How Things Work: Congress’s Revolving Door
Hear it? What’s that sound? “Whoop, whoop, whoop!” Ooh, it’s Washington’s revolving door, allowing corporate interests to come directly inside Congress to pervert public policy.
That door is now spinning even faster, because there’s a new boss operator in Congress. He’s Mike Johnson, who Republicans recently unanimously chose to be their Speaker of the House. He’s a corporate dream—an affable ultra-conservative from Shreveport, Louisiana, who consistently backs the plutocratic agenda of Big Business over workers, the poor, consumers, and most other Americans. Moreover, Johnson maintains that it was God (!) who elevated him to his new position of authority, and that the Bible will guide his policy views.
Susan Webb
Well, selected parts of the Bible—don’t expect much mercy, justice, or peacemaking from this hardcore laissez-faire ideologue. For example, guess who he’s chosen to be his director of policy? Big Pharma’s top Washington lobbyist! Dan Ziegler has been the chief influence peddler for a dozen multibillion-dollar drug giants, including Eli Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer. He has furiously opposed every legislative effort to stop the rampant price gouging by profiteering drug makers—even though 80 percent of Americans are clamoring for Congress to clamp down on their rip-offs. But we 80-percenters don’t control the revolving door—Mike does.
Johnson piously cloaks himself in both the Christian gospel and the libertarian myth of “free markets,” yet he has consistently pushed government action to restrict competition and protect drug monopolies. Now, in his first substantive action as speaker, he is literally bringing Big Pharma inside to sit beside him in the seat of legislative power.
Drug pricing reform will soon come up for a vote in Congress. Before Mike’s lobbyist buddy tells him what to do, let’s demand that he re-read the Sermon on the Mount.
The Billionaires Behind School Privatization
If you’re trying to enact an extremist rightwing policy but the public keeps rejecting it—what do you do?
You could try blatant deception, giving the same old policy a new coat of paint, a euphemistic name, and a multimillion-dollar political shove. That’s the dark path now being taken by the clique of plutocrats and theocrats who are determined to privatize America’s public schools.
Take Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott. He’s been pushing to make taxpayers fund private schools. But his own rightwing legislature has consistently rejected his power play. After all, even red-state Republicans don’t want for-profit chains and religious zealots grabbing tax dollars to indoctrinate school children.
So this year, Abbott & Company rebranded their scheme as “school choice” and “parental empowerment.” Who could be against that? The People, it turns out. While some families might want exclusive private schools, the claim that they have no choice is a fraud. As Republican state representative Drew Darby put it, his rural Texas county has “private schools, a parochial school, a charter school, and a large home-school community. That is choice,” he rightly notes.
Who are the privatizers? National billionaires like the Kochs, and in Texas, we have Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, two messianic oil billionaires from West Texas who double as proselytizers of a toxic theology of Christian nationalism. They are the Money Gods of school privatization—indeed, the governor, more than half of Texas House members, and every Republican state senator are financially hooked on their oil money.
No matter what slogan the privatizers masquerade behind, their goal is simply to defund public schools and divert our education dollars from the common good to their corporate and theological academies. Ask yourself: “What would Jesus do?”