Word: lobbyists
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...Baroody is no businessman. He's a business lobbyist. The distinction is crucial to understanding an Administration in which energy lobbyists oversee mining and drilling, timber lobbyists oversee logging and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association has practically moved to the Department of Agriculture. These are Washington people, not corporate people. They make legislation, not payroll. They're insider hens who side with foxes and know the henhouse well...
...capitalist ideal is free markets and level playing fields; the lobbyist ideal is influencing the levers of power to help clients. In 2004 the Denver Post found 100 Bush appointees regulating industries they used to represent as lobbyists or lawyers. That didn't include former quasi-lobbyists like Vice President Dick Cheney, who became a CEO because Halliburton wanted government contracts...
...Predictably, government-by-lobbyist has produced some scandals. Philip Cooney, an oil lobbyist who worked in the White House, got caught editing the science out of global warming reports; he's now back at ExxonMobil. Steven Griles, an energy lobbyist who became deputy interior secretary, was a one-man extraction-industry conflict-of-interest machine at Interior; the inspector general described his tenure as an "ethical quagmire," and he's now awaiting sentencing in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal...
...Still, at NAM, Baroody has fought to shield manufacturers from safety claims and fines over products ranging from asbestos to tobacco. That is, of course, his job. Most of the Administration's former lobbyists haven't broken any rules; they've just sided with industry against consumer activists and environmentalists. That's their job. Hiring a NAM lobbyist to oversee consumer safety regulation is a bit like letting a child set his own bedtime. It's only a problem if you expect enforcement...
...capitalist ideal is free markets and level playing fields; the lobbyist ideal is influencing the levers of power to help clients. In the Bush Administration, lobbyists control those levers of power, and use them to provide corporate welfare, tax breaks, access to public land, and other big-government goodies to friends in pro-Republican industries. Baroody knows how to work those levers; he's worked in the Washington henhouse since 1970, and he's intimately familiar with the CPSC. Consumer activists had called him "totally unqualified," but they're breathing easier today because they know he's just the opposite...