Glenn Greenwald: How Telecoms Are Attempting to Buy Amnesty From Congress

[marmar]

from Salon.com, via CommonDreams:



Published on Sunday, May 25, 2008 by Salon.com
How Telecoms Are Attempting to Buy Amnesty From Congress
by Glenn Greenwald


One of the benefits from the protracted battle over telecom amnesty is that it is a perfect microcosm for how our government institutions work. And a casual review of the available evidence regarding how telecom amnesty is being pursued demonstrates what absurd, irrelevant distractions are the pro-amnesty justifications offered by the pundit class and the Bush administration.

Just in the first three months of 2008, recent lobbyist disclosure statements reveal that AT&T spent $5.2 million in lobbyist fees (putting it well ahead of its 2007 pace, when it spent just over $17 million). In the first quarter of 2008, Verizon spent $4.8 million on lobbyist fees, while Comcast spent $2.6 million. So in the first three months of this year, those three telecoms — which would be among the biggest beneficiaries of telecom amnesty (right after the White House) — spent a combined total of almost $13 million on lobbyists. They’re on pace to spend more than $50 million on lobbying this year — just those three companies.

Let’s pause for a brief minute to reflect on how ludicrous and deceptive — laughably so — are some of the main FISA/telecom claims that are being advanced. We continuously hear, for instance, that these poor, beleaguered telecoms need protection from the big, money-hungry plaintiffs’ lawyers driving these “costly” surveillance lawsuits. One of the two organizations leading the litigation against the telecoms (along with the ACLU) is the non-profit group Electronic Frontiers Foundation. Here is what EFF’s Kurt Opsahl wrote this week:

To put this into perspective, AT&T’s spending for three months on lobbying alone is significantly more than the entire EFF budget for a whole year, from attorneys to sys admins, pencils to bandwidth.

And then there’s the claim — advanced by the likes of The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt, among others — that it’s a grave injustice to force these telecoms to incur attorneys fees in order to defend themselves against allegations that they broke the law because the litigation is so “costly.” Yet here these telecoms are spending $1 million per month or more in order to send former government officials to pressure members of Congress to write our laws the way they want them to be written. * * * * * .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/25/9186/

[BlooInBloo]

1. Heh. They're in a race against time.