Home
D&D
Music
Banner Archive

Marvel Comics Timeline
Godzilla Timeline


RSS

   

« Why is fnord cranky today? | Main | They Must Smell the Vegan on Us »

Attorney General Shouldn't Be an Elected Position

Eric Lipton from the New York Times just won a Pulizter for his three-party story on how lobbyists are buying attorney generals and shaping policies.

Here's the Intercept's summary of it:

The Times series explains that the current corporate onslaught is a response to successful collaborations by state attorneys general over the past several decades, including settlements in which 46 states extracted $206 billion from the tobacco industry, and 49 states forced the top five mortgage servicers to cough up $25 billion.

Public officials acting in the public interest was clearly a glitch in the matrix, and corporate America set out to eliminate it. In 2000 the GOP created the Republican Attorneys General Association, telling corporate lawyers to "round up your clients and come see what RAGA is all about" and then contribute because policy was being set "via the courthouse rather than the statehouse." RAGA raked in at least $11.7 million in 2014, including $2.2 million from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and $500,000 from Sheldon Adelson.

The Democrats founded DAGA in 2002, and it now siphons up big chunks of money from many of the same donors as RAGA, including Citigroup, Comcast, Coca-Cola and Pfizer.

RAGA and DAGA provide one-stop shops for influencing state attorneys general. Corporations donate; RAGA and DAGA distribute much of their cash to the campaigns of individual attorneys general; and some of the rest of the money pays for "conferences" that include fundraisers at which corporate executives and their lawyers can donate more to officials in attendance. Then after the attorneys general leave office, they can use the contacts they've developed to go work directly for the corporations.

The end result has been a kind of outsourcing of what citizens would expect their legal representatives to do themselves. For instance, The Times found:

  • Oklahoma's Republican Attorney General Scott Pruitt wrote a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency accusing them of "very significantly overestimating" the pollution caused by fracking; the letter was actually written by lawyers for an Oklahoma oil and gas company (which was a big supporter of RAGA).
  • Missouri's Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster instituted restrictive new rules for investigations by his consumer affairs division, rules that had been suggested by a senior executive at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
  • Plaintiffs' lawyers have encouraged many attorneys general, mostly Democrats, to file hundreds of lawsuits against businesses; the attorneys general then hire the outside lawyers to do most of the work in return for contingency fees, usually 20 percent of any settlement.
...
But here's the funny part: all the attorneys general questioned by The Times maintain that the money and lobbying have no influence on their decisions whatsoever. This means that the corporations doing the lobbying are engaged in a massive waste of shareholder resources. In other words, if the attorneys general truly believe what they say, they should consider filing a huge, multi-state lawsuit against their donors.

Ofc it has absolutely no influence on your decisions when someone just gave you a ton of money that helped get you elected. Why would anyone feel obligated to do some favor in return?

Plus, instead of shmoozing and politicking and spending time asking for campaign donations so they can hold on to their jobs for another term, mebbe it would be nice if the AGs could spend some time actually being the "people's lawyers".

By min | April 23, 2015, 1:04 PM | Liberal Outrage