under these circumstances every sizable prudent business employs lobbyists to insure, at a minimum, that its own ox is not constantly gored.<\/p>\n

One evening a lobbyist for chemical companies tried to explain his job to me. This man was a moral idiot; the interests of his clients circumscribed his universe. He could not, or would not, distinguish between robbing and being robbed, between, say, supporting a subsidy and opposing a regulation. He was no less instructive for that. So many vastly complicated bills come before legislators that they have no idea what they’re voting for most of the time. His job, he insisted, was to inform<\/i>. He said that it was no secret that he represented chemical companies, that anything he said was discounted accordingly, and that lying is a long-term poor strategy for being listened to. Grossly self-serving; might still be true! And whether it’s true or not, surely the lobbyist, a pathetic figure scratching out his equivocal living, is the least responsible of all the parties involved. To legislate against him is to shoot the messenger. <\/p>\n

The problem, if there is one, is that politicians take bribes. The remedy is supposed to be “campaign finance reform.” The abuse of the term “reform” requires an essay in itself, but here it means giving more tax money to political candidates. In other words, legislators, to prevent themselves from taking bribes, vote to pension themselves off, at public expense. This is absurd. Political euphemism makes absurdity plausible.<\/p>\n

And not just absurdity, but evil, as Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language,” sixty years ago:<\/p>\n

\n

Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bomabrded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification<\/i>. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population<\/i> or rectification of frontiers<\/i>. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic labor camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements<\/i>. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

By comparison “campaign finance reform” is not very serious, and if Orwell were alive he would laugh. Yet the mental fog that surrounds it is very serious indeed. Easy to sneer at “People’s Republics”; harder to put one’s own lingustic house in order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“In his first 100 days as President, John Kerry will sign an executive order to end influence peddling and secret deals,” Kerry spokesman Mark Kornblau said. Senator John Edwards proposes new restrictions on lobbyists in an effort to end “the nasty business of influence peddling” in Washington. Howard Dean doesn’t like influence peddling either. Neither […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-politics","category-19-id","category-22-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}