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8/15/13, "At the Bipartisan Policy Center, is cash the real divide?" Washington Post, by Lydia DePillus
"The word "bipartisan" carries a special weight in Washington. If
something's bipartisan, it's presumed to be fair and balanced. Just get
an approximately equal number of Democrats and Republicans together to
agree on something, and it should inoculate you against attacks from
either side.
But what if the sheen of bipartisanship masks a deeper, more
important bias? That the real divide in Washington is between those who
can afford to pay for manufactured reports and white papers, and those
who can't or don't want to?
.
That's the central allegation facing the Bipartisan Policy Center, a
nonprofit founded in 2007 by former Senate majority leaders Howard
Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole and George Mitchell. As the self-proclaimed
"only Washington, DC-based think tank that actively promotes
bipartisanship," it says it "drives principled solutions through
rigorous analysis, reasoned negotiation and respectful dialogue."
Over the past month, the center faced attacks for perhaps being not nearly so principled as it claims. The Nation magazine dinged
the center for its role in shepherding a plan for major U.S. retailers
to improve conditions at Bangladeshi garment factories, when it had
received funding from Walmart and several of its affiliated scholars had
worked or lobbied for some of the other companies involved.
Investigative journalist Ken Silverstein, in a piece for Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics,
outlined how the BPC takes money from oil and gas interests while
promoting expanded drilling in a report overseen by a lobbyist who'd
done work for ExxonMobil.
This week, the BPC is the subject of a scathing report
from Ralph Nader's consumer advocacy group, Public Citizen. The authors
charge that, soon after receiving funding from the American Banking
Association and Citigroup, the center convened a project on financial regulatory reform stacked with industry advocates
meant to examine what could be improved in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street
Reform and Consumer Protection Act as implementation got underway.
Public Citizen's worries were bolstered by the resignation of John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who was among the few on the task force who was not affiliated with industry.
"The Task Force has been bipartisan in terms of political parties,"
Coffee says. "But it was not bipartisan in terms of the critical
division in Washington: The financial services party and the reform
party." Coffee had been satisfied with a previous BPC project on capital markets, which had been staffed purely with academics. This one, not so much. He was assigned to a working group with Annette Nazareth,
a former Securities and Exchange Commission member who now works on
financial issues for the mega-law firm Davis Polk. They couldn't agree
on what to do about money market mutual funds, and Coffee quit.
"I just felt that whether they were Democrat or Republican, the
people I was dealing with were professionally engaged in serving the
financial services industry," he says. "All they wanted to discuss was
further deregulation, and I thought it was a waste of my time. There
were Democrats, former SEC commissioners. But if you are a partner with
Davis Polk, which is the firm most involved in lobbying on these
issues, you're really not neutral or objective."
Another academic on the 15-person panel, James Cox
of Duke University School of Law, also expressed some dissatisfaction
with the process in a statement to Public Citizen. While not speaking in
detail on the record, he said that lawyers these days have a hard time
contradicting their clients' interests -- such as those of the financial
institutions that the lawyers on the panel represent.
"Increasingly, the legal profession's becoming more client-oriented,
and less public- oriented," Cox said. "It's ceased being a profession,
and it's become a business." And a more competitive business, at that,
which makes it even harder for a lawyer to stay independent of what the
people they work for want. "There's no longer any client loyalty to the
firm, so it's a volatile situation," he says.
But a third academic participant, former University of Rochester president Thomas Jackson, said he had no problem with the process. The white paper his
working group put out in May on how to resolve failed banks, which the
Public Citizen report didn't mention, doesn't take sides in either
direction, he says. "Essentially what the report did was endorse the
direction in which the FDIC was going," he says. Like Coffee, Jackson
was also paired with a Davis Polk partner,
but he didn't think the lawyer's view dominated the outcome. "I never
got a sense that my academic ideas about what you needed to do with this
were being resisted on the grounds that 'my clients would go into an
uproar about this.'"
Jason Grumet, the BPC's president, vehemently defends the group's
process. The financial reform initiative was underwritten by a California-based foundation,
he says; the ABA and Citigroup provide less than two percent of its
funding. The center took care to make sure each working group had at
least one Democrat and one Republican....
But BPC didn't cross the whole spectrum when recruiting for the
panel. It avoided people who thought Dodd-Frank was perfect as-is -- or
who couldn't be seen publicly criticizing it -- and those who wanted to
see it totally repealed. While declining to name those who didn't join
the panel, Grumet referred to them as the "tribal warriors for the
different orthodoxies."
"There was an implicit expectation that there was a polarized and
unproductive debate going on, between those who were arguing for repeal,
and those who were saying this massive piece of legislation is
perfect," Grumet says. "The folks who said they weren't willing to move
past the position of perfection or repeal didn't join up."
But are valuable voices lost when the more strident ones are ruled
unfit to participate? Simon Johnson, an economist who espouses greater
intervention in the banking industry, wondered why people like former
FDIC chair Sheila Bair or former TARP administrator Neil Barofsky
weren't on the panel. In a critical New York Times blog post titled "The Dark Side of Bipartisanship," Johnson
wrote that the composition of the group suggested that its final
positions would favor weakening reforms that already didn't go far
enough.
And as for industry participation, Grumet says it's both unavoidable
and essential, since most high-level government people also have taken
turns in the private sector and have the experience to know what works
and what doesn't. "How one would suggest that they could have a
meaningful interaction on these issues without corporate engagement is
befuddling," Grumet says. "The question is, do we have a process that
inoculates our policy work from the special interests of our funders?"
Public Citizen (Nader) says that it's impossible to separate policy work from
the people who pay the bills. But lots of think tanks receive corporate
contributions, or at least help from institutions that have discrete
policy interests. Bart Naylor, who wrote the report, says that's fine as
long as you're up front about it.
"Public Citizen gets money, and I bet if we attacked the people who
are our funders, they might be less than thrilled," he says. "But we say
we're progressive, and Cato is up front that they're
anti-government. But 'bipartisan' says, hey, we have an open mind."
Grumet acknowledges that the banks who donated to the center probably
hope to see that something favorable to their point of view comes out
of it.
"This idea that there is such a thing as disinterested money, the
notion that anybody's going to write a $100,000 check to an organization
because they don't care about the issues that are being worked on, is
kind of fantastic," Grumet says. That's why they try to get a diversity
of funding sources, and prominently identify where everybody is coming
from, in hopes that the collision of interests will result in a solution
that makes some sense to everyone."...
---------------------------------------
Roll Call article elevates "Bipartisan Policy Center" by describing it as "non-partisan:"
12/3/13, "Boehner’s New Immigration Policy Director Has Deep Experience on Overhaul Efforts," rollcall.com, Emma Dumain
"Rebecca Tallent, who currently serves as director of immigration policy
at the Bipartisan Policy Center, will join Boehner’s staff on
Wednesday. Before joining the BPC, Tallent held several senior staff
positions with Sen. John McCain, including chief of staff....
The BPC, the nonpartisan think tank established by four former Senate
majority leaders — Howard Baker, R-Tenn., Tom Daschle, D-S.D., Bob
Dole, R -Kan. and George Mitchell, D-Maine — announced her departure on
Tuesday afternoon.....
The BPC release heralded Talent’s new job as one that “signals new momentum for immigration reform.”
“Speaker Boehner could not have chosen a better person to help House
leadership develop effective immigration reform legislation,” Haley
Barbour, the former Republican governor of Mississippi who is
co-chairman of BPC’s immigration task-force, said in a statement."...
-----------------------------------
Comment: Haley Barbour exemplifies the worst of the permanent political class and this country's biggest problem.
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"The Bipartisan Lobbying Center," Harvard Ethics
.
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