Silverstein, Ken. Washington on $10 Million a Day: How Lobbyists Plunder
the Nation. Monroe ME: Common Courage Press, 1998. 251 pages.
These days, politicians vote huge sums for corporate welfare in the
form of tax breaks and special favors, and then come up with new tricks to
yank the social safety net from the rest of us. CEO salaries and benefits
in 1996 are up 54 percent, to $5.7 million, while workers' salaries rose
about 3 percent. Big-time journalists never have a discouraging word about
NAFTA, GATT, or WTO, and they never mention the impending MAI. Have you
ever wondered why? It's because they've all been bought off. Cokie Roberts
collects five figures for a speech at some corporate convention, her brother
Thomas Boggs gets $550 per hour as a lobbyist, and Peter Jennings or Lesley
Stahl attend (but never report on) a secret meeting of the Bilderberg Group
(an off-the-record, invitation-only annual gathering of the world's most
powerful people from both sides of the Atlantic). Meanwhile Newt Gingrich,
who also supports global capital to the hilt, recommends that we prepare
for the future by reading novels about the decline of the Roman empire.
This book is about lobbying, lawyering, and public relations in
Washington, and how Beltway insiders and fat cats have completely corrupted
the process. Not all of the above examples are from this book (no one book
can cover it all), but they do capture the flavor of this hard-hitting
investigative work. Highly recommended, and we hope to see more like it.
ISBN 1-56751-137-6
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