Generals turned fatcat lobbyists

About three-quarters of all retired three- and four-star generals in recent years have gone into the defense business, natty Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe reports in a terrific bunch of articles.

I'd always known this double-dipping was bad, but I didn't realize how bad. "The revolving-door culture of Capitol Hill -- where former lawmakers and staffers commonly market their insider knowledge to lobbying firms -- is now pervasive at the senior rungs of the military leadership," he concludes. Some of them serve on Pentagon advisory panels without even disclosing to fellow panel members that they are paid to advocate certain weapons programs. That stinks.

I wonder what George Marshall, who went to work for the Red Cross when he retired, and then was recalled to government service, would think of these people. Not much, I bet.

Not nauseous yet? How about this: Your tax dollars are used to teach them how to get on the gravy train. "Since the early 1990s, the Navy and Air Force have been sending retiring senior officers -- in some cases a full two years before they leave the military -- to taxpayer-funded career seminars on Coronado Island near San Diego. They are taught how to write a resume and to network in private industry."

Here is a summary of other takes on it.

A Best Defense salute to those, like Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who became professors or went into other non-lucrative endeavors, or who simply retired to live on their full salaried pensions and offer their expertise for free as needed. I mean, one reason for the pension is the sense that you can be recalled to active duty. If someone's counsel is really needed, why not activate him for six months and make him a special assistant?

Meanwhile, there is a controversy over whether Northrop Grumman should bill the government for sending Navy officials to Paris, Singapore and on a golf outing, but apparently everyone is saying it is OK because the Navy is picking up the tab. Seems to me that the taxpayer shouldn't pick up the tab.

(source:foreignpolicy.com)

New tactics alter flavor of lobbying

WASHINGTON - -- For decades, the National Restaurant Association was the poster child for the unbreakable alliance between Washington's business lobbyists and the Republican Party.

One of the most potent grass-roots lobbying groups in the capital, the group helped kill Bill Clinton's health care plan, bankrolled Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution, and year after year helped drive stakes through such Democratic proposals as raising the minimum wage and protecting the environment.

But something strange happened after Barack Obama became president: Courted and cosseted by savvy White House political operatives, the National Restaurant Association and some other business powerhouses changed their stripes.

The "other NRA," for example, ousted its conservative leader and installed a more pragmatic chief executive. It began to take meetings with once-hated Democratic politicians, including White House aides. And when the titanic battle over health care began, the restaurant group broke ranks with such unreconstructed business groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and declined to attack the White House.

The shift is a tale of changing political tides, the ultimate practicality of business executives and of a successful Obama White House effort to reach out for allies among traditional adversaries. And it's beginning to change the balance of power inside the Beltway.

The new strategy embraced by the restaurant group and others such as the Business Roundtable has allowed them access to Democratic decision-makers and a chance to influence or at least mitigate proposed policy changes.

"The political landscape changed so dramatically over a short period of time that we had to make a decision on how to respond," said Jot Condie, president and CEO of the California Restaurant Association, who is on the board of the national group. "Are we going to lob bombs from afar and understand that return fire will kill us? Or should we try to mitigate legislation that is a relative certainty?"

The restaurant association began to shed its conservative aura in late 2007, installing Dawn Sweeney, a longtime Washington player known for pragmatism, bipartisanship and marketing savvy, as its first woman CEO.

The organization continued to meet with conservatives, but it also began talking with consumer activists, Democratic party leaders and White House officials.

"What we are trying to do is see how we can be at the table," Sweeney said. "If you are not at the table, you are on the menu."

When the health care battle came to a boil this fall, the National Restaurant Association was among those that broke ranks with such business groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, declining to join their "Start Over" coalition that has launched an advertising campaign against the reform bills in key states.

The decision, along with those made by the drug industry and a handful of other business trade associations, helped Democrats keep their initiative moving. It also gave the National Restaurant Association access to the White House and to Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, allowing them to be heard on key issues, such as whether small business would be exempted from some of the new law's requirements.

On the eve of the Senate's health care vote Dec. 23, Sweeney entered the White House gates to meet with, among others, the Obama family's personal chef, Sam Kass.

Sweeney, who represents the interests of the megachains such as McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts, also discussed first lady Michelle Obama's plans for combating childhood obesity.

"We should play a leading role," she said.

She took a similar approach, dubbed "mitigation and damage control" by members of her board, to consumer activists' demands that the health care bill include provisions on restaurant nutrition labeling.

Sweeney and her board members met with food safety activists at the Center for Science in the Public Interest to hammer out a precedent-setting industry-consumer deal on the issue. The compromise, forwarded to the House and Senate health committees, provided that calorie information be printed on menus, but more detailed information such as fat and cholesterol content would be available on request.

Sweeney has not endorsed the recently passed Senate bill, but she is able to tell her members that the excesses of earlier proposals were dropped thanks in part to the restaurant group's participation. And she notes that effective lobbying killed efforts to tax soft drinks, one of the most profitable items for restaurants, in the name of reducing obesity.

Her new friends at the White House have helped provide access to the Commerce Department, where Sweeney is in the early stages of developing a proposal that would have likely stunned her predecessors: using stimulus funds to encourage Americans to dine out and support the restaurant industry.

Sweeney makes the case that "restaurants are major providers of jobs, employing 13 million individuals in restaurants nationwide," making it the second-largest private sector employer in the country, after health care.

In November, Sweeney was one of 13 trade association chiefs invited to meet with Nancy-Ann DeParle, Obama's health care czar. Sweeney laid out a handful of specific fixes that could win her organization's support.

Among them: Exempt small businesses from the law's penalties, change the calculation for defining part-time workers to allow for the seasonal fluctuations in the industry, and raise the minimum time allowed for complying with paperwork and registration requirements.

Those proposals alarm labor advocates, who see them as a way for employers to avoid providing benefits to workers.

Yet, most were adopted, at least partially, in the Senate bill, and Sweeney hopes for further gains when House and Senate leaders meet to reconcile their meetings.

Neil Trautwein of the National Retail Federation credits the Obama White House for tactical brilliance in finding ways to split the business community on health care.

"The genius of the administration's approach was to set broad principles and allow Congress to fill in the details," he said. "This immediately divided the focus of outside groups and ... it delayed development of a unified opposition."

Source:chicagotribune.com/

Forget the Israel Lobby. The Hill's Next Big Player Is Made in India.

The fall's most controversial book is almost certainly "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," in which political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt warn that Jewish Americans have built a behemoth that has bullied policymakers into putting Israel's interests in the Middle East ahead of America's. To Mearsheimer and Walt, AIPAC, the main pro-Israel lobbying group, is insidious. But to more and more Indian Americans, it's downright inspiring.

With growing numbers, clout and self-confidence, the Indian American community is turning its admiration for the Israel lobby and its respect for high-achieving Jewish Americans into a powerful new force of its own. Following consciously in AIPAC's footsteps, the India lobby is getting results in Washington -- and having a profound impact on U.S. policy, with important consequences for the future of Asia and the world.

"This is huge," enthused Ron Somers, the president of the U.S.-India Business Council, from a posh hotel lobby in Philadelphia. "It's the Berlin Wall coming down. It's Nixon in China."

What has Somers so energized is a landmark nuclear cooperation deal between India and the United States, which would give India access to U.S. nuclear technology and deliver fuel supplies to India's civilian power plants in return for placing them under permanent international safeguards. Under the deal's terms, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty -- for decades the cornerstone of efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons -- will in effect be waived for India, just nine years after the Clinton administration slapped sanctions on New Delhi for its 1998 nuclear tests. But the Bush administration, eager to check the rise of China by tilting toward its massive neighbor, has sought to forge a new strategic alliance with India, cemented by the civil nuclear deal.

On the U.S. side, the pact awaits nothing more than one final up-or-down vote in Congress. (In India, the situation is far more complicated; India's left-wing parties, sensitive to any whiff of imperialism, have accused Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of surrendering the country's sovereignty -- a broadside that may yet scuttle the deal.) On Capitol Hill, despite deep divisions over Iraq, immigration and the outsourcing of American jobs to India, Democrats and Republicans quickly fell into line on the nuclear deal, voting for it last December by overwhelming bipartisan majorities. Even lawmakers who had made nuclear nonproliferation a core issue over their long careers, such as Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), quickly came around to President Bush's point of view. Why?

The answer is that the India lobby is now officially a powerful presence on the Hill. The nuclear pact brought together an Indian government that is savvier than ever about playing the Washington game, an Indian American community that is just coming into its own and powerful business interests that see India as perhaps the single biggest money-making opportunity of the 21st century.

The nuclear deal has been pushed aggressively by well-funded groups representing industry in both countries. At the center of the lobbying effort has been Robert D. Blackwill, a former U.S. ambassador to India and deputy national security adviser who's now with a well-connected Republican lobbying firm, Barbour, Griffith & Rogers LLC. The firm's Web site touts Blackwill as a pillar of its "India Practice," along with a more recent hire, Philip D. Zelikow, a former top adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who was also one of the architects of the Bush administration's tilt toward India. The Confederation of Indian Industry paid Blackwill to lobby various U.S. government entities, according to the Boston Globe. And India is also paying a major Beltway law firm, Venable LLP.

The U.S.-India Business Council has lavished big money on lobbyists, too. With India slated to spend perhaps $60 billion over the next few years to boost its military capabilities, major U.S. corporations are hoping that the nuclear agreement will open the door to some extremely lucrative opportunities, including military contracts and deals to help build nuclear power plants. According to a recent MIT study, Lockheed Martin is pushing to land a $4 billion to $9 billion contract for more than 120 fighter planes that India plans to buy. "The bounty is enormous," gushed Somers, the business council's president.

So enormous, in fact, that Bonner & Associates created an India lobbying group last year to make sure that U.S. companies reap a major chunk of it. Dubbed the Indian American Security Leadership Council, the group was underwritten by Ramesh Kapur, a former trustee of the Democratic National Committee, and Krishna Srinivasa, who has been backing GOP causes since his 1984 stint as co-chair of Asian Americans for Reagan-Bush. The council has, oddly, "recruited groups representing thousands of American veterans" to urge Congress to pass the nuclear deal.

The India lobby is also eager to use Indian Americans to put a human face -- not to mention a voter's face and a campaign contributor's face -- on its agenda. "Industry would make its business case," Somers explained, "and Indian Americans would make the emotional case."

There are now some 2.2 million Americans of Indian origin -- a number that's growing rapidly. First-generation immigrants keenly recall the humiliating days when India was dismissed as an overpopulated, socialist haven of poverty and disease. They are thrilled by the new respect India is getting. Meanwhile, a second, American-born generation of Indian Americans who feel comfortable with activism and publicity is just beginning to hit its political stride. As a group, Indian Americans have higher levels of education and income than the national average, making them a natural for political mobilization.

One standout member of the first generation is Sanjay Puri, who founded the U.S. India Political Action Committee in 2002. (Its acronym, USINPAC, even sounds a bit like AIPAC.) He came to the United States in 1985 to get an MBA at George Washington University, staying on to found an information-technology company. A man of modest demeanor who wears a lapel pin that joins the Indian and American flags, Puri grew tired of watching successful Indian Americans pony up money just so they could get their picture taken with a politician. "I thought, 'What are we getting out of this?', " he explains.

In just five years, USINPAC has become the most visible face of Indian American lobbying. Its Web site boasts photos of its leaders with President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and presidential candidates from Fred Thompson to Barack Obama. The group pointedly sports a New Hampshire branch. It can also take some credit for ending the Senate career of Virginia Republican George Allen, whose notorious taunt of "macaca" to a young Indian American outraged the community. Less publicly, USINPAC claims to have brought a lot of lawmakers around. "You haven't heard a lot from Dan Burton lately, right?" Puri asked, referring to a Republican congressman from Indiana who has long been perceived as an India basher.

USINPAC is capable of pouncing; witness the incident last June when Obama's campaign issued a memo excoriating Hillary Rodham Clinton for her close ties to wealthy Indian Americans and her alleged support for outsourcing, listing the New York senator's affiliation as "D-Punjab." Puri personally protested in a widely circulated open letter, and Obama quickly issued an apology. "Did you see? That letter was addressed directly to Sanjay," Varun Mehta, a senior at Boston University and USINPAC volunteer, told me with evident admiration. "That's the kind of clout Sanjay has."

Like many politically engaged Indian Americans, Puri has a deep regard for the Israel lobby -- particularly in a country where Jews make up just a small minority of the population. "A lot of Jewish people tell me maybe I was Jewish in my past life," he jokes. The respect runs both ways. The American Jewish Committee, for instance, recently sent letters to members of Congress supporting the U.S.-India nuclear deal.

"We model ourselves on the Jewish people in the United States," explains Mital Gandhi of USINPAC's new offshoot, the U.S.-India Business Alliance. "We're not quite there yet. But we're getting there."