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DC Revolving Door: Ex-FCC Commissioner Is Now Head CTIA Lobbyist
jfruh (300774) writes "Up until three years ago, Meredith Attwell Baker was an Obama-appointed FCC commissioner. Now she's the newly minted CEO of the CTIA, the nation's largest lobbying group for the mobile phone industry. How can we expect regulators to keep a careful watch over industries when high-paying jobs in those industries await them after retirement? One of the most damning sentences in that article: 'More than 80 percent of FCC commissioners since 1980 have gone on to work for companies or groups in the industries they used to regulate.'"
when they leave the place they work for, move to companies in a similar field?
wow
people with a knowledge of telecom/rf going on to work at telco's unpossible
98% of the voters approve... You gotta give them what they ask for, or they might end up voting for somebody else, right?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
if all she knows is telecom, then it makes sense that she would go work at a telecom lobby. She was a top dog in the FCC, dozens of companies probably tried to hire her for name recognition.
The cream rises to the top. In charge here, switch jobs, go be in charge there.
Should she have to start at the bottom everywhere she goes to work?
STUPID ARTICLE
The current FCC Chairman was a paid lobbyist for the Telecommunications industry before he became the FCC chair....
As long as our politicians are bought and paid for, things will never change for the better.
I mean the recent issue with Verizon and the state of NJ, NJ let them off the hook for not building out the infrastructure promised in the early 90's by a mere technicality by considering heavily capped LTE as an alternative to wiring the entire state. Then stating that they would wire areas that do not have wireless service, only if 35 or more people request it.. except they know that wireless reaches every spot in NJ where there is no VZ service, so it is a cop out, they know, the PUC knows it, and how anyone in their right mind could possibly think that this is good for consumers. This only benefits the telecoms.
This is what we have in stall for our FCC chairs of the future.. not exactly this scenario, but people that would vote in a similar vein under the pretense it is good for the consumer.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Anyone remember who said that?
I seem to remember a President saying that.
Who could it have been?
And this is one of the many reasons why the US really isn't a democracy.
http://wh.gov/lwhr8
The iron fist has been revealed slowly. We're not sure when the fat lady went from humming a few bars to singing a mournful tune. The frog? Its dead, Jim. Gradually boiled by a thousand conspiracies...none of which exist, apparently.
if you don't want any conflict of interest. pay the agency heads $20 million a year and stipulate they are not allowed to work for any private entity for 5 years after they leave government
No, I am not a big proponent of this action as it "smells" funny. That being said...
Did anybody else notice she held the position from 2009-2011 in a two year appointment? She didn't jump right from the FCC to the CTIA.
She hasn't been working for the FCC as a regulator in three years. My guess is her contract or appointment included a clause restricting her from working for the CTIA or other groups she regulated for at least 1-2 years.
Naturally, the CTIA wants her as they hope she has the connections to make things move more smoothly in their direction. But, has she done anything unethical or otherwise illegal?
The conflict of interest is pretty unmistakable, here... but we have to keep in mind that even absent that conflict, this would still be the most obvious choice for both the former FCC commissioners and for the lobbying groups. The commissioners obviously have an interest in the field, and the lobbying groups would want to hire someone who knows more then a little bit about the inner workings of their "arch nemesis."
I mean... sure, moves like this will always have that sort'a greasy slimy feel to them, no matter how you cut it. But where else are they going to go?
(Plus, there's some pretty darned good scratch in going all turncoat!)
"Hope"
"Change"
And please don't ASSume that we live in some sort of binary world where criticizing Obama means I think Bush 2 was any less of a piece of crap. However, I don't recall Bush 2's election(s) being accompanied with the sort of priapic panegyrics about how "everything was going to be different" and the administration was going to be "lobbyist-free", either.
-Styopa
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Shitbags that go in & out of industry into areas of gov't. that regulate it (paid off with bribes (cut the "lobbying" bullshit term that's meant to desensitize you to the REAL CRIME occurring here, bribery))? No thank you. They go in, change the rules or lay off of the company that's going to hire them after their political term (or that put them into the job in the 1st place - since let's face it. that IS how it REALLY works in that case too)) - that's utter outright insane bullshit, & yet it keeps on happening. We're fucked.
Interest groups and lobbyists run the country. Voters enable it.
Votes do not.
Welcome to the new world order. The age of enlightenment seems to be over.
Money can't buy you love, but can and does buy influence.
This isn't unusual, nor should it be unexpected. Regulatory agencies are there to provide advantages for the established companies over upstart competitors and their customers. The stories about working for the interests of the consumer are just what the politicians tell voters, as they take money from politically connected companies, to create bureaucracies that further the interests of those companies.
It's how a fascist (a.k.a. mercantilist, cronyist) economy works.
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Like the other article yesterday about net neutrality, this just goes to show people that in the end big company's like Verizon can just buy anything they want and make the regulators and politicians dance to their tune and it's the general public that gets the short end at every turn and the regulators who are supposed to protect the interests of the people are not doing their jobs.
That should be considered a form of treason...
The post government employment surtax by libertarian Glenn Reynolds:
50%, no deductions, no credits, just outright confiscation to ensure less profit from leveaging any potential leads from the government to win insider deals.
If we don't fight for new protections, we will lose our rights forever.
Oh you mean DC.....
In general a person who makes contracting or regulatory decisions must wait a year after leaving government before working for a company related to their government work in the US. Other countries have different waiting periods (e.g. France is three years).
That's not perfect, but I don't see anyone suggesting a better alternative. A permanent ban on working in the industry after government service is unrealistic; Ms. Baker is 45 years old and has spent her entire career in telecom, I doubt you could get anyone with telecom experience if it meant their career was over when they left the government job.
I suppose you could eliminate political appointees altogether and fill those positions from career civil servants, but that has its own problems.
> How can we expect regulators to keep a careful watch over industries when high-paying jobs in those industries await them after retirement?
We can't.
Right, an individual passing through the revolving door does not represent a conflict of interest, but rather just the hiring of experienced/knowledgeable individuals. Here are some cherry picked statistics to prove my point /s
Please tell me this isn't where the PR spin is headed, because I fully believe people will buy it (if it's repeated often enough and made tribal). I mean, the spindoctors have already convinced too many people that bribery is "free speech" and 99% of climate scientists are frauds.
People are told to hate corporations and give the government more power. That power gets co-opted by corporate interests to be used against the people.
Will anyone ever learn that power should not be concentrated in government hands?
Have you bothered to look up Meredith Attwell Baker's history? She Is a Lawyer & Lobbyist by profession with connections to various politically families (Bushes, Bakers, etc). Her education is in Spanish & journalism, what about this would make her a good fit for the mobile phone industry. She is a career lobbyist, nothing more, nothing less. Why she was ever the FCC commissioner is beyond my comprehension.
I can easily see why this would cause problems, but the one thing no one seems to address is what is the alternative? If we want someone to head the regulatory body for telecommunications (for instance) we need someone who has a vast knowledge of the telecommunications field. That means pretty exclusively someone who has worked for years in telecommunications businesses. You can't pull someone from another field because they don't know anything about what they are meant to be regulating. When these people leave the government regulation jobs, they are obviously going to go back to the telecommunications field (with the other option being lobbying for the telecommunications field since they now have telecommunications experience and government experience).
So what are our options? We can't ban them from going back and working in the field, since that is what their expertise is in no one would take the job. We can't the hiring to people not in the field, since that is just silly. We could try to limit hiring of industry insiders but that severely limits your hiring pool and potentially swings the pendulum too far the other way. The only thing I can think of that is reasonable and doable is to try and regulate the quid pro quo going on, but that is all but impossible. So what exactly is the fix?
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Silly activist! You've never heard of "regulatory capture" before? It didn't occur to you that big bad media corps rely on "compliance" rent seeking behavior by the FCC to flush out the little guys and FCC hacks rely on big bad media for upward mobility in the so-called private sector? Sheesh, you'd think that we'd be able to appoint a Moses to head the FCC to implement social justice just the way Cmdr Taco and similar self-appointed experts would expect them to do.
Innovation, not regulation, folks. Regulators are self-interested bureaucrats, and bureaucracy gives you the status quo.
We keep voting for these politicians - BUT - the politicians who make it through the primary process are the only ones we are allowed to vote for, and they are already beholden to those special interests which facilitate their victory. 3rd parties are aggressively suppressed.
Very interesting TED talk by Lawrence Lessig on the issue: "There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens. That's the argument at the core of this blistering talk by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig."
There are many countries in the world where a de facto "Supreme Council" determines which candidates are allowed to stand at election. They are sham democracies. We are falling into that model more and more.
The issue is if the regulator, instead of stopping abuse, let it slide for the promise of a future high paying job. In my book that is bribery, and I'm sure many people agrees with me.
That's part of it, but there's more. The topic is called regulatory capture. An inherent problem in all regulation is that those being regulated have a vested interest in "capturing" the regulators and influencing them for their own interests. It's often not as simple as bribery or a promise of a future job. It can be (and often is) things like convincing regulators that certain kinds of regulation are great ideas, regulations that 1) make the regulators think they are doing something, 2) can be easily implemented by that regulated entity, and (entirely coincidentally!) 3) hinder the competitors of the regulated entity. Whenever you read about bankers being in favor of Dodd-Frank, or health insurers being pro-Obamacare, or a large company that supports raising the minimum wage, look for something like #3. Such support does not usually come from the goodness of their hearts.
As pointed out in this thread, who knows the complexity of a set of regulations better than someone who used to be in charge of them? So too much separation between regulators and regulated would be dysfunctional: you don't want carpenters regulating doctors, or vice versa. But the whole field shows some of the inherent problems of all regulations, especially complex ones.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
If we want to get top-quality people for a job like FCC Commissioner, which doesn't last that long and doesn't pay well, but don't want them to take industry jobs when they leave, we need to pay them more. Pay the Commissioners $2 million a year each, plus $1 million per year for the ten years after they leave the FCC, but make a condition of taking the job that they can't take outside employment in the industry during that ten year period. The incremental cost to the budget would be trivial, and it would remove the revolving door.
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As long as our politicians are bought and paid for, things will never change for the better
"When the buying and selling is controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators."
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No more so than currently, and there are simply fixes for preventing such situations even in pure democracies (require 2/3 or more vote to pass basic laws, 85% or more to modify constitution, etc). A few years ago you could have made the claim that "well reps have more time to analyze the issues" but I think that myth has been pretty much debunked. Most congressman/woman don't actually read the legislation they are passing & can't even answer basic questions in regards to it. At bare minimum I think we need a "third branch" of congress, a group of randomly selected citizens that would act as a buffer against the current engrained culture in Washington. Say 100 randomly selected citizens from all states, after legislation is passed by the senate & house it goes to them. If even 1/3 vote in favor it goes on to the president, if 65% vote against its kicked back to congress, if 90% vote against it the sponsors of the bill get permanently ejected from federal government work.
But what difference does that make. People have realized that voting, if you even still believe your votes are valid, doesn't make a difference.
People basically feel that a) this is wrong b) no one listens c) there is nothing they can do
And if you think this is going to go on forever, look at BLM and Nevada. People are starting to feel their only means of stopping such corrupt government beauracracy is the use of arms.
That is sad...we should never be at that point.
Most of the FDA are lawyers and beauracrats and would have a tough time telling a cow apart from an ass, without looking in a mirror.
The law would state that government employees with regulation powers are prohibited from working in the industry they regulated for a period of 10 years after they leave their government position. This would apply to commissioners as well as congressmen.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Among others. It's a huge conflict of interest.
"More than 80 percent of FCC commissioners since 1980 have gone on to work for companies or groups in the industries they used to regulate" Guess what folks they didn't get those jobs by pissing people off in the industry while performing their duties for the government. Needs to be some non-compete in their contracts that prevents them from taking a job in the industry they regulated for a certain amount of time. These politicians are screwing the citizens at every chance they get. I guess there is no way to stop the corruption in Washington. We need to take control of our government again, we need term limits for all elected and appointed officials.
The private sector job-pimping begins long before any candidate is chosen for a Gub'mnt position. Got to have **reliable** folks doing the peoples business. Small fry & large-fry like Harry Reid and Diane Feinstein. Like them! Really really like them. Feckin-A ... arrested/tried/convicted a just citizenry would hang the lot skinned and quartered from city walls .....
The problem is at this point it's been systemic of people in lobbying moving into the regulator role and people in the regulator role moving into lobbying, including congress critters. I don't care how versed you are in the topic, when virtually all of the people are specifically from lobbying when going into regulation, then place lenient regulations in place, then go back to lobbying, there is a major problem. Lobbyists should not be regulators and regulators should not be lobbyists. It's corrupt. The way you stop it is by putting people in the role who actually understand the implications, i.e. the engineers, the people who actually do the work. I find it hard to believe that someone with a communications or a liberal arts degree is *always* the best choice for leading a technical regulatory group.
So guys... what can we DO about this BLATANT EROSION of our Internet rights? Net neutrality must be maintained. Lets try and come up with solutions and suggestions to take action.
Hell, pay me 20 million and I will sign a contract that I won't work anymore ever! :)
When you grow a government to huge proportions and inject it into all aspects of your economy, you need an army of people to do all the work. When you add-in a political class to "run" things, they'll bring-in their "friends" to fill all the management spots.... and when control of the beast shifts from one party to another, the political appointees of the party losing power get the boot - and appointees of the inbound party get all those management spots. All these political appointees being human, they tend to want to buy homes, have families, and develop "roots" in their communities. As a result, there ends-up being a permanent class of people in each party who live in the vicinity of the capitol city who work in government when their party is in power and who need jobs outside government (but in their fields) when their party is not in power. There's your revolving doors. In the US, both parties have certain "friendly" companies where they "park" their friends. Goldman Sachs, for example gives money to politicians on both sides of the aisle but it's also a great place to park Democrats as are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Republicans like to park people in defense contractors. Smart companies that like the public to see them as non-partisan will happily park people from both parties.... after all, you never know when your multi-billion dollar company mign need some favors in D.C. and having some former (and future) employees there to answer your phone calls can sure be handy in in Crony-Capitalist world.....
You can ONLY end this with smaller government (NOT a panacea, but a good start). When government is small and not involved in much, businesses have far fewer reasons to get involved in government corruption, the politicians have far fewer spots to fill with appointees, and the public has far fewer people and departments to scrutinize for signs of corruption. Shrinking the government shrinks the petri dish in which corruption grows.
The more the government gets involved in the private economy through regulation, the more opportunities there will be for this kind of self-dealing ... no wonder politicians are so eager to expand the reach of government ...
There is an easy solution, re-target the NSA to spy the rats nest that is Washington. If you get a public office, it should be a given that you are held up to scrutiny. Spy on all these people, and when you catch them doing something wrong, throw them in the federal pen for 20 years. Once word gets around that relationships with elected officials are monitored and offering quid pro quo bribes will land everybody involved in federal prison, the practice will greatly cease.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Regulatory Capture is exactly what is going on here. Regulatory Capture is a failure-mode of government.
Instead having your radio go through FCC labs for Part 90 type acceptance, just say it's Part 90, pay the dues, and voila you are done. Maybe not as factious as this but it sure seems like that. Especially for some Part 15 devices which really cause havoc in radio interference and I wonder how they managed to get it on the market.
mfwright@batnet.com
You're not the first to suggest this - a surtax on earnings above the government salary is a *really* good way to deal with this.
University of Tennessee law professor and blogger Glenn Reynolds is one of the more outspoken proponents of this approach (he suggests a 50-75% surtax on earnings above the government official's salary for five years after leaving office.)
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit...
Although it's just a small step in eliminating cronyism and corruption, it's a meaningful and effective one, and we should all make sure that this is a major issue in every congressional election until it passes.
Ideally, this would apply to both elected and unelected officials, but the chances of getting congress to limit thier own feed trough is pretty slim given the heinous corruption levels we already have. (How *did* Harry Reid (and many others) get to be a multimillionaire *after* becoming an elected official?)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I am shocked, shocked to learn that regulatory capture continues to exist, even after I learned the name for it.
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=regul...
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Take a look at the revolving door at the Pentagon. Civilian and military personnel responsible for awarding and overseeing billions of dollars worth of contracts have been retiring from Government service to take up senior positions at the very companies they wrote giant checks to as civil servants for years.
Its one giant incestuous cesspool. They get away with it because they can.