John McCain, the media's darling, has found a clever way
around his own campaign finance reform law to take big
corporate bucks in furtherance of his political ambitions
while carrying water for the corporate mammoth providing the
dough. But the national press is ignoring the story.
The Associated Press first ran the story of John McCain's
odorous but lucrative Senatorial service to the
communications giant Cablevision on the afternoon of March
7. But, while some local papers in McCain's home state (like
the East Valley Tribune) have run the story,
nothing has as yet made it into the print editions of the
New York Times, the L.A. Times, the
Washington Post, or any of the half-dozen other big
city dailies I checked (although, if one searches the
hundreds of AP stories available on the Post's
website on its Politics page by clicking on "Latest Wire
Reports," one can find it
there--but how many readers would bother to do that?)
One notable exception: the
Kansas City Star.
Here's what the AP's investigation found:
McCain repeatedly intervened on behalf of a policy
Cablevision favored -- one which "congressional and private
studies conclude could make cable more expensive" -- while
his chief political adviser, Rick Davis (who's masterminding
McCain's probable '08 presidential rerun) solicited $200,000
in contributions from Cablevision to an institute that
promotes McCain and pays Davis a $110,000 annual salary.
The Reform Institute was set up to promote McCain and his
issues--especially campaign finance reform, embodied in the
famous McCain-Feingold law. This Institute is "a tax-exempt
group that touts McCain's views and has showcased him at
events since his unsuccessful 2000 presidential campaign,"
and it "often uses the senator's name in press releases and
fund-raising letters and includes him at press conferences,"
the AP says. And, of course, it provides a cushy sinecure
with no heavy lifting for McCain's main man, Davis, as he
prepares the pontificating Senator's next presidential run.
Cablevision's contributions account for a whopping 15% of
the Institute's budget.
Now, let's be clear about the phony McCain-Feingold law,
which I denounced as "campaign deform" before its passage.
The myth is that McCain-Feingold abolished so-called soft
money in politics. That's nonsense. It does forbid the
national party committees (the RNC and the DNC) from taking
soft money--but it leaves a loophole large enough to drive
an invading army through, because soft money contributions
to state parties are still legal. And, as anyone who closely
followed the investigations of the 1996 campaign finance
scandals knows, some of the most screamingly unethical
influence peddling-and-buying then went on when, to conceal
the contributions from a lazy national press corps, millions
and millions of dollars in soft money were channeled to
state parties by corporate fat-cats seeking to influence
government policy and Congressional votes.
Moreover, McCain-Feingold put more corrupting hard money
than ever before into the '04 presidential election by
doubling the cap on hard money. This provision of
McCain-Feingold motored the mushrooming of the practice
known as "bundling," by which special interest
influence-seekers -- like the lawyer-lobbyists of D.C.'s
"Gucci Gulch" and their corporate clients -- get a large
number of cronies to max out under the raised
McCain-Feingold caps, the individual checks thus collected
totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thanks in part to
McCain-Feingold, then, the '04 presidential cycle was the
most expensive ever in the nation's history. McCain-Feingold
was, and is, a fraud.
Why did McCain, a standard-issue Republican conservative,
lead the charge for the campaign "deform" law that bears his
name? Why, because he got caught with his hand in the cookie
jar. McCain was one of the infamous
Keating 5, the band of Senators--greedy for campaign
cash--who sold their favors to jailed Savings and Loan
kingpin and junk-bond racketeer Charles Keating in the
S&L scandals that rocked Congress in the early '90s.
(The S&L scandals were the most expensive corporate fraud in
history, costing citizens and taxpayers some $600 billion.
There is
a pile of good books on the S&L Scandals, especially
those by Steve Pizzo--who helped break the story; Pete
Brewton; and Martin Mayer.) McCain was whitewashed by a
complicitous Senate "ethics" committee, after which the
Arizona Senator decided to refurbish his image and become a
so-called "reformer"--hence the fraudulent McCain-Feingold
bill, which was designed to make people forget his
boot-licking service to Keating.
Now, McCain is back at the same old game, this time on
behalf of Cablevision and its campaign for an "a la carte"
provision, which would allow cable customers to pick the
channels they want rather than buy packages of channels.
McCain has continued to campaign for this provision even
after the independent General Accounting Office -- in a
study requested by McCain himself -- concluded that the a la
carte provision would considerably raise cable rates for
consumers. This is a neat hat trick by McCain: he adds
another "reformist" feather to his cap by promoting a
populist-sounding measure which, in fact, benefits industry
and costs the consumer a packet. And, at the same time he
takes money from Cablevision in the form of contributions to
a pet group of the Senator's which furthers McCain's
presidential ambitions.
The AP investigation found that McCain's assiduous
services to Cablevision included "letting its CEO testify
before his Senate committee, writing a letter of support to
the Federal Communication Commission, and asking other cable
companies to support so-called a la carte pricing." Davis
solicited the first of two $100,00 installments Cablevision
paid to McCain's pet Institute just "one week after [the
conglomerate's chief, Charles] Dolan testified before
McCain's Senate Commerce Committee in May 2003 in favor of a
la carte pricing. And it wasn't until after Cablevision paid
up that McCain intervened on behalf of the policy the
company sought with the FCC.
There's a lot more detail, but you get the picture. You
can read the entire AP story about its investigation of
McCain by
clicking here.
Just as the media bought McCain's cosmetic makeover when
he became a "reformer" -- while its kissy coverage of
McCain in 2000 turned the Arizonan into a major national
figure, thanks to a fit of collective amnesia -- our leading
organs of information are now turning a blind eye to the
AP's revelation that McCain is an unethical recidivist who
is once again mired in a putrid conflict of interest scandal
with a major corporate player. Most of the
Inside-the-Beltway press corps seems not to care about this
latest McCain chicanery--so you are kept in the dark about
it. A free press is a great thing, isn't it?
© 2005 Doug Ireland
CHeck out Doug Ireland's blog at
http://direland.typepad.com/
