TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Craig McDonald (CM)
INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT) and David Weisman (DW)
DATE: March 6, 2008
LOCATION: Austin, Texas
TRANSCRIBER: Rhonda Wheeler and Robin Johnson
REELS: 2443, 2444, and 2445

Please note that the recording includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the reels. Boldfaced numbers mark time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

(misc.)
DT: My name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. We’re in Austin, it’s March 6th, 2008 and we are lucky to be visiting with Craig McDonald who has had a illustrious career starting with a—John Ball Park Community Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, just out of college, from ’76 to 1980. 1980, he went to work for a—a Public Citizen’s Congress Watch and during his tenure there, helped open the—the Texas office of—of Public Citizen in ’84. In ’94 through ’97, worked with a group called the Center for New Democracy and in ’97, we were lucky to have him come to Austin to found and direct a group called Texans for Public Justice, a non-partisan group focusing on money in politics. And with that introduction, I wanted to thank you for spending time with us.
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CM: Hey, my pleasure David.
DT: I thought we might start with your—your stint at the community center in Grand Rapids and—and the role of being involved in community, organizing…
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CM: That was it, that wa—that was my first taste of organizing really. It was a—the John Ball Park Community Association. It was turf-based organizing, came out of the neighborhood movement, you know, this was just after the Vietnam War, which radicalized a lot of people and certainly, I think, radicalized me. And the Civil Rights Movement was somewhat done, the Anti-War movement was somewhat over and a lot of the organizers around the country were really doing welfare rights organizing. And there was a new trend towards turf-based organizing, community empowerment organizing. And so some of the center of that was based in Chicago, the Saul Alinsky Model. I went to school with, you know, Shel Trapp and Gail Cincotta, people
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who ran National People’s Action out of Chicago and trained people on how to be organizers, how to get block clubs going, how to build leadership, how do you use an issue and how important issues are in organizing and motivating people for change. I got fascinated with that in college where I studied Political Philosophy and—and kind of eased into this—my first fulltime job, I guess you would say, my first real job, which is being f—a community organizer at what we called the Ball Park. It was a community of four thousand households, almost all white, but eastern European, Catholic, gave us a natural way to organize, you know, as Alinsky and others will tell you, organized people or they’re naturally organized already. It was kind of
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a Parrish model, if you will. We had the support of the Parrish in the neighborhood, which gave us great entrée into the—the members of the community. And we just set about organizing, creating block clubs, creating a community association, trying to build leadership, which we did, indigenous leadership, tackling issues that the community cared about from the old, what we call the Stop Sign Syndrome. That’s when you knock on someone’s door and say we’re—I’ve been talking to the neighbors, what—what concerns you, most all of them have a traffic concern, if you’ve ever done any community organizing, too fast, too slow, not enough stop signs, not safe enough. So that was kind of—that’s where you start your organizing, around the Stop Sign Syndrome, get people involved, let’s say, well, I think if we
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band together we can probably go to the city and we can probably get a stop sign, if that’s what the community wants. It’s kind of a training exercise for yourself as an organizer and for the people in the community, to show them that they have power, that if they band together, articulate an issue, articulate a demand on the political system, that they can often get that demand fulfilled. And then it builds up from there. We had a whole series of, oh, I don’t know, had thirty, forty had the block clubs, some more active than others and at different stages at time. And from that we built a neighborhood board of directors and a real neighborhood power base that, again, worked for the betterment of the neighborhood. We did some real interesting
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model stuff at the Ball Park. We started, I think, one of the first ever—it was a work co-op. We called it the SWAP Program, S W A P, Service with Active participation. We literally had a job bank, so that if you had a skill in the neighborhood, if you were a plumber or a painter and were willing to give an hour or two or how many hours you could give using that skill, not for any monetary return, but for an hour of someone else’s time. The hour of the babysitter was just as valuable as the hour of the lawyer. So we started that SWAP Program, which—I don’t know if it still goes on today, I haven’t been back there, but I think it does. We had a program where we kind of took over the running of the neighborhood parks, the community became involved, the community ran them. So it was a basic community organizing project,
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back when the neighborhood movement was probably at its height. I think it has been somewhat co-opted today. It’s not as confrontational as it was. The city planners in almost every city, certainly Grand Rapids, the city that I came from, kind of found a way to co-opt those neighborhood organiz—those organizations into their planning systems. And—and this is somewhat of a good thing. When—there was a issue about services in community, they’d work through the neighborhood associations. Neighborhood associations had become somewhat de facto and arm of the city government and have become less confrontational, back in the days, we were somewhat confrontational. We—we take a (?), you know the Alinsky style,
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we take a crew of people of people down to City Hall and demand that the city department had to do something, I mean, demand, get people screaming and yelling for their rights. It was kind of a little—somewhat of a radicalized version of—of civic participation. So the manner of it has changed a little bit since I’ve been there, but it was a great learning experience. I mean, I really learned how to organize. I can’t tell you how scared I was that day I had to knock on my first door.
DT: Well tell us about that first day.
(misc.)
DT: Now that we resuming, I think I had asked if you could give us an example of a—a typical day of—of going door-to-door and soliciting people’s opinions and trying to organize them and—and maybe stretching that out to talk about a—a typical campaign that might start at a visit at somebody’s apartment or—or house and then moving it all the way through to getting some response from the city or the country.
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CM: Yeah, yeah. Well I—I don’t know if I can remember a specific issue, I’ll try David. I think certainly the—it all starts with that first knock on the door and again, I tell—I can re—I’ll probably never forget that first knock on the door, I’m not exactly sure what we talked about. I think it was about improving the curbs as a, you know, the same thing as the Stop Sign Syndrome, the curbs were crumbling on the street and that was the first thing the resident brought up to me, that geez, we can’t seem to get any city help around here to—to—to build the infrastructure. And so the first issue I ever worked was on Straight Avenue and it was the Straight Street Block Club and it was in quest of new sidewalks and curbs on that block. But the first thing you
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always do in A block club, is you try to drop the names of people who have credibility within the neighborhood. Of course, we always drop the name of the priest at the church, Father Kubiak said maybe I should stop by and talk to you. And it opened conversation, opened dialogue. I wasn’t of the neighborhood but I think an organizer doesn’t have to be of the neighborhood. I wasn’t eastern European, I was from the other side of town, I didn’t have roots. This was a community that had deep, deep roots going back a couple generations. So you had to break through that and gain some trust and that was—the—your—your first task of the day, of any day and that was difficult to do at first, but after the years it got a little easier. But the first thing
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you’d try to get out of that first meeting, I said, well, do you know anyone else who cares about these curbs, is there anyone else on the block who’s talked to you about this, who’s mentioned this problem, who cares about this issue, who’s particularly active and then you try to feel out that first door knock to—to build on that, someone else, we’ve talked to that person, you talk to the next person down the street. On their recommendation, you talk to someone else who was perceived as a leader or someone that that person you’re talking to trusts. So you build a little cadre, if you will, of three or four people on the street. And the next thing you know, you try to
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get them to a meeting; try to get them to do something that they wouldn’t do. Well how about could you host a meeting next Tuesday night? There’s a lot of people who care about this problem on the street and maybe we could something about it if we got together and talked about a solution. So you try to get them to go outside their normal sphere of not being active, not being participatory. And so as we did in the Straight Street Block Club, you know, we got our first meeting and you had a neighbor house it and you sit around and you, as the organizer, try not to play leader. I think that’s the most difficult thing in community organizing. And you try not to get the—the citizens to rely as much on you as they would like to. You almost play
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dumb, if you will, that—l—let you figure this out, let’s figure this out. I can guide you through this process and the neighborhood association here t—here to help you, but let them talk about their issue and talk about ways to figure it out. We offered expertise, you know, we do the flyers to get—for the meetings. We’d—or do the legwork to organize the meetings. We would do the research on—well what city department is this—can take care of this problem. In this incidence, where do we go, who doles out curbs in the City of Grand Rapids and you try to personalize it. You try to—we found out—I forget the fellow’s name, I think it was Don Johnson, something like—was the head of infrastructure, curbs and sidewalks. A—a—a—all—all good issues need an enemy, that’s what we were taught at the Shel Trapp School and at the—the organizing schools in Chicago, you got to have an enemy. You got to
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have someone who is—who—who is—who is standing in your way to get something done politically. And you have to be—and it’s best if you can personalize that because you have to know who can go—who can solve this problem for us. Who’s the person we should focus on? You just can’t focus on government or focus on the system or focus on the city, you need real people who play real roles. That’s what—and that’s what you impart to the block club. Well it’s Don Johnson, what do you think we should do, let’s go have a meeting with this guy. Let’s call him over to the—better yet, let’s have it on our turf, let’s call him up and see if he won’t come down to our next block club meeting. And you get the city bureaucrat down there and you get him standing in front of you. And just by that, that’s some sense of accountability. You get him to explain, well, what is the process for getting this
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street fixed, we’d certainly like it lo—up on th—our—our—are we on the list to be fixed at all. And through that process, you kind of confront that city bureaucrat and in a sense, demand that it be fixed. Why is downtown getting fixed, why are all—what—why is all the money going to the big buildings, what about our neighborhood here? We want some services, we want some priorities and lo and behold once you—you—you make that progress with the city bureaucrat and let your elected officials know you’re doing it, we’d always be in touch with our elected officials. We’d had a m—monthly meeting, the city commissioners would come to our Ball Park meetings because they wanted to know what was going on. And when you had
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a—a—a—an agenda item such as the Straight Street Block Club needs new curbs, the city commissioner gets involved. And that’s how you get the ball rolling and so you start from those little victories and we did get—took, I don’t know, six, eight months, we did get new curbs one summer, brand spanking new curbs on Straight Street. Those people then have a sense that hey, if we band together we can get things done. And we moved them up to bigger and bigger issues, from a block club leader; we would have a chairman of the block club from a block club leader. You would have a—the possibility to run on the board; the board was all neighborhood activists. I forget the size, a dozen people, and we would talk about—as you go up the food chain, we’d talk about bigger issues. We would talk about the Service with Active Participation, the job bank program. We would get the board to start dealing
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with that, how do you—how do we put this together, where do we find f—funding for this. We created, again, the Parks Oversight Program. We had a Paint Program that was neighborhood wide where we used city resources, community development resources that would fund the Paint Program that we housed in our neighborhood association. We got to hire the staff, we got to choose how the—how people came in and got Paint Program to do home improvements. So it was from those little block club issues where you really build leadership and you try to and—and, you know, the cream kind of rises. There are—i—it’s amazing the ability of some people who’ve never been politically active, who just catch onto it, who dug it, who wanted to be leaders and who had great judgment and great people skills. And so it was a—it—it
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was a fascinating project to watch and—an endearing project—program, to see how people—you could build real leadership that became politically active. Not everybody would, people would drop out, you can’t get everybody active, but we built—we built one of the premier, I think, community organizations in the country in those four years. We got lots of—lots of local recognition. I think Grand Rapids had two of the best community organizations in the—in the country, the East Town Community Association was a—got lots of recognition, academic re—recognition for the programs it did. It even had its own print shop. You could go to that community organization, get your printing, it was the—it was a—the only community organization that unionized. The guy who ran the print shop was a Wobbly, he was a member of the
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IWW, but they had their own print shop. So it was all about building leadership and it was about empowering the neighborhood and empowering the neighborhood for its own economic development, to find the issues it wanted addressed, organize yourselves and reach out to the city and make sure you get them addressed. And it worked, because I think it’s a model for all organizing. It’s very grassroots and it’s a—the—the same principle applies in my organizing today. I guess I’m less of an organizer today than I was then, but I still consider myself an organizer. But even building coalitions on the national issues, on national issues at the national level somewhat works the same way. The peo—the people you’re dealing with are a little more sophisticated about the political process and about how it’s a—necessary and important to put coalitions together to move a political agenda. Certainly they’re—
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the—they’re more sophisticated than the neighborhood folks were at the Ball Park, but the process is the same.
DT: Well, this might be a good chance to—to talk about the next chapter in your life where you went from organizing blocks in neighborhoods on a very grassroots level to working in Washington on—on general policy issues. I—I believe in 1980, you went to—to—to work at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, which was working at the time for stronger health, safety and environmental protection and to corporate subsidies and—and better access to the courts. And I—I was curious, how did you come to go there? It’s a very different, sort of, field to be involved in and in a different level and tell us how that happened.
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CM: Well, you know, after four years at the Ball Park, I think I was ready for a change and—and you do feel that after that time we built great leaders, we had a very strong council. But the more you were there, the more and more they depended on you staff—staff person, I think we had four staff people, maybe six at our height, but usually four or five. But you felt the neighborhood depending more and on you to do the work and that’s not what the organizing was about. The organizing was developing leadership and not having them become dependant on you to define the issues, to do the speaking, to speak out on—to be the advocate. You wanted them to be the advocate. And after four years at the same place, I could—you could feel that there was more and more dependence on the staff. And
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I—I thought it wasn’t healthy for the group, plus I had an opportunity to do something that I had, you know, never done, had never really been in Washington and never dreamed about doing politics or organizing on a national level. Instead of just the grassroots stuff, I wanted to learn how to build coalitions, I wanted to be more involved because I knew the Public Citizen model and the—it was really Ralph Nader model. It was Ralph who had started Public Citizen and it was his vision for the organizing program that I got invited to participate in. And that model was building coalitions and it was attractive to me because I’d never done it and I thought it would be just a great next step in learning how to be a good advocate and a good organizer. So on that journey to trying to be the best organizer and advocate you can, I thought it would be a good—good learning stop and it was, absolutely. I
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got involved in it—Ralph at that time was starting his Congress Watch Project. He had always—he had a Congress Project that had started some eight or ten, maybe—yeah, six or eight years earlier and that was really documenting who owns Congress, if you will. They documented—did a dossier on every member of Congress, so it was informational. But he lost a key vote to create a consumer protection agency, cabinet level agency, he lost that vote in the House in, geez, I believe it was during Carter, it was 1978, I think, during the Carter presidency. He lost that—had—had built up lots of momentum for it and lost it by one vote in the House of Representatives. Lots of people took a walk and I think at that time in D.C., he
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de—decided that, you know, we really—we—we had not grassroot—he had no grassroots pressure back home to try to hold these members accountable, to try to lobby them from the grassroots, to support a consumer pa—the establishment of a consumer protection agency. And he said, well, I—you know, we’re not going to let this happen again, I’m going hire some organizers and we’re going to start—pick fifty to a hundred Congressional Districts that are relatively swing districts, not strong ideologues, not li—liberals all the way or strong conservatives, but districts, which on paper, could go either way. We’re somewhat moderate districts with members of Congress who, again, themselves weren’t that strong ideologically and with a little grassroots pressure, could be swayed. Ralph always believed that, you know, ten or fifteen people working together could change the way a member of Congress votes.
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And that with a little staff support and organizing support and advice on—providing them information on an issue, providing them with the opportunities, ho—how do you get a me—how do you get a meeting with your member of Congress, how do you introduce yourself to your member of Congress, how do you do a press release from the community. That was the model Ralph was going to use and he started the Congress Watch Locals Project. And he invited me—I had met him because at the John Ball Park Community Association, we had cosponsored a—he was doing a speaking tour where he was really—they’re really organizing tours to try to organize these Congress Watch Locals, so he was going in—into these targeted communities and would do a consumer conference, we’d out together a one day conference. And
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I just volunteered for that conference where Ralph came in and gave the keynote. And we had workshops on natural gas price decontrol and federal issues that affected the community, pocketbook issues, healthy and safety issues; your typical slate of Nader issues, slate of Nader issues. So I worked on that conference and I came in contact with Gene Karpinski, who was the field director for Ralph at that time and is currently the head of the National League of Conservation Voters. And Gene offered me a job to Washington and I took it. So that’s how I became involved with the Nader campaign. It was still grassroots organizing. We were doing, again, we were putting together coalitions in these Congressional districts of people who were active on some level and/or coalitions of staff, people that a lot of them were just citizens. Ralph, you know, would go on TV, go on the Mike Douglas Show and
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hold up the Congress Watcher newspaper and say, if you want to get active in our organization, you know, send us three bucks and write in. And w—we, as organizers would get those names in our geographic area. I was a—you know, from Michigan and my turf was the Midwest. And so we would go in and almost do—it was pretty close to the—the neighborhood grassroots organizing. It wasn’t as turf-based, it was mal—all issue based and focused on members of Congress, but the—the purpose was to change the votes of members of Congress. And, you know, it worked sometimes and sometimes it didn’t. But it was a—just a—one level up from that turf based organizing, more getting involved with national issues, getting more involved with
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coalitions because almost every national issue you work has a sitting coalition in Washington, D.C. You know, the difference between the neighborhood organizing is that in the neighborhood organizing at John Ball, you know, it’s a nighttime job. Most of your work is evening meetings and knocking on people’s doors when they’re around and you’re the only staffer in the mix. You’re the only paid person, though you weren’t paid much, you’re the only paid person on the job. When, you know, I moved up to the Washington job, you know, there was a—there—there—there was a huge table coalition aroun—around every issue, whether it was natural gas decontrol or pesticide or reauthorization of the Superfund bill. You know, there were paid people in suits who were paid good money to be advocates and a coalition in place around the table that gave you all the support you needed. You jointly figured out the strategy, that was the coalition part of it, was that in—in—inside the beltway.
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But the real organizing part of this job, for the Nader job, was when you went to your Congressional Districts, you were really doing typical grassroots organizing as if you were doing neighborhood organizing, though the direction of the campaign, the lobby support, the information support and all that came from a paid coalition of paid advocates around the table. Your job on the ground was the same job essentially I had at the Ball Park in Grand Rapids.
DT: Well, using that Alinsky model, who would be your opponent, how would you personalize it if you were here on these, sort of, abstract issues?
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CM: Yeah, yeah, well, I think your opponent, so to speak, was the member of Congress. This was the person who was your community’s target, if you will, to change the vote of the member of Congress. And there’s always enough boogie men if you’re working on the Super Fund issue, you know, we always had the list of the chemical companies and how much they had given. And we always had the list—it’s kind of the same work we do today, who is this member of Congress, where is his mo—money coming from, who are the lobbyists who are fighting on the other side. So the real boogie men were the—the lobbyists and the entrenched, you know, the oil companies and the—and the polluters and the chemical companies. They were always the real boogie men. But your target was the member of Congress and always try to get members of the community to not be fearful, to stand up to their
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member of Congress, to invite him or her out to a Town Hall Meeting. We would even bring people in, get coalitions of people to—community people to come in Washington and have our lobby days in Washington for those who could make the trip to Washington and meet their member of Congress. So, it was a combination, David, of the—the member of Congress was usually the target. I mean, that’s a person whose vote you wanted to change, that was the person who could do what you wanted done in the community. And—but there were plenty of boogie men in the background and reasons why that member of Congress might not listen to us, the citizenry, because they were beholden to the entrenched interests who didn’t want a strong Superfund, who did want natural gas deregulation. So, there was—there were plenty of enemies to go around.
DT: Well, can you give us a little context here. You’re there from—w—well, the beginning of 1980, you’re—you’re there ‘til 1994, at least the first twelve years that you’re there, you’re in the midst of—of Republican administrations and a real rollback in a lot of the regulations that had been passed in the sixties and seventies. What was it like to be there? What were some of the, I guess, the efforts that you mostly got involved with?
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CM: It was—it was dark—they were dark times. I mean, Reagan really—they were on a—a—a—an absolute campaign to un-regulate America, to tear down the Federal Trade Commission, to rollback regulations, to—through paper f—work reform acts, to really rollback health and safety network in the country. We worked on—I—I think we did a fair job on stopping a lot of it. Well, we never got—during that time we were trying to get reauthorizations, I believe, on the Clean Air Act, the Pesticide Act, Superfund Act—we were able to, I think, escape the Reagan years on the regulatory health and safety level, without as much rollback as one might expect, but we weren’t w—well—we—we—we weren’t able to make very large strides.
DT: Sort of defensive?
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CM: Yeah, it was all defensive, it was all defensive. There was a—a very little offence being waged. You know, we always had an offensive campaign finance a—agenda, but I can’t—I don’t believe it went anywhere. So those were dark times in a way, in organizing and what we did then during the Reagan years was often turn to the states. After Karpenski left, I eventually became the Field Director, the Organizing Director at Public Citizen. And we decided to do more work on the state level, where we thought we had better chances of getting some consumer protection, some environmental protections and/or even democracy reforms or campaign finance reforms. And a lot of the battles that had resulted from some of the deregulatory efforts in Congress actually were issues that then eventually got thrown back to the states. Let me give you an example and I believe it was ’84, ’83 or ’84,
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the breakup of AT&T was a huge consumer issue. And we as co—kind of, the—the Public Citizen is really where—where free marketiers, where the free market works, we were anti-monopoly and we were for the break-up. But we—we wanted the phone company, you know, it was a—one big phone company, you bought your phone from AT&T, you got your local service from the one big phone company, you got your long-distance service from the one big phone company. It was a huge change in the way the phone companies were—and communications industry was doing business once Congress split the phone company into long-distance carriers and then regional local independent phone companies. Our role from the consumer point of view was try to keep some consumer protections in the system. We
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supported the breakup. We thought it would be more competitive, competition, we’re—f—we’re for competition. Competition in free markets, where competition works is good for all. The phone companies at that time though were trying to—as they were readjusting their rate base were, we thought, along with the National Con—Consumer Law Center out of Boston, Consumer’s Union and other straight up consumer groups, were concerned that the phone companies were going to try to put a whole lot of burden on the local telephone user so that—the—so the—so in essence, the local telephone user would subsidize all the new hi-tech telecommunications business that they wanted to get into, the very lucrative businesses which were just starting out. They were just—the lo—competition in long-distance, data service, they saw that as their goldmine to—to—f—for their money and they wanted to shove that rate base on the monopoly consumer, if you
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will. Now these pricing battles were really worked out at the state level, so I spent several years fighting the local phone companies to try to make sure that we would have universal phone service, that the local regional Bell’s would not put the burden, the cost of the telecommunication system unfairly on the local user, the mom and pop who had that phone and used it for their lifeline and used it for communication and that’s all they did, what we—we used to call it POTS, plain ole telephone service. We want to keep it affordable and we want to keep it out there. So we battled the local phone companies for many years on this and those battles all took place at the state level, along with the National Consumer Law Center. Some—some of my proudest moments is defeating the phone company which was and is one of the biggest lobby groups across America and in most states. In Maine, we actually
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created a consumer coalition that put an initiative on the ballot, which would outlaw what the phone company was trying to do. That is, the phone company at that time, its scheme was to go to what they call local measured service so that that phone service which was, up to then, and still is basically unlimited for local calling, they wanted to put a meter on your phone. They wanted to charge the consumer for every call they made for time and distance as if it was a long-distance call. That way—we thought that those pricing schemes—we had lots of internal ATDT documents show those pricing schemes would maximize the revenues, would unduly be subsidizing their business long distance interests and would put enough burdens on the consumer to jeopardize universal telephone service in this country. We thought it really threatened the ability that everyone ought to be able to have and
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afford a phone. So we challenged those pricing schemes and those were—had to be challenged at the state levels, the state public utility regulators who would implement those pricing schemes on the state level following the break-up of AT&T by Congress. So much of our work—that’s just one example how our work turned to the states. In Maine, we created a coalition. We got our initiative drafted and put on the ballot to outlaw the Maine local phone company from implementing local measured service. Ed Muskie was against this, was the former Senator from Maine, extremely popular person up there. He—we had very little money and he was hired by ATT to be the spokesperson on how local measured service would be such a
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great thing and how they had to stop our initiative. But we ended up winning that initiative. That was back in the days when we had a fairness doctrine. And we filmed a commercial, we wrote it ourselves and filmed it with Ralph at what we call the Center, his den of boxes and paperwork and film—filmed the commercial and asked for a Fairness Doctrine in time, back when the Fairness Doctrine was still an enforceable doctrine. AT&T was spending tons of money, we weren’t spending any. Broadcasters back then had a statutory obligation to air all sides of controversial issues. We convinced them that this was a controversial issue. We put together a TV spot for, I don’t know, t—two thousand dollars, it was the—the production values were—were not very good. But it was Ralph talking about how he was in the
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business to save consumer’s money and they should believe him and not Ed Muskie and AT&T. Now the beauty of that is the Red Sox were in the World Series that year just before that and our a—fairness time—actually we—we had that commercial run during the World Series, all these p—people in Maine were Red Sox fans. We—we, you know, we—we got all this free advertising on the World Series when every—everybody in Maine was tuned into the World Series and our commercial ran. And I think we w—won some advertising award as the most effective commercial of that political year. And anyway, we took ATT—T to task and we passed the initiative. Interestingly enough, that’s what brought us to Texas and opened the Texas office, was…
DT: This is 1984?
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CM: This was ’84. Following the breakup, we opened the Texas office for the sole purpose of fighting local measured service in Texas. We didn’t intend to open an office, but we came down here and we created a coalition. I came down with a staff assistant in ’84 because there was a—Southwestern Bell was moving a proposal at the Public Utility Commission then to create that same type of service, local measured service. We created a coalition that included AARP, most of the consumer organizations to the extent they were here. Well, I know who—who the big consumer organization here was the southwest office of…
DT: Consumer Union?
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CM: …Consumer’s Union, that’s right. Consumer’s Union was a huge partner in that coalition and very helpful. And we kind of—I think we had raised—by then we were on a roll, we had raised about thirty thousand dollars for that campaign, which was, you know, a substantial amount of money back then for a grassroots campaign and certainly didn’t compare to the money Southwestern Bell was willing and able to spend against this. But we just had—by then we had a great message against local measured service. We had a coalition in place and we came down and we actually—we brought Ralph down to do a press conference to announce that he was going to send a team of organizers, that team was me and another intern. Sent a team of
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organizers down here to stop local measured service and we were going to pull no punches. We were going to take this to the mat. And in an essence, we kind of bluffed Southwestern Bell and they withdrew the proposal in three weeks. We—we had whooped them. And so here we are, we had raised thirty thousand dollars for a Texas organizing campaign and I guess we could’ve taken the money and gone home or gone out to another state, but I was able to—I fell in love with Texas. I’d always—d—didn’t want to come down here, I’m—I’m—I’m from, you know, new egg—I had all the stereotypes of Texas in my mind, thought it was going to be a horrible place and really didn’t want to come here. And of course now I live here and just—it—it’s hard to get me across the border and out of here. But at the time there was the—the public interest community in Texas was so unlike what it was in many
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of the industrialized states. It was welcoming of other resources, the—it wasn’t turf conscience. You know, you go and you try to organize a Congressional District in Chicago, it’s difficult work. There—there—there’s a lot of turf going on, that no, this is my issue, no, these are my people, no these are my activists, no, we don’t want Public Citizen coming in here, none of that in Texas. Texas was just a—a—a—a—a wide-open community where the—Carol Barger, who was running Consumer’s Union at tha—that time, was so open to trying to get more resources, more progressive money down here, more progressive ideas, that there was not a sense of turf consciousness at all. And so I think I—we did successfully convince Public Citizen, the leadership in Washington to open a permanent field—to use that money to
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establish a permanent field office. So we took that twenty thousand dollars and we hired the first Public Citizen Texas director to go on and do a number of issues. I think the first issues that first Public Citizen office took on was the issue of—it was a—the—Comanche Peak. It started doing the fights against some of the nuclear plants, STNP and Comanche Peak. And Jim Schermbeck was one of the first people we hired, who is now a—a well-known activist in Texas and a filmmaker himself. He did the recent—a film called The Big Buy, the documentary of Tom Delay and how Tom Delay tried to take over the state. So—so it’s a…
DT: Can you take this—this moment just to—to talk about the roots of the environmental activists and organizing movement in the consumer efforts as well? It seems like there’s—an—and especially in the early days, there’s a real sort of partnership there.
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CM: Yeah, I think—I—I—there’s a real mix between—at—at least from my perspective in Public Citizen and the Nader mix, there was a real mix, many of the issues we took on were what you might call straight-up consumer issues, pocketbook issues about phone pricing, about safe products, about safety issues. But many of those cross the line, so yo—environmental issues certainly hit those too. Environmental issues were economic issues to us. They had health and safety costs. And I think certainly at any given time, the agenda of Congress Watch which might have ten or twelve policy priorities, certainly a good one-third to half of them were environmental in nature. Again, they were reauthorizing the Superfund act, trying to get toxic cleanup through, trying to make sure that the corporations who had
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created the pollution would remain liable for it’s clean up. We worked, again, as I mentioned already, the Pesticides Act, reauthorizing Pesticides Act for stronger pesticide label. That issue had lots of appeal in the worker safety community because many of the people poisoned by pesticides were farm workers and other workers. And it had a broad appeal to those who Nader had attracted over the years, whose loyalty was for consumer issues, pocketbook issues because they’re mothers concerned about the safety of what they’re feeding their children. So that environmental issue crossed a lot of different lines, the pesticide issues. But we have always worked a number of en—environmental issues. You know, I think the Public Citizen agenda and my personal career agenda has been about people’s
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health, their safety and their pocketbook, trying to protect those three things from the avarice of the corporate system we live in today.
DT: I see and—and if we could maybe go forward a few years. 1994 you became a co-director of a group called the Center for a New Democracy which seemed to have picked up and interest of yours that—that carries through the current day, by campaign finance reform and ballot acts, leave these sort of political questions. And I was wondering if you could talk about the origins of that part of your career.
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CM: Yeah, so you’d almost—at every part of work spend a good deal of my time or resources at Public Citizen and at the Center for New Democracy working on small “d” democracy reform. You know, since the Watergate days the—one of the first issues we had worked at Public Citizen was what we call the Money with Strings Organizing Campaign. Cut money with springs—strings and we—we—we got all our activists at—Public Citizen activists to send in the little paper dollars with strings attached to members of Congress to try to get public financing for Congress in much the same manner that the reform community was successful in getting public financing for presidential elections following the Watergate scandals. So there’s been a b—piece of my agenda, if you will, at almost every organization that cares deeply
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about the role that money and power plays in the political system. And tries to push reforms that would empower more of us—the many of us at the expense of the few who seem to now hold more than their fair share of political power. Center for New De—New Democracy was all about that. Again, we started that project—that project was, again, aimed at the states. There was some hope in the reform community which had been working for public financing for the decade while I was at Public Citizen, we would always get Bills introduced. They would never pass. So it was kind of—a—again, it was under most often a Republican controlled Senate and a Republican White House. There was hope when Clinton was elected that our public financing agenda and reform agenda was going to pass the Congress. Clinton in
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his—his famous inaugural speech claimed, we’re going to give this House back to those to whom it belon—this capital back to those to whom it belongs. He was a strong advocate for public financing and campaign finance reform. And as most politicians are, he certainly—wh—when push came to shove, he didn’t deliver on his commitment. Our coalition worked the first two years of the Clinton administration, we even hired his pollster about the benefits and how—how—how he could take on public financing, be a strong advocate for strong campaign finance reform and how it would not hurt him among the voters of America and, in fact, might endear him to the voters. So, we put a lot of effort into the first two years of the Clinton White House to pass a public financing Bill in Congress. Again, when push came to shove,
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Clinton turned his back on us and didn’t lift a finger to get our Bill through the Senate, very close in the Senate. We need the Senate on our side. He didn’t so what he claimed he would do. And it left a huge frustration in the coalition and reform community. There was a strong coalition at that time, many of the churches, almost all the environmental organizations, certainly the consumer groups and what we call the Goo-Goo’s, the good government groups, Common Cause, Public Citizen, really kind of led that coalition for many years, since we were the traditional money and politics reform groups. Well it was very disappointing that the Democratic leadership in the White House turned their back on us and a lot of us then figured out it was time to get out of the campaign finance reform business and Congress if we—wo—an—an—and our strategy turned to the states. And that’s why I went to
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the Center for New Democracy. It was a program that was focused primarily on the states trying to get public financing or campaign finance reforms through the state level, realizing that our chance in Congress had been denied by a lack of Bill Clinton’s leadership on the issue. And the Center for New Democracy was based in D.C. And we helped provide some intellectual background, organizing impetus and raised money for state coalitions that wanted a pass through the ballot initiatives—through ballot initiatives, pass campaign finance reform. Anyone who’s worked the campaign finance reform business understands that it’s very difficult to get through any elected body. There’s much resistance on campaign finance reform through any elected body. The best way to do it is to choose states where you can circumvent the
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elected political elite and go straight to the voters and pass some reforms. It’s not the best way always to legislate because when you do go through a legislative process, you kind of refine the statute, if you will. Going through a legislative process does one thing, sometimes weakens a progressive statute but it works out many of the kinks, it’s amendable. It—when—when you write a—a campaign finance statute, it’s written and it’s—it—it—it’s written and it’s thrown out there and that’s what you’re stuck with if it passes. And then on the other hand, that’s what you get if it’s progressive and good. So we spent a couple years at the state level working campaign finance reform. And so I was the National Field Director for that and
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worked with strong coalitions in, I believe it was seven states. We passed an initiative in the District of Columbia, that was our first practice run, if you will, and I believe we did that in the fall of ’94. We passed initiatives in Arkansas, Missouri, Oregon, Montana and one or two other states. They’re—sli—slipping my mind now. But part of that campaign, which was—was running initiative campaigns, creating a coalition or speaking to people who cared about campaign finance in the state, trying to help organize financing to them. The most difficult and costly part of any of these is in the petition drive. Most of these states needed twenty, fifty, a hundred thousand signatures to qualify your initiative for the ballot. So we spent most of our time gathering signatures to qualify the initiatives for the ballot. None of the initiatives were really about public financing. Public financing is not a very popular
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when it comes to voters. Our polling shows and I think it still shows to this day that it’s very, very difficult to pass a public financing popular statute among the electorate. Not that people don’t believe it and can’t believe it, but the negative message that could be used against you is you don’t have to spend much money to knock down a progressive public financing statute. And most of the interest that be wherever we had tried public financing, wherever it appears on the ballot without spending much money, could really knock it down and defeat it. We saw that in Austin here in the public financing statute about six—six or seven years ago. All it took was a couple of billboards to talk about welfare for politicians and—and—and the negative message on public financing is so easy and—to articulate that it kind of wins every time because the pro-public financing side just never has enough
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money to do the education that it takes to counter that message. So these initiatives were actually about a new concept, they were about low contribution limits. These are what we called Hundred Dollar Limit Initiatives and a very simple concept. The purpose of it was to get the big money off the top, out of the political system. You know, most of these states either had no limits or had extremely generous limits, five thousand dollar contribution limits was typical. And these initiatives would knock them down to a hundred dollars. It’s something an average citizen could absolutely understand. The average citizen and—not—not even the average citizen gives a hundred dollars to a candidate. Giving a hundred dollars to a candidate or a political party or a campaign is something beyond the experience of
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the average citizen. And I think the average citizen who feels disenfranchised by their government certainly understands that o—than—that a hundred dollars—to them, a hundred dollars is a lot of money. And that’s all you ought to be able to—to give. Our slogan and our pins were A Hundred Dollars is Enough. And those initiatives were in most states, widely popular and very successful. I believe in—in Missouri, we won with seventy-five percent of the vote. I think in nowhere were we below sixty percent of the vote.
DT: And these were campaign finance caps on all statewide offices, judicial, elective…
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CM: Yes. Yeah, generally to—applied to all—all statewide officials, from the legislature on up. And some had escalators for statewide offices, the cap might be two fifty, but they were all relatively low contribution limits. And they weren’t very—they—they weren’t always supported by our friends in labor who—who are used to having political action committees that amassed a lot of small dollars but would give their contributions in increments of five, ten, fifteen twenty thousand dollars. So they weren’t always pop—we didn’t always get labor support. But we really got citizen support and we got a lot of environmental support and a lot of consumer group support. And we got a lot of support from the national—from the national
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funding community that really was frustrated with the lack of response on democracy issues in Washington and were looking for state strategies. So we got a lot of support there. The…
DT: These—these efforts were deemed non-partisan but it sounds like you were getting more sympathy from the Democratic side of the aisle than the Republican. Wh—why is that?
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CM: You know, I’m—I’m not so sure we did in the voting booth. I think we won so many that even—even Republicans in the voting booth are concerned about the role of big money. And Republicans are not part of the e—establishment, if you will, the political establishment, your average voter Republican. We got their support as well. These a hundred dollar limit initiatives a—polled, I forget the exact numbers but David; I’m sure they were—got support equally from both sides of the partisan aisle. It was the establishments who—who was against us everywhere. And they—the—the—the—the voting base of the—of the—wa—was absolutely for them. The establishment, be it Democratic or Republican was against them. I don’t think we had Democratic leadership support in any of the states from the entrenched political
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class, if you will. These were opposed across the board from policy issue—by politicians on both sides of the aisle. But they were supported by voters on both sides of the aisle. And they’re very successful. That is, electorally successful. So over a period of a couple years we passed them in like six or seven states. In no state did they fail, where we were able to qualify them for the ballot. But then the courts took over, lawsuits were filed on behalf of politicians and donors that said a hundred dollar was too much of a limitation on free speech. We started losing these in the local federal courts and that kind of stopped the momentum for that project. Our funding base dried up as more and more of them were struck down—more of the state initiatives were struck down by federal courts on free speech grounds.
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Ultimately and too late, we ended up winning them, a Supreme Court argument. The initiative we passed in Missouri was challenged in the federal courts and that challen—it was struck down at the local court, it was struck down at the Court of Appeals. So shortly after we enacted that initiative, it was taken off the books by a federal judge. It made it to the Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court three or four years later. And the Supreme Court actually held up the concept of hundred dollar contribution limits to candidates in a very strong opinion. It said, well, giving to a candidate is not really—it’s an act of speech but the speech is not tied to a dollar amount. The Supreme Court upheld the concept that independently you can spend as much of your money as you want on politics but when you give to a candidate, there’s a—there’s—the—the—there’s a—a—a public interest in stopping the
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corruption that large contributions to candidates may make. The Supreme Court had always said that but it never said where the level was. But the Supreme Court upheld our Mir—Missouri imitative in very, very strong terms. Now regretfully some people argue that those initiatives weren’t great public policy, that it squeezed too much money out of the system, that it’s difficult to raise enough money for candidates to engage in meaningful electoral campaigns when contribution limits are two hundred or one hundred dollars. I think there’s some validity to that argument. But that’s not what stopped—what really stopped the CND Project. What stopped it was the—our funding kind of dried up because we were losing these battles state by state, [IA] real time. We passed an initiative; the federal court would strike it down. We couldn’t get progressives and foundations to invest in this strategy any further.
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But ultimately, we ended up winning and the Missouri statute remains in place, aspects of the Arkansas statute re—remain in place and confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of just a couple years ago. But in other states where they were taken off the books, they remain off the books. But CND was about more than that too. We were also—we were very supportive in pushing alternative forms of voting that are somewhat complex and not as popular as hundred dollar limits, but the concept of proportional representation, the concept of instant runoff voting, the concept of fusion politics, all to give voters more choices. That’s what we’re about, expanding the facilities for voters to have more choices. I think very pew—very few American citizens understand that we are actually one of the few countries that has generally winner talk all politics. That is, you could have in any legislative district,
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you might send a Representative to your legislative body, let’s say Congress. You send a member to Congress who wins with fifty-one percent of the vote. Forty-nine percent of the voters from the other party are essentially disenfranchised for the period of that Representative’s tenure. Fifty-one—the—gets fifty-one percent of the vote, they get representation in Congress, forty-nine percent of the people left back in the district don’t even get a seat at the table to discuss the issues, to have a presence there. Most—many countries, many western countries use proportional systems which we were promoting with CND. So that you, again, you—you pick an arbitrary number, but let’s say, if you are a political party or your candidate gets a minimum of ten percent of the vote, you get allocated ten percent of the seats
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around the table. It wouldn’t stop the majority party from being in the majority but it means that the minority voices at least are heard throughout the political debate.
DT: Did you also press for third party representation? I know that Ralph Nader’s been running as the Green Party candidate and has often expressed the difficulty of even getting on the ballot for somebody who’s not a Democrat and not a Republican.
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CM: Well, those proportional systems would actually benefit all third parties because you could then take a third party and your third party would just need to generate ten percent of the vote and you would get ten percent of the legislative seats. So they would empower third parties. Right now the rap against third parties is a—it’s a wasted vote. And a third party helps elect, you know, the—the—votes for the third party often you end up with the worst evil, if you will. In the Nader situation, people blame Ralph for taking votes away from the Democratic candidate in 2002—in—in 2000 and electing a Republican. And so, yes, we were working on fundamental reforms which would empower third parties. We took a lawsuit to the U.S. Supreme Court on fusion voting to allow third parties to endorse the candidate of a major
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party, fusion voting they called it. It works in New York. New York has it, some states have it. Many states deny fusion voting. Fusion voting, for instance, would allow the Green Party to endorse Democrat but then you would—you would vote for that, or the Republican on one of the other major parties. But then you go and you vote for that candidate on the Green Party ballot so that you can build up and show that Green Party has lots of support. It’s giving the support to that candidate, but for the other values of the Green Party that may not be represented by the Democrats or the Republicans. But what it does, it doesn’t create a spoiler situation. You know, third parties now, you give a vote to a third party and that candidate, you’re—you’re—essentially many would argue, you’re throwing your vote away. But
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you can build—you can take time to build political power for third parties without electing the lesser of two evils. We took a lawsuit against the abolition of fusion voting in Wisconsin to the U.S. Supreme Court and regretfully we lost that lawsuit as well. The—in a—in a terrible U.S. Supreme Court decision, they said that the states actually have an interest in a strong two-party system in this country. It’s a horrible decision. And so our challenges to fusion—to—to the abolition of fusion voting were not successful at CND. But we also were promoting, again, along with proportional representation, instant voting runoff which allows you to—in elections for president and mayor—single candidate elections, allows you to rank your votes. For instance, let’s take that Nader situation, again in—in Florida, you would go in and you would
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put Ralph Nader’s my number one choice but if—if no one makes a—and my number two choice would be Al Gore, my third choice would be George Bush. If none of the candidates got a majority, then they would—your—your—your second choice if Nader didn’t get fifty-one percent of the votes, your second choice would be in play. And instead of electing George Bush in Florida, if George Bush won Florida, those second place votes would generally accrue to the Democrat and you wouldn’t have wasted your vote, you sent your message and maybe built up support for that third party candidate. But then you’d—your votes would be instantly counted and go to the other candidate ‘til one of the candidates got fifty-one percent. In this situation, Al
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Gore would’ve won Florida and Nader would’ve got his votes, but he wouldn’t have been a factor, if you will. So, we’re—w—w—we’ve been working for a long time to promote those changes in voting. Instant runoff voting, I believe, has passed by initiative in San Francisco and lots of other communities. I think it’s a—it’s a way to, again, give citizens more choices without—without limitations and without have—if that choice is for a third party or forth party or fifth party, they can make that choice without being spoilers and not—without ending up with the candidate of their last choice. They can end up with their candidate of their second choice, if not their first. So we’ve been trying to promote those kind of reforms. They—they’re difficult to talk about in Texas, so we’re just light years away from that.
DT: Well, you mentioned Texas. Perhaps we can—can start to talk about your effort to bring campaign (?)—campaign finance reform and—and small “d” Democratic access ideas to the state. In 1997, you came to Austin to found and then direct the group Texans for Public Justice. And I was curious how you got started with that and what—what your goals have been for—for the organizations.
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CM: Yeah, well it’s—it’s kind of similar to what Public Citizen does on some ex—to s—to some extent and again, of the Public Citizen, I o—oversaw that office here for some twelve or fourteen years, since ’84 to when I moved down here and started this project. And a lot of the issues that I saw Smitty and Public Citizen and the other groups work on in Texas over the years were not successful because they came up against big money. You know, big money runs Texas, big money just to a large extent, maybe more so than other states, plays a role in the outcome of public policy debates in Texas. We have a lobby here that is extremely active and well funded. There’s a campaign finance system with virtually no limits. There’s a campaign finance system that allows even our courts, the civil courts, to receive campaign contributions from the very people they’re judging that day in their
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courtroom. In short, it’s a—it—it’s a—it—it—it’s not very well hidden corruption, money drives the political process in this state. And unless you have a very dramatic issue, an issue that’s getting lots of attention, it’s very difficult for the good guys, the environmentalists, the health and safety reformers, the campaign reformers to get something through this legislature. You come up against entrenched interests every time you turn around. And I’ve known that from, you know, working down here off and on or from Smitty’s work and I thought there was kind of a void that no one was really documenting the extent to what we sh—we did routinely on the federal level, was what Public Citizen—routinely document the money and how it flows to Congress, to members of Congress. We thought there was kind of a void in Texas
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that Smitty and Consumer’s Union and the Sierra Club often talked about the role that money played in defeating their agenda. They very seldom documented it. I think it was because they didn’t have the time or the resources. You know, they’re busy working the substance of their issue. They’re busy working for cleaner water, for breathable air. They didn’t have time to do this. Well I had some expertise in doing it as having been a—the director of Congress Watch. I was also—directed a research program for several years. And so we just had—w—we knew how to set up a model and how to document the flow of money and who it flows to in the political system and to draw the lines between public policy, campaign contributions and politicians. And we thought there was certainly a void here.
(misc.)
[End of Reel 2443]
DT: When we cut off on the—the last tape, we were talking about how you came to Texas in 1997 to form Texas Republic Justice and the niche, the gap that you saw in the efforts to disclose, document, the role of money in politics in the state. And I was hoping that you could go on from here to talk about some—some examples of—about how money does work in the political system in the state.
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CM: Well that was an interesting time and w—we saw among the public interest community, I think there was a shortcoming in documenting the role of how power works, particularly how money and politics works in—in the state. Smitty and the Grey Panthers and Consumer’s Union and Common Cause office here, which was pretty strong at that time, always had a solid reform agenda and they were never making much progress. One thing we didn’t think they had was—or they could’ve used more of was factual documentation about where the money comes from in the state, who it flows to. You have to really document the problem before you can make much effort in passing reforms and so we thought we’d take on that role. Now that’s not all we do but we do do that and we think we do it very well. So what we
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decided to do, I think the first—the first group we looked lat, the first exposé report on money in politics we did was to document Texans for Lawsuit Reform, which is a coalition, a—a—a—it’s a political action committee, I guess, and a coalition that supports what we believe were pretty draconian tort reforms. The members of Texans for Lawsuit Reform had pitched in a lot of money into their political action committee and many say they were responsible for George Bush’s victory in ’94 over Governor Richards. It was the first year their PAC was formed. It was formed, we believe, at the suggestion of Karl Rove who wanted to use Tort Reform as a bankable issue, if you will. Bush ran; he had very good discipline message during that campaign. And one of the messages he used extremely effectively was that the civil justice system in the Texas courts were out of control and were a laughing stock and that he would do something about it and enact Tort Reform. Doesn’t sound like a
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very sexy issue or a very popular issue, but it became popular and it had a huge—huge amount of money behind it. The Texans for Lawsuit Reform PAC, we documented—though they claim membership of hundreds and hundreds of business people and average Texans, and indeed, they may have that among their membership. But the money that funded their effort came from a small cadre of tycoons, if you will, around Texas, who were almost all exclusively engaged in businesses and industries that carried lots of liability with them. They were homebuilders, they came from—they were construction magnets, one of them ran a whole string of liquor stores, very litigious industries. Industries that were responsible for lots of injuries and lots of pollution, many from the chemical industry, Sterling Chemicals was a member. These tycoons had pitched in a lot of money to
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this political action committee to support candidates, they knew who their candidate was going to be, George W. Bush, to run on an agenda of strong Tort Reform. So we documented—this was after the fact, George Bush did—they did raise the money, George Bush ran and won. Actually, his first act as governor when he took over in ’95 was to declare the need for Tort Reform in Texas a legislative emergency, which gave the Tort Reform funders—brought them much joy and actually changed the rules of how legislation moves through legislature. It really greased the way for some very draconian Tort Reform. So Bush delivered to that business community, that small group of tycoons on their wish list, rolled back the ability for consumers to get into the—to get into the courtroom. It really was the first wedge that undermined the civil justice system here and undermining that’s gone on ever since
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because Texans for Lawsuit Reform, even though we’ve been documenting their financial and political power, we haven’t diminished their ability to raise money, to deliver money and to win victories. But that first report did. It documented and—and I think it—it—it had some very positive impact, who is this Texas for Lawsuit Reform, do they have an economic interest in this policy, are they just promoting good government or is this something that benefits their members? And of course we found, as happens often in politics, is that the agenda they were pushing was a self-interested agenda which would limit their liability, take away the threat of lawsuits for when they harmed, maimed, injured, polluted the environment. It was a self-interest agenda, self-interested agenda that promoted their—that—that would help the bottom-line of their pockets and their businesses. So that’s when we started documenting the—doc—documentin—documenting the money. We have
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gone on to do, I guess what we call our reference studies. We do—every two years, after every election cycle, we in our databases now have—have millions of campaign contributions and we have every lobby contract ever undertaken in Texas going back for fifteen or twenty years. And every two years at the end of every legislative year, we document through a study we—we call Austin’s Oldest Profession, we document who are the big lobbyists, how much money is spent on lobbying, who’s hiring those lobbyists, what issues are they working on. And we—we analyze that and throw it out there as a reference for the media and the public and activists. We do the same on all the campaign fin—all—all the campaign money, though we periodically do a report on a particular industry or around a particular issue such at the coal plant
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fight, we can get into that in a little bit. But we do a reference report called Money in Politics and it—that’s at the end of every two year election cycle here. And it documents every campaign dollar given by everyone in Texas, we—where—where it came from, what industries those donors care about, what industries their background is, who it goes to and what sizes. A—a—a reference work, if you will, that can tell you almost everything you need to know about the campaign finance system in Texas and how it works and how it’s skewed, how it’s tilted. So we document the problems and one thing that allows us to do, it gives us a voice. We—we—we are nonpartisan, we don’t endorse candidates from any party, we don’t work on campaigns. But that’s not to say that a public interest groups like ours can’t have a point of view. We have a very strong point of view and I assume most people say
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it’s a very liberal point of view and they accuse us of being Democrats and partisans, but we’re not. We document money from Democrats to Democrats, from Republicans to Republicans. But that documentation brings us a lot of press attention. The press don’t have the—the—they don’t have the resources, the media doesn’t have the resources to do what we do, nor do they have the expertise. When we do these reports and someone in the media needs a number, for instance, how much did T—TXU or the coal plants give to the chairman of the Environmental Regulatory Committee, we can provide them the answer. And us having the answer also gives us the ability to give our spin. We can promote our point of view on what’s wrong with the system, on how it favors the special interest, if you—that’s what you want to call it, the rich and powerful business class and what should be
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done about it. So just documenting the problem gives us a voice, a voice for reform and advocacy voice in the problem. You know what we found is a—Texas is—we got the wild west in money in politics. You know, w—we say down here that in Texas you can get as much political representation as you can afford. And that’s really true; we have no limits on campaign contributions. It’s the only state of its size and it’s only one of four states that don’t have any limitations, the rest are small in backwaters like Mississippi and a couple of others. But no limitations and that system has resulted in too much power in the hands of two few people in Texas. The most recent study we did of campaign money in the most recent election cycle, the 2006 election cycle, revealed that a hundred and forty-three Texans out of twenty-two million of us, is there twenty-three million now, a hundred and forty-three
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Texans gave a hundred thousand dollars or more to political candidates in this state and that money totaled fifty-one million dollars. Twenty-five percent of all the money that flows to politicians and to political parties and to PACS here comes from a very, very small handful of elite wealthy donors and that skews how politics are run. We have one donor from Houston who has been the elite ever since we’ve been tracking money, a homebuilder, Bob Perry, who gave seven million dollars in the last campaign cycle. We have people out here who are—because we have no limitations on campaign money, there are some wealthy individuals who play the role of political party. James Leininger, a huge wealthy donor from San Antonio, a medical doctor who made his fortune in the medical bed industry. He’s been a strong supporter of Texans for Lawsuit Reform and the Tort Reform a—agenda because he’s in a
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business that saw lots of litigation, lawsuits filed against him. But he literally funded a slate of republican candidates because he—he cares strongly about an education issue. So he single-handedly funded five Republicans because we have no limits, he funded five republican challengers in republican primaries in ’96. These are—the—th—the politicians who run on this money and win on this money become beholden to one person out of the twenty-two million Texans, become beholden to their funder. As we say, these—these are not public servants, they’re private representatives who—whose votes are in the hands of t—their campaign funders. Bob Perry has become, in 2006, he’s the largest political donor in America, he gave a total of seventeen million dollars in the last—in the 2006 Congressional and state
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elections combined. This is unheard of. On the federal level, which needs reform and needs public financing, you know, once you give a hundred thousand dollars, you’re out, you can choose—Mr. Perry could give a hundred thousand dollars to a—a combina—to any of the eight hundred and seventy candidates for Congress, the how many hundred or so candidates for the senate, the presidential candidates. Once he gives a hundred thousand dollars in a campaign cycle, he’s done because we have laws that say everyone should at least have some sense of equality of clout in the political system. Well that’s not true in Texas, as we say, you get as much clout as you can afford. We allow these rich donors to absolutely dominate the system. So we track that, we track how the system is skewed towards the wealthy, how they dominate it, how virtually small contributions and it depends what you call—
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contributions of a hundred dollars or less are almost nonexistent in this state. Politicians don’t go after them, there—the—there’s no efficiency in it. When you can say you’ll please Bob Perry and get a twenty thousand dollar check from him instantaneously, why do you need to go out and get a hundred bucks from two hundred people and constituents in your own—in your own community. You don’t have to. You know, we’ve done analysis of where the campaign money comes to the House and in some years we have—I forget the exact a—a—amount off the top of my head, but overall, it’s certainly less than half the money comes from people who can vote for you. We have several Representatives who get five percent of their money or less from the voters back home. And we’ve had instances where we’ve had several Representatives that got not one dollar from back i—in their
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communities. All the money comes from the lobby, it’s centrally organized here. That’s what has the grip on the Texas system, you only hear people talk about the lobby. Who is the lobby? The lobby is primarily those paid lobbyists who are here day in and out. There’s sixteen hundred of them, any given session, sixteen hundred paid lobbyists billing their clients three quarters of a billion dollars a y—a—a—a year, billion, three quarters of a billion dollars. Out of those sixteen hundred lobbyists, there are fifteen that work for consumer groups. We have documented in the last report we did that thirty-three worked for environmental or conservation groups. So in the sixteen hundred, I mean, you’re—you’re just physically outnumbered, absolutely outnumbered over there. But more pernicious than just being
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outnumbered is the fact that there’s a sense over there that unless you’re a Lon Burnam, someone who has a lot of courage in an extremely safe district that you can’t go against the lobby, that the lobby moves as a whole when it comes to figuring out who they’re going to fund. Once you win a seat in the Texas legislature and you have shown that you will not jeopardize the fundamental interests of the corporate community in this state, you’re good to go. They will provide you with as much money as you need to scare off challengers and to win reelection. And very—this—the—the—the—th—this happens in almost every instance and very rare instances does someone who doesn’t—who—who goes along with the lobby gets funded, gets—gets defeated, it’s a very rare. It’s a system here where incumbents have all the power and the incumbents understand that you can’t be pro-consumer,
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you can’t be pro-g—you can’t be too green, you can’t be too pro-consumer, you can’t be too worker safety or the lobby will turn its back on you. And when the lobby turns its back on you, it’s not just maybe the one company or the one industry that you pissed off. They move in a—you know, like a giant ship. And so the—the—the reason that progressive agenda fairs so poorly here is that almost everyone in the legislature with very few exceptions and courageous exceptions and there are some, but almost everyone understands how the game is played. A lot of them are more thoughtful about it than others, I mean, some people get elected here and they’re just, you know, wood on the bench and they go along and they get reelected time and time again. Others are more thoughtful and have a—have a—i—it bothers their
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conscience not to do the right thing so many times. But most of them end up doing the right thing as far as the lobby goes so that they’re not discarded, if you will, by the lobby. Let’s take TX…
(misc.)
DT: You’ve given the—the sort of general outline of how campaign finance works both from the perspective of—of donors and lobbyists and—and the—the officials themselves. Maybe you can show how this process functions through the lens of looking at some issues that have, I think that you’ve examined. One would be the efforts to keep the grandfathered exemptions for old plants and facilities. I think this happened back in ’98…
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CM: Yeah, seems it’s a…
(misc.)
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CM: Yeah, boy, that was a long time ago, 1998, I think that was our first environmental report. Again, we’re not strictly environmental advocates but we do care about the environment, many of our colleagues are in the environmental community. They had been trying for years to get some legislation through to cap the grandfathered air pollution that was coming from the major station air polluting sources around the state. We did a study called Dirty Air, Dirty Money because the environmental community, I believe, you know, came to us as sometimes communities do, to say w—we feel, we—we know there’s a connection between the money that comes from these polluters and our inability to get reforms through the committee. Could you use your databases, could you use your resources and
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your expertise to document that because that will help us in our fight. So that’s the role we play. So I believe that study we did in ’98 called Dirty Air, Dirty Money took a look at the largest grandfathered facilities and the owners of those facilities around the state and then tracked how much they had given in campaign contributions to members of the legislature. And lo and behold and not surprising, if I remember the results of that study, the chairperson of the Regulated Industries Committee, which oversees this particular legislation, received the most money from the polluting industry. And it happens time and time again, case by case, the people in power to regulate an industry or to do some cont—sumer protection that would affect an industry, the industries and the lobbyists are not naïve. They know that those are the people to give their money to and that money seems to—well,
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does, it promotes their agenda at the expense of those on the other side who don’t have the money, the resources or, you know, the—the economic self-interest to give money. In this instance, there’s the breathers, the breez—breathers of the state weren’t organized into a very effective PAC. Now, yeah, they were members of the Sierra Club and the Sierra Club did all it could, but again, I take you back to that statistic where, you know, sixteen hundred paid lobbyists and thirty-three of them work for the environmentalists. And when it comes to campaign contributions, the environmental community, the labor community, the consumer community isn’t even a blip. So we would docu—so we di—as we did in that study, we would document that the largest emitters of grandfathered air pollution provided, I forget the number,
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X millions of dollars to the legislature. And we used that report as the environmentalists took that report and used it with the media to make their case on why nothing is getting done about grandfathered air pollution. You know, the—the major polluters, which are probably made up of the utility companies in this state, were also huge donors to Governor Bush. Governor Bush, as you might recall, had his clean air program that he announced to take care of grandfathered pollution. And lo and behold, who did it benefit? It was called the CARE Program, it was an acronym for something, but the—the—the secret to it and the beauty of it was that he said he was doing something but it was beautiful to his donors too because absolutely voluntary program that took not one gram of CO2 or grandfathered
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pollution out of the skies, absolutely voluntary. And why is that, because Bush is beholden to the business interests in Texas, as most Texas politicians are. It’s not a partisan thing. The Democrats were, to a large extent, beholden to the business interests as well. But in that report, Dirty Air, Dirty Money, we tried to make the direct connections between the polluting industries who had been grandfathered and the politicians who received the money and what those politicians—their role in making sure that the industries we—were not adversely regulated, if you will.
(misc.)
DT: Craig, I was hoping that you could explain exactly where the money is coming from, from these corporate interests. It’s not exactly the corporations as I understand it.
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CM: That—that’s correct. Texas actually has one very strong piece of campaign reform law, if you will, that we passed in 1903 and that is a prohibition on corporate contributions. We passed that prohibition long before Teddy Roosevelt pushed it and passed it for Congressional elections in 1917, so the corporations themselves do not give directly out of their treasuries. But the corporations have the ability to create political action committees. They create what we call a PAC, which is a separate entity on paper, with a separate bank account. Those corporations then have the ability to spend the corporate money, the corporate treasury money, the stockholder money to solicit its privileged class, to solicit that privileged class for donations into its PAC. That privileged class is all the employees, all the employees’ families, all the
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stockholders and their families. And that’s where corporations feed their political action committees. So they can solicit that group of people for unlimited contributions into the political action committee. When the corporation gives, not technically gives, because it can’t give out of its treasury, but when, for instance, Texas Utilities gives money, it does so out of its PAC, which had these unlimited contributions from its executive an—and employees. But it also encourages its executives to give. So many of the employees who do give to the PAC on many occasions, also give direct contributions to—within the political system. One thing we have done to add value to data that is publicly disclosed in Texas, is to figure out that Joe, for instance, is a vice-president of a particular company and that when we get a campaign contribution [IA] and see it came from Joe, we can trace that back to
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what company Joe works for, what interest he may represent. And so we draw the lines. When w—w—we do a study claiming that the owners of the grandfathered plants, for instance, gave X millions of dollars to the legislature, we’re really tracking what its employees gave personally and what its poli—I mean, what its political action committee is getting because the corporations themselves are prohibited from giving. And we’ve seen—we—we’ve seen only one dramatic example in recent history where the corporations broke that rule and that’s with Tom Delay’s Texans for Republican Majority. Otherwise, that rule is pretty strictly followed, we believe.
DT: I—I’d like to return to this—the issue of TRMPAC, Tom Delay’s effort. But while we’re talking about polluters and campaign finance, perhaps you could talk about a—a study you did in, I think it was 2000, about the Texas Chemical Council and its gifts and its influence.
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CM: Yeah, you know, again, I think we did that in conjunction with the Public Interest Group, which was working on legislation to try to make sure we at least documented the toxic releases of chemical polluters. And th—w—and they had discovered that one of their most effective legislative opponents was the Texas Chemical Council. A powerful group, a trade association, if you will, a powerful group of many of the biggest Texas based manufacturing corporations. And so we worked with them to identify who the members of the Texas Chemical Council were and again, to document their amount of giving in a political system, which companies it was coming from as member ot—o—organizations and where it was going. And again, I’m sure, again, I—I don’t remember the exact findings of that report but
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clearly there’s no doubt in my mind that we documented that most of the chemical companies was going to w—what we would call environmental obstacles in the legislature, the chair people of the committee who oversaw regulation of toxics. And that, not surprising to the environmentalists who we w—worked on the report with, not—it was not surprising to them why their agenda was getting short shrift, if you will, because much of the campaign money was directed at the people who could stop pro-environmental legislation.
DT: And was most of the giving directed at legislation or was there also pressure on the agencies and rule makings and permitting—was there any sort of influence there that you were able to identify?
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CM: You know, not really, we don’t—there’s no—there’s not a lot of money that flows to the rule making process. That money generally flows to the top of the ticket. As an example, current Governor Rick Perry received over four hundred thousand dollars from Texas Utility Corporation since he’s been governor. He actually changed the rule-making for the coal plants; he fast tracked the coal plants. So when ru—when rule making is influenced, it’s often influenced from the top. The money doesn’t flow to the rule makers themselves, certainly not to the Public Utility Commission nor the TCEQ, the regulatory bodies, but it flows to the top. And the top can’t send subtle or direct messages as the direct message in the coal plant from Perry to fast track the permitting process. So, the money has an impact but most of
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the money goes to elected officials and very little have we ever seen flows to non-elected officials. The non-elected officials are often lobbied and often lobbied by legislators. W—we exposed the fact that the interest behind Metabolife, the food supplement, had hired le—several legislators to lobby the Texas Department of Health to stop some warning labels on Metabolife. We exposed that and ended up, that exposure of their lobbying, behind the scenes lobbying actually resulted in pretty strong protections where members of the Texas legislature can no longer hire themselves out to lobby state agencies. It use—so—so the—the way the state agencies and the regulators got lobbied was the Chemical Council or another s—special interest would give campaign contributions or dole out money to members of the legislature who they would then hire as their paid professional lobby’s advocates
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at the regulatory agencies. It’s an absolute system of—o—of—co—filled with conflicts of interest. And so I think our exposure during what we call the Metabolife scandal, actually resulted in a pretty strong reform getting through the next legislature which prohibits the practice.
DT: Well you’ve told us a little bit about where the money ends up, maybe we can return to where the money comes from and—and you—I think it was in 2—from 2001 through about 2005, Tom Delay and some of his associates were involved in a effort to move money from the federal to the state level through a group called TRMPAC, Texans for a Republican Majority.
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CM: Majority, hmm umm, that’s right.
DT: Can you explain that whole process and how you d—you exposed it?
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CM: Well, you know, it’s a—it was a—certainly a—a—a transitionary period in Texas politics. The House was controlled by the Democrats, Pete Laney was still Speaker, the election of 2002, everyone knew was going to be a pivotal election. In 2001, the Texas state government redistricted all our Congressional districts as you are supposed to do every ten years and we usually do it 2001. The plan that—because of the Democrats controlled the House in 2001, the redistricting plan, which was adopted by the courts in Texas, was a plan that was pretty fair. It kept the balance between Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Congress pretty even. The Republicans understood that they were on the verge of taking over the House, it’s just the natural transition that’s been going on for fifteen or twenty years here, the demographic shift between Democratic majorities to Republican majorities. And then Tom Delay had actually boasted during the 2000 election that he was going to spe—
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he was majority leader in Congress, very powerful member of Congress, former member of the Texas legislature, boasted that he was going to help raise, I believe it was a million dollars or so, in the 2000 election to make sure that the Democrats lost the majority of members in the Texas House. So that when redistricting came around in 2001, the Republicans would have the Senate, the governorship and the House and they could draw their plan. Well Tom Delay was distracted, was busy, hired some bad people, fell down on the job, was a—actually personally, I think shamed and embarrassed. They didn’t raise hardly any money and they didn’t wrest the House of Representatives from the Democrats in that 2000 election. I think when it came to 2002 that Delay and his cronies, I think, thought they had to result
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to cheating to raise as much money as they can, to make sure what they failed to do in the 2000 election would happen in 2002. They created a independent political action committee called Texans for a Republican Majority and they raised a great deal of hard money, legal contributions from non-corporations, from individuals and from other PACs into that committee to support Republican candidates in the 2002 general election so that they could win the House—the Texas House. What we discovered through the hard work of Chris Feldman, our staff attorney here, who after that election poured over IRS filings from Texans for a Republican Majority. We discovered a couple of funny transactions, that unlike the reports they filed with the Texas regulators, the Texas Ethics Commission, which showed no corporate money, the reports that they filed with the IRS, Feldman found out showed that there was
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some—several hundred thousand dollars of direct corporate contributions that went into the TRMPAC treasury, corporations which we’ve talked—corporate contributions which had been outlawed in Texas in 1903. So we discovered it, we documented it, we also saw that some of that corporate money was instead of given directly to candidates, it was funneled up through the RNC, the Republican National Campaign Committee in Washington. Feldman discovered that there were several transactions on one day with checks coming back from the RNC to a slate of candidates that Delay was supporting here. Essentially, if you looked at the time pattern, you could see—a reasonable person could—could see that they had laundered this money. They had raised corporate money; they’d sent it up to the Republican National Party Committee. That committee had taken the same amounts, written checks directly to Republican candidates and sent the money back. The original source of the money
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was corporate money, which was illegal. And Feldman did a good job of discovering that and we within a matter and, you know, on—once we saw the documents it did—didn’t take too long to document what had happened. We wrote that up in a complaint to Ronny Earl, who’s a Travis County District Attorney and Mr. Earl runs the Public Integrity Unit. He’s responsible for enforcing all our anticorruption laws. And we took that information to Mr. Earl and it since—and in, you know, the Grand Jury has indicted Tom Delay and indicted three or four of his cronies. There’s been civil lawsuit against the treasurer of TRMPAC that was successfully carried out. And that scandal, if you will, which was successful to the extent that the money was used to help the Republican slate and the Republicans won the Texas House of Representatives in 2002 and Tom Craddick became Speaker, took the gavel a—a—
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away from the Democrats and it was successful in that Delay, in the short term, got what he wanted. The Texas legislature for the first time ever readdressed the redistricting map, the map they had just passed two years earlier. After the 2002 elections, they wrote a new map without waiting the customary ten years for a new census to do it and that map absolutely favored Republicans, I b—believe the—the switch of seats was seven House seats, six or seven House seats, Republican gains over Democrats. That map became the law of the land and is currently the map. The only justice in the story is that Ronny Earl did take up the prosecution, he investigated it, a Grand Jury indicted Delay and indicted several operatives of TRMPAC and they are still under criminal prosecution. And Delay, of course, has been forced to give up his seat in Congress. First he had to give up his leadership post and then resign his seat, all as an outcome of this particular scandal. So we
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were very proud, we, you know, all that boring watching of the campaign finance system sometimes pays off in high drama.
DT: One thing that I thought was interesting about the exposé of the—of—of the Delay financing mechanism was that apparently it—it put some advantage, some disclosure laws that had passed just prior to Craddick coming a—as Speaker of the House. And I was wondering if you could talk about some of these electronic disclosure laws and how that—that helped your case?
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CM: Yeah, we—we haven’t been very successful in getting fundamental reforms through this legislature, by fundamental I mean, some real limits on how campaign money flows. But we have been successful in improving the disclosure. When we first started this work back in ’97, we had to go through dusty file cabinets of documents and spend hours and hours with interns inputting paper records into computers so that we could database this stuff. But over the years, I think in large part to our studies and some of the exposure we’ve given to the system, we’ve been able to shame the legislature, if you will, to enacting state-of-the-art disclosure. Now, and it helped us in the TRMPAC case, because now we see virtually in real—real time all campaign finance reports, contribution and expenditure reports are filed with the Tes—Texas Ethics Commission via electronic format. There used to be in the
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first couple years some loopholes on how you could get out of it if you pledged that you didn’t use a computer to do any of your fundraising. And some of those pledges weren’t on file, though we know it certainly wasn’t true with most people, that everyone used computers and that the requirement now after a couple of reform laws which passed thanks to the hard work of Steve Wallens from Dallas. All—we—we see all the money almost instantly and we download it into our computers. One thing we’ve not been successful in doing is requiring that—getting street addresses and—and getting some other information which we would think be helpful to determine the identity of a donor and the economic interest of a donor. We still have to provide that ourselves, so we go through these databases and we enhance
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the value of the data. But the essential reporting requirements are pretty good in Texas. I think Texas gets probably, you know, a B or s—B+ or certainly a B when it’s rated among other states on the e—efficiency of its filing system.
DT: Oh, you mentioned that this data in the—are—are filed with the Texas Ethics Commission, which I believe also has authority to investigate and—and enforce some of these violations. I believe that when it came up for—for Sunset Review recently, they found that—that very little of that had been done. Can—can you talk about the Commission and its—about its weaknesses?
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CM: It’s—it—it—it’s a—it’s a somewhat a captured Commission because that Commission is dependant on the legislature itself for its funding. That creates a conflict of interest there. What we have always said about the Texas Ethics Commission is it makes a pretty good library, lots of good information, it’s doing a good job there but it’s not a very good cop. It doesn’t enforce the law. So that’s why many of our complaints—we sometimes have filed complaints with the Texas Ethics Commission on a fundraising gone wrong or improper filing. But it’s kind of like a dark hole, they haven’t instigated any investigations on their own, they only reply—they only respond to complaints. It’s a complaint driven system. You have to be able to, you know, find the goods on someone, draft up a formal complaint and
00:39:31 – 2444
then you go through a process that is pretty much secret. And you often don’t see the outcome of that process. And so you really don’t know if your pla—complaint was taken seriously, if someone was fined, what the outcome might have been. Again, it’s just not a tough regulator and we understand why. I mean, it’s—it doesn’t want to bite the hand that feeds it. The legislature, though it has passed some reforms and required electronic filing, it has also put requirements in there that the Texas Ethics Committee—Commission not do some things, and that is to do the kind of analysis we do. It doesn’t want these contributions analyzed in any way, it just wants to be a repository, make people go get the facts themselves. And it doesn’t want it doing independent investigations. So the only thing that the Texas Ethics Commission does on the cop side, the only violation it really checks for
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independently is whether you file the reports on time. If you file a report on time and there’s nothing but garbage in that report or bad information, they don’t care about the quality of the information, they just—they only monitor whether the reports are in there. It’s up to advocates like us, citizens, campaign opponents, to go into those reports if there’s something fishy or phony, to file up a formal complaint and then hope that the Commission deals with that complaint in a timely manner. We don’t have much faith in it because, again, it doesn’t really want to bite the hand that feeds it. It’s a—a—it should be a good cop and the regulation, we think, should be handled outside the Ethics Commission, where there’s no conflict of interest and that’s the job of the District Attorneys. And we think this District Attorney in central Texas has done a pretty good job on political corruption, the
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Travis County Attorney, Ronny Earl. But we’ll see, again, the enforcement from the District Attorney also was fraught with, you know, political problems here and they’re depending on who it is an who’s being investigated. So, there’s no perfect system but the Ethics Commission, again, it’s a good library if it’s not a good cop.
(misc.)
DT: When we broke off just a moment ago, we were talking about Tom Delay and—and some of his efforts to move money around the political system. I thought this might be a good time to a—to maybe take a particular example and that’s the relationship between Dom—Tom Delay’s efforts with campaign finance and—and at a particular issue, the MTBE gasoline additive…
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CM: Which stands for—we don’t…
DW: Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether.
00:42:16 – 2444
CM: Alright.
DT: Can you put together the pieces for us on that…
00:42:21 – 244
Cm: Yeah, yo—you know what, we’ve found a fascinating juncture of money in politics that transcended Texas when Tom Delay got involved. You know, Tom Delay wanted so badly to win a republican majority down here. And he went to the corporate community to raise what turned out to be illegal corporate funds for his TRMPAC down here. We discovered that most of the corporations who gave to that didn’t give two hoots about Texas. Most of them didn’t have interests in Texas. That most of the corporations that gave, it looked like, had a connection or wanted to make a connection with Tom Delay as his role (?) House Majority Leader in Congress. Those—Tom Delay had gone to bat for many, many industries. One of the industries that he had gone to bat for was the refiners and others who had put
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this additive in the gasoline which had been polluting Texas groundwater and Texas ground. Ton Delay strongly was pushing legislation to give them immunity, to pass Tort Reforms so that those MTBE manufacturers would not be responsible for the cleanup. This was all part of him gathering money from those manufacturers. They would give Tom Delay’s TRMPAC money that would be spent in Texas because they wanted these kind of favors out of Tom Delay in Washington. So we saw the majority of corporate givers to the TRMPAC operation which spent all his money on influencing the Texas state elections, really had no business in Texas. Many of them had no offices in Texas. The ones that did have business with Texas, had business with Texas’ Tom Delay, they wanted favors such as immunity for the MTBE pollution that they had caused in the state. And they could get that immunity out of Tom Delay as a member of Congress.
DT: Le—let’s move on, if we could, and talk about more connections between corporate interests, money, politics and particular pollution issues. One that comes to mind is TXU’s interest in environmental regulation in general, politics in general, but also their proposal to build a number of coal plants came up in 2006 and 2007.
00:44:52 – 2444
CM: Right, right, it was probably the hottest issue of the 2007 legislature was what was going to happen to the eleven proposed new coal plants that Texas Utilities was promoting. As I mentioned before, they’re—they’re a constant campaign giver. They are one of the biggest donors in the system. They’re certainly the second largest lobby. The largest corporation that lobbies here in Texas and, in most states, has historically been the phone company. When SBC ran the phone company, it was SBC with something like a hundred and forty paid lobbyists. And AT—it is now ATT, they have the highest number of lobbyists. But Texas Utilities has always been second on that list. So they have a great deal of lobby power and a great deal of campaign finance power. They are undoubtedly in the top twenty PACs in Texas
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every year. As I mentioned before, in Governor Perry’s career as Governor, TXU PACs and executives have given over four hundred thousand dollars to his reelection fund. That explains in the minds of many of why Perry, Governor Perry ordered an expedited review of the licensing process for these eleven coal fi—plants. Well the environmentalists community where th—were trying to mount a campaign and trying to go to the legislature to, first of all, stop the fast tracking of the plants and secondly, I think, if you ask Smitty or the other environmentalists, well I’m sure they were hopeful to get legislation that would actually disallow, un-permit, if you will, stop the eleven coal plants. Well, what happened in the interim was there was a buyout offer with TXU, a group of investors, primarily in New York, to buy TXU as part of that buyout offer. They agreed not to pursue, I believe it was eight of the
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eleven coal fired plants and still keep a couple of—couple of the plants on the books. Well that kind of took some of the steam out of the environmentalists’ campaign but then there became an issue in the legislature not directly over the coal plants, but whether the legislature or Texas regulators should have some review over that buyout deal. And whether it was going to be—whether it—the citizens of Texas as represented to the legislature, were re—represented to the Public Utility Commission could have some say on the terms of that buyout, whether we were going to have any voice at all. So the fight morphed inside the legislature from one, as to whether we would or would not pursue the coal plants, to whether the legislature should have
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any regulatory authority over—over the purchase of this huge u—public utility. I’m sure it’s a—the largest service provider—residential service provider in the state, if not, the second largest. So that’s what the fight became about. On the consumer side, there was also a fight over deregulation. We had in Texas at the best of Enron and Ken Lay and his money juggernaut. We had deregulated wholesale energy prices, I believe that Bill went through in ’99 and in 2001 we deregulated residential elec—e—electric prices for anyone who didn’t live in a co-op area or area served by a municipal utility and that applied to—to Texas Utilities. So the fight in this legislature bec—morphed from one ab—over—about coal plants, which I guess from the environmental perspective was good, since most of the coal plants were off the table, to a fight over whether we should have any say over the buyout of TXU and
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whether we should think about re-regulating residential electric rates. Again, I don’t have the exact numbers, we certainly had them at the time, but Texas regu—residential electric rates have skyrocketed compared with the national average, since we deregulated electricity. There are stories that in some communities in Dallas and in Houston, that rates have jumped two hundred percent. So there was a little bit of a fight over, not only should we oversee the terms of the buyout, but should we maybe think about bringing this deregulation back under control and that’s what the fight became about. And TXU—U certainly mustered as many resources that it could. TXU’s agenda was no oversight on the buyout and no rate re—regulation. And essentially, the short story is, they got exactly what they wanted through this legislature. Now how did they do it, well they flexed their political muscle and
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they have a bunch of it. We did two studies during the legislative session. We did this series call Lobby Watch and it really takes a sharp focus, excuse me, sharp focus on a, you know, a—a single issue, perhaps, that’s moving through the legislature or a single business. And we did two over the coal—coal plant fight. We did a Lobby Watch that tracked all the campaign money that TXU had given to members of the legislature. Then we did a separate one that tracked their lobby clout over the coal plant fight. And lo and behold, one reason why TXU gets its way almost consistently is that TXU, we found out in this report, had given campaign contributions to all but seven members of the Texas legislature. So they’re equal opportunity contributor, both sides of the aisle, of course the chairman on the key committees got more, the statewide officials got more. But out of the hundred and
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eighty-one e—elected members of the legislature, all but seven were the beneficiaries of the—TXU, Texas Utilities campaign contributions. And those contributions, I think, I forget exactly what they totaled on that report, but I think during the—that cycle they had given some eight hundred thousand dollars, which is pretty big. If you give them a million dollars here, you’re usually in the top five of all PACs in the state of Texas. So it’s a huge amount, and again, it goes to everybody and again, it’s to buy—it’s to buy them access but it’s also to not rock the boat. It goes back to how you r—maintain your seat as a member of the legislature, you don’t do anything that—that the—that the lobby doesn’t want you to do. And TXU has sown the seeds for many years across the board, across the aisle. It’s very hard to take on TXU in this legislature when they are the provider of campaign
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contributions to virtually every member of the legislature. So, there’s no other voice here. Our lobby report showed that they, indeed, spent a lot of money—you don’t often see, and we haven’t talked about it much, how much money is spent by corporate interests on public relations campaigns on behalf of their—on behalf of their political agenda. That money is generally not reported. TXU did report some of that, so we did get a glimpse on how much spending on their public relations campaign because one of the TXU lobbyists, they had eighty-six lobbyists that worked the legislature in 2007 on behalf of their issues. It’s the buyout team of some twenty something lobbyists and TXU’s staff of sixty-five hired gun lobbyists, totaled eighty-six. One of those lobbyists w—actually they—they spent some of their PR campaign on their TV ads through one of the lobbyists so that lobbyist was
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obligated to report what they had paid. And what he reported was eleven million dollars in TV advertising, a substantial amount. Usually we don’t see the TV advertising. You see, on any big corporate campaign or push in the legislature, there is TV advertising, there’s other promotional stuff that goes on behind the scenes that is not regulated and therefore not disclosed. But in this instance, we saw that TXU had spent during that, oh—and he—what’s the legislature, five months, five and a half months, seventeen million dollars, corporate money. This comes straight out of the corporate treasury. It’s not like the political money that comes out of people’s pockets or comes out of a PAC. This was seventeen million it had
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spent on lobbying. So it spent a substantial amount, that’s—that’s a tough number to counteract if you’re one of the thirty some environmentalists, or probably the smaller handful of five or six environmentalists who care about keeping electricity rates affordable.
DT: This brings up a—a question from me. The money that’s coming straight out of the corporate treasury, not out of individuals who may be executives or—or mid-level labor force people in—in the company, but—but directly out of the corporate funds. I—is there a constituency that public interest has in shareholders, people’s conscience that—that own stock in these companies who would be offended that their—their company’s funds are being used to influence legislation this way? Do you—do you have any sort of reaction from those folks?
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CM: Yeah, you know, w—the—there—there is a small community that tracks some of that and actually with respect to Tom Delay and the TRMPAC issue, we actually did a little of that ourselves. We wrote to all the corporations who had given to TRMPAC and asked them to adopt a corporate poli—sai—said that you at the board level are responsible for the cheating that went on in the 2002 elections. You may not have been aware of it because it might’ve been your government affairs office or someone who decided to give Tom Delay fifty thousand dollars. It may not have been the board, but the board, the corporate board does have some responsibility in this. And the corporate boards have to be held accountable. So we called on all those corporations, the—I forget exactly how many there were, thirty-nine, some donors—corporate donors to TRMPAC and we didn’t get very many responses. But we asked
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them—it’s an age—it’s an agenda developed by corporate reform groups in Washington that a responsible corporation will make sure that the board of directors has at least knowledge, if not final say, over all political contributions, over all political gifts, that that ought to be a board level responsibility. That the politics being carried on in a corporation in the stockholders’ names, the stockholders ought to be aware of that activity f—for the exact purpose of what if they don’t like it. They’d had a—they’d have ability to criticize. The stockholders of many of these corporations ha—probably had no clue that Tom Delay and the Republican redistricting agenda here was the recipient of their money. So we—we had a positive response from only one corporation saying that they, indeed, they—they—they wouldn’t adopt the specific policy we asked, but they indeed would make sure
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that at the board level as least their direct campaign contributions would be an issue brought up to the board and be published by the board and the board would become aware of that. We think the corporations here in America do have that responsibility, they should be held accountable and responsible for the giving to the campaigns here. Just as they argue that, pardon me, that, you know, unions ought to make sure that union membership knows where their political dues, money are going. That’s the same that’s true on the other side of the equation—that corporate stockholders ought to know where the corporation’s giving money. And now they don’t.
DT: Let’s return to some of the studies that you’ve done and—and we ju—got a—about five minutes left on this tape, so maybe you can just sort of introduce the topic and then we could talk about some specific examples on a third tape. My understanding is that one of your recent research projects is something called Watch Your Assets. So looking at the privatization of commonly held public resources, how did you decide to—to study those things and what are some of the goals that you have [IA] your re—reports?
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CM: Yeah, well, you know, I’ve been watching Texas politics for a long time and not just Texas but a national trend as well, we saw—what happens often is that the special interests are either looking to—in the last few years particularly, privatize a job that’s been done—do—be—do—done best by government or to usurp, if you will, something that is a public asset for private gain. And we thought there was a thematic area for investigation here, that the public assets of Texans, that should be owned and shared by us all, that we all benefit from, should not be privatized or misused. And so we decided to embark on a research project that would take one aspect of what we thought was misuse of the public commons by private interests facilitated by politicians usually. That—that we would take and try to expose that, to critique it, if you will, and to just get it out there in the public domain that this is
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what’s happening and is it—it may not be the clear—the best use of public resources. And generally we’re talking about tax subsidies. Hardly anyone knows about them, hardly anyone knows where they flow; hardly anybody knows who controls tax subsidies and they’re multi-million dollar giveaways. Again, activities that the government was doing that they are privatizing to private interest and private groups to profit over something that should be a government activity and held and controlled by the government of Texas, the citizens of Texas, if you will. So—and the privatization of other public resources, not just government services, but other public resources, the privatization, the—were—were fastly going for privatization of water and—in Texas and it’s going to become a huge issue in the next few years. So we thought these all fit on what we called the Public Assets Project to expose the
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misuse and abuse of the public commons and we’ve done—it’s been going on about a year. I think we’ve done ten—looked at nine so far, nine different aspects of the misuse of public assets. And we’ve written that into a monthly report and distributing that report to our members and to mem—and—and to members of the press.
DT: Okay. Well, why don’t we cut it here and then we can return…
[End of Reel 2444]
DT: When we left off with the—the last tape we were talking about a—a new research project that Texas for Public Justice been undertaking, it’s called Watch your Assets and you—you gave us the general overview of what the project is about. But I was hoping that you could give us a few examples, particularly those are kind of the environmental line of—of the research.
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CM: Yeah, there’s a c—there—there’s a couple of examples, like I said David, I think we’ve done nine of these to date. And actually two of them bit off a—a—a—a pretty big piece of legislation that has some negative environmental impact, it’s not focused on the environment. But that was in 2001 the Texas legislature passed some enabling legislation which allows local school districts to give tax abatements to manufacturing plants and who—who bring jobs to the local community. This 2001, I think it’s called the Texas Economic Development Act, really gives these school districts to grant almost at will local tax breaks with very li—well, we discovered in the project that there’s been some several hundred million dollars in tax breaks granted, some to very dirty industries in east Texas particularly. And that our
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bottom line was that these tax breaks probably weren’t necessary, that the plants would’ve engaged in the same behavior with or without the school tax abatements. And that the school tax abatements th—that were being given, that is the virtually public tax dollars, which are being given to these companies were not being accounted for very well. There was some broad criteria and there were some contracts that were developed—negotiated between a local school district and the company who receives the tax subsidy. But there was virtually no follow-up or oversight to see that—that for the tax break that the number of jobs was being created that was agreed to in the contract. There was virtually no central point to track these contracts. It was all done very loosely at the local school district level. Now what happens is that school districts—this was really a piece of legislation that you might even say started out with all good will and intent, was trying to create
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jobs in school districts, to bring jobs to school districts that were what I g—I—I forget the proper term, but the—the—the least rich, the poorer school districts who received money from Robin Hood and not paid to Robin Hood. You know, a school district now, when it meets a certain threshold has to give some of its tax money to the central pockets, redistribute it to the poorer school districts around the country. It’s the way Texas equalizes, and equalizes is by far the wrong term, but it’s the way Texas redistributes some of its wealth to fund schools in—in poorer districts. Well this Bill had some good intention to try to bring jobs to those poorer districts but we found that it’s really been taken advantage of by the property rich districts. And it’s in the interest of the property r—rich districts because they can use this to defeat the
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Robin Hood rules. A—a factory which is currently, perhaps, paying, let’s just arbit—trarily say a million dollars in school property taxes, can engage in one of these contracts and agree to bring more jobs, a standard agreed (?) without really ever d—delivering on the promise to bring them. And the school district can then vote to abate its million dollar property tax bill in exchange for the job. However in a wink, the school district and the company, instead of paying the school property taxes, which would be subject to the Robin Hood rules, if the million dollars went to the school and it was a property rich school, that school would have to turn around and give that million dollars to the state to be distributed to a poor school district. Well the business and the school districts with a wink and a nod agree to a—what they call a payment in lieu of taxes. If you cut our tax—give me an abatement so we
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don’t pay the million dollars in school taxes; we will give you a fifty million dollar payment in lieu of those taxes. So the school districts gets fifty million dollars that it would otherwise, if it was a school tax, would have to give back to the state to a poor district. So now it gets fifty million dollars, the corporation saves—or—it—it—it—it gets a—half the money, instead of a million dollars, it gets five hundred thousand dollars, excuse my math here. So they agree to pay half the taxes as a payment in lieu of taxes, so the corporation saves money, the school district makes money that it wouldn’t have made and the people who really get screwed in the whole deal are the poor school districts of Texas. So we thought that was absolutely a misuse of public assets, misuse of this whole ability of school districts to grant tax abatements, and again, they’re mostly for manufacturing industries that aren’t
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desirable anyway. And so that was one of the—the issues that we—a—a paper we did, Lauren Reinlie is the director of that project, she’s done a wonderful job documenting some of the abuses on a case-by-case basis and then we published them and as you mentioned, this report we called Watch Your Assets. We also took a look at—there’s been quite a bit of controversy locally here in Austin, where the city, not the school district, but the Austin City government has granted a hundred and seventeen million dollars in tax abatements to, I believe it’s seven or eight development projects, local develop—mer—m—mixed use projects that have come into Austin, you know, apartment, housing, other projects for quote economic development purposes. And we questioned whether that money was necessary, in this report, whether why are the taxpayers of Austin—this represents taxes paid by a hundred and twenty-eight thousand homeowners. So the tax revenue from a
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hundred and twenty-eight thousand houses per year went to pay for these businesses to develop their businesses and their retail complexes inside the city limits. Now you don’t have to look very far around to figure that people are doing this anyway. We don’t need to give out this hundred and seventeen million. Why are we spending a hundred and twenty-eight thousand households worth of taxes to fuel growth here? Growth that is questionable, by any—most environmental standards, growth that we need to control better. We don’t need to—we don’t need to give gross incentives to happen in Austin, it’s happening anyway. The task in Auskin—Austin is how to control it. And this particular issue, this particular tax abatement we looked at for Austin—or series of tax abatements. We—we actually had some impact, the city is rethinking the whole use of tax abatements in the
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future, it may not use them. Some activists in the city, mostly made up of small businessmen who don’t get the tax abatements, have qualified a charter amendment that will be put before the vot—voters in Austin to end these abatements. We think, again, this is a questionable use at best of the community’s public assets. That tax revenue could be going to lots of different things and not to promote a new condo project downtown. So, again, that’s another what we thought was a—a misuse of the public assets in the public commons that needed to be documented.
DT: I guess a third study topic that I—I was curious about is—is the T. Boone Pickens interest in—in developing wind energy and—and groundwater resources.
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CM: Groundwater, right, right. Yeah, again, I—I guess you could say this—the ability of—to grease the way for wind and T. Boone Pickens’ water ventures actually came out of the Texas legislature as well. And the—we’ve done two of these Watch Your Assets projects on water related issues, on the commoditizing of the water that flows into the aquifer at San Antonio. And about this T. Boone Pickens’ venture of trying to build a water pipeline that would allow him to buy w—water from the Ogallala Aquifer that is north Texas and Oklahoma and sell that water—his goal is to buy that water and sell that water to the thirsty new suburbs of north in Dallas/Fort Worth, the Metroplex. The development there needs water to grow and so there are some who are trying to make a commodity of that water to, you know, the—the Texas way to get rich on it and deliver the water to fuel development, which
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is, you know, questionable at best from an environmental perspective. The legislature passed, again, authorizing legislation that allowed T. Boone Pickens particularly but anybody could engage in this, to create what they call a freshwater district. T. Boone Pickens bought eight acres of land where this pipeline would go; he needed the right of way. And that eight acres allowed him to create—to get the property owners within that eight acres, employees (?) to vote to create one of these special districts. They did that this year, they got the—the legislative approval, alright, they created the district through a vote of—I think there were six or seven voters, that’s eight people voted, they created the district. And what that allows T. Boone Pickens to do, is it gives him and his water and energy company, really gives it to this district which he controls because it’s closely held, it’s his property, it’s his people living on the property, but it gives them the power to use eminent domain to
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build a pipeline anywhere in the state of Texas. So it really greases the way and takes away the power that used to be held by a broader group of citizens, it gives it to a closely held group of T. Boone’s compadres and it allows them to create a pipeline to move water from any place in Texas to any other place in Texas. So it really gives him the heads up to engage in his new business to sell water and he’s actually going to use that same right of way to, he claims, to fuel the transmission lines for his wind farms, so he’s going—he’s—he’s going to get a doubleheader out of it. But the problem with it is that, again, it’s another example where a very powerful interest, T. Boone Pickens, can go to the legislature and get s—some powers given to him privately that we believe should best be held by the politic, by the state, not by the eight people, the—the people who live on T. Boone Pickens’ eight acres. So we
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have tried to—that—that was one of the topics we exposed was the misuse of what we believe is the eminent domain laws in Texas to benefit T. Boone, to benefit the developers of northwest Dallas.
DT: You—you’ve identified a—a—a lot of shortcomings in the way money is used in politics in Texas and—and actually across the country. I was wondering if you might be able to outline some of the—the agenda that you might have for trying to remedy some of those problems.
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CM: Yeah, well, the problem is there—there—there—there’s a pie in the sky agenda which we’re a long ways from getting to in Texas, I think. And one of those would certainly be this new movement for clean money that some states have adopted, essentially public financing. Take the private money out of the political system, that’s difficult to do in light of some of the current Supreme Court rulings which protect private political money as free speech. But it can be done, it’s been done well in Arizona, it’s been done in Maine by ballot initiative. Since in Texas they don’t let the masses do what they want, we don’t have ballot initiatives, we don’t have that power here. I don’t foresee that we’re going to move to a public financing system anytime soon. But I think that’s a—a—a—the ideal reform, at least in the mind of the reform community now, that if you can take the public—i—if—if you can replace interested campaign money with basically uninterested small money
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provided by the public, that your political class are beholden only to voters then. It’s not like they get money from special interests to do their bidding and then go out and tell the voters what they want to hear and get elected by voters. But they really have no—they would have no reason to take that money, so they can tell voters the truth. And they’re not beholden to that campaign donor knocking on their door saying, uh, remember me, can you do this for me. So it just cleans up the system. You know, unfortunately David, it’s been trending the other way, we—away from public financing, though we’ve passed a couple of strong initiatives in a couple of states that are—seem to be working well. And the politicians in Arizona, I think, would tell you they love that system, they love not having to go out and beg for money. They love not having to be beholden to the interest groups that come to them and want to give them money. They love that freedom to do what’s best for
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their constituents or their conscience, whatever—however they do it, that freedom to cut the strings between money and their political views and their voting inside the legislative body. People in Arizona love it. On the presidential level, just for an example, a—the ’74 reforms are really the ref—that—that passed post Watergate on the national level, it’s really the model we’re still working under. And that, of course, created public financing at least for the presidential elections. There’s a partial voluntary public financing in the primaries, if you raise a certain amount of small money, the federal government will give you—will match that money to fund the primary elections. And the general election, the taxpayers generally pay for the National Conventions and they pay for the general election campaign. And the
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general elections—we’ve had no general election since Watergate where the participants did not participate in the public financing system. This year if John McCain and the Democratic nominate participate in it, they will each get sixteen million dollars to fund their party’s conventions and they would get eighty-six million dollars to run their general election campaign in November. George Bush has kind of busted that system for us. George Bush and Karl Rove, when they created the Pioneer bundling network to raise money on behalf of Bush’s first run for the presidency in 2000, actually created the network in 1999. They created a system of bundlers that more matched the money culture in Texas that Bush and Rove had been used to. Remember in Texas, there are no limits, as Governor Bush would get lots of contributions at a hundred thousand dollars, fifty thousand dollars, seventy-
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five thousand dollars. Well when Bush and Rove decided to run for the presidency, they were limited, because of the federal laws, in raising money in two thousand dollar increments. So this network of huge funders that Bush had relied on as a Texas politician was not much good to him in his run for president until they figured out what we call the Bundling Scheme, the most efficient Bundling Scheme ever. And you may recall it was called the Bush Pioneers. Rove went to these traditional big donors, most of them were in Texas in the first runs, who could give a hundred thousand dollars and asked them to work their rolodexes, work their employees and bundle together pledges of a hundred thousand dollars and therefore turning them from two thousand dollar donors back into hundred thousand dollar donors that Bush had been used to. So they devised this very effective, very efficient bundling
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mechanism and it worked very well. Bush was the first candidate to win his party’s nomination who chose not to participate in the public financing system in the primary because once they had devised this bundling scheme of Pioneers, they realized that they could raise much more going outside the voluntary public financing system, reaping special interest money than playing in it. And it worked quite well for Bush at two hundred and some—two hundred and nineteen Pioneers in the next campaign. They had five hundred and fifty some Pioneers and Rangers that accounted for well over a hundred million dollars into the Bush presidential race. Bush still, however, once the primaries were over and he had vanquished his opponents with these huge amounts of cash, in the general election Bush went back into the public financing
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system. We had never had a presidential general election since Watergate with—with candidates who went outside the public finance system. Bush’s success has resulted in every major campaign copying him, every major campaign now, Clinton, Obama, Edwards, McCain, Guilani, Romney, they all used this system of bundlers, mostly corporate executives who can pull together huge amounts of money and n—in ways that may indeed be coercive. It’s a very troubling system. And deliver it and get credit for the campaigns for delivering not their legal limit of two thousand dollars, but for delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars. So they get the political clout that comes with a contribution that is hundreds of times the legal limit and the candidates get to amass much more money which gives them incentives to go outside the clean system. Why take the public money in a clean system when it
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limits you—what you can spend. If you think you can make the calculation that well, if I rely on the corporate executives from New York and California and the big moguls around, I can raise two or three times the money that the public voters are going to give me. And no one, no successful candidate has stayed in the public financing system in this election for the primaries. And all the campaigns have started to raise private money; they haven’t made commitments, but have started to raise private money. When they ask for a contribution from you for the primary, they’re also asking for a contribution to be stocked away in an account for the general election. Most of the candidates are calculating, I believe, that they can raise much more money from s—private interest than they can get in the eighty-six million dollars from the treasury. So I think we’re going see the first campaign, national campaign
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for president that’s run with private money, in many, many years. And I think the public financing system at the federal level will be dead. So, that’s troubling. It’s trending away from public financing and again, I don’t think it was on the agenda for anytime soon in Texas. But there are some reforms I think would make a difference in Texas and we’ve been responsible for passing some. I mentioned the prohibition on—on legislators lobbying, that’s a very good change. We also—legislators who are members of the Bar, attorneys, could actually just by the stroke of a secret paper filed with the court, could stop a lawsuit in its tracks while the legislature was in session. It’s called the Power of Continuance. That power was exercised in secret and brought tens and tens of thousands of dollars into the pocket of legislative lawyers. We exposed so many abuses of that and it cost a couple of
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members of the legislature their seats. And we passed a reform that stopped that practice of selling your office this—to a corporation that had a lawsuit pending against it. So we have made some strides and I’ve talked about some of the strides we’ve made in electronic disclosure. The disclosure laws have gotten better, that’s because we and a Coalition of Friends, Common Cause and often Smitty had Public Citizen and the League of Women Voters had been pushing for that better disclosure. And we’ve made some strides. The things that are on our agenda, which are tougher to get, that would make a difference, they’re not nirvana or pie in the sky, is we absolutely believe that we need a citizens commission to do redistricting. We got to take the re—redrawing the Congressional maps and the state maps out of the
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hands of the politicians and giving it to a citizen’s commission. Right now, when you go to vote for a member of the legislature, the winner of that election is predetermined by where the lines are drawn. So we say the p—politicians pick the voters in the system, the voters don’t pick the politicians because the politicians control—control how the lines are drawn. If we could take that single power and give it to a—a—a—a nonpartisan, non-interested citizen’s commission to draw the lines, their incentive would be to draw them for not the least competitive districts, but the most competitive. Lines should be drawn that put voters together that are fifty-fifty Republican, Democrat or where—so that—so that we can have a real election on real issues that’s meaningful. Right now we don’t have those. We think
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we could get that with a—a—a citizen’s redistricting commission. And that legislation has been carried by some bipartisan group in the legislature and it passed the Senate last year. There—there’s some hope for that. So that’s one—one item on—on our agenda. I talked about the clout of the big donor in Texas, a hundred and forty-three mega-donors who give a hundred thousand dollars or more. We simply want a cap on what you can give as an individual to all the politicians in the state during one election cycle. We think that cap should be the same place the federal cap is, about a hundred thousand dollars. Once James Leininger or Bob Perry or Fred Beerman, some of the liberal trial lawyer funders, for example, give a hundred thousand dollars, we think they ought to be able to go home so that there will be some more competition for where the money comes from and we—in some
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sense, small “d” democratize the system. If we dr—drew that line at a hundred thousand dollars, we would virtually take out some fifty million dollars off the top of the system that’s extremely concentrated. S—and that’s reform that has been introduced the last couple of sessions, it—it may go through. So that cap on aggregate contributions, we think is even more important than a cap on individual contributions. If you want to take your hundred thousand dollars and give it all to one candidate, go ahead, but then you’re done. Alright, now you can—you do that and you can give it to a lot of candidates. So we’ve got to stop—cut it off at the aggregate, more important than cutting it off contribution by contribution. We didn’t talk much about the money in the court system, and we’ve done lots of work documenting money to the Civil Court Judges in Texas. Again, they act just like
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other politicians, there’s virtually very little limits, in reality, no limits on what can be given to a justice in Texas. And justices in Texas run on partisan ballots and they run just like any other candidate. They can take money from any source, non-corporate, but they can take money from the very lawyers, law firms and parties who are in their courtroom that day, who say, they swing the gavel with one hand and collect the money with the other at the same time. And it’s a corrupt system that needs to be changed. We need to move to public financing for our judiciary or we need to move to an appointment system, a merit selection system as they call it. One thing is clear, we need to get the money out of the courtroom because the
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money influences judicial so—so—decisions. The judges themselves and survey after survey tell you that it does. So we also think we have to stop the practice of the—what we call the revolving door in Texas, where a member of the Texas legislature, who—legislature and/or their chief—key staff, there are no restrictions from them resigning from the legislature one day and being a high paid lobbyist the next day. They go from a seven thousand dollar a year public servant, the next day they sign on for a lobbying contract and they become a million dollar lobbyist the next day. It happens time and time again. Key example is Todd Baxter here, who head of the telecommunications subcommittee, quit his office before his term was up to become a lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, paid a hundreds and
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hundred thousand dollars. There’s an absolute conflict of interest in that system. We need to know that when our legislators are sitting in the legislature that they’re voting for our interests and not voting to please the person that’s going to hire them tomorrow. And right now we don’t have that. Donna Howard, a freshman—well, she’s not a freshman anymore, but a local Representative has drafted cooling off legislation that will slow down the revolving door. The position of Texans for Public Justice is that once you ask for the public’s trust to serve in the legislature, you should be banned for life from coming back to lobby your colleagues unless you’re doing it pro bono for a nonprofit group. You shouldn’t be able to make money to come back and—and lobby your legislator, to lobby your—your fellow colleagues. You can’t sell the public trust again as a commodity. So Donna Howard has a Bill to at
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least provide a two year cooling off, that you can’t just flip the next day as happens so often here. So we need to close the revolving door, we need campaign limits, we need to change the way we select judges and we need to change the way we draw district lines here, take a lot of politics ou—out of the legislature. Those are some reforms that I think are winnable in the next few years.
(misc.)
DT: Craig, you—you’ve told us about your work from grassroots organizing at the local level to working on policy at the national level, to working on disclosure in—and on campaign finance reform here at the state level in Texas. And—and I was curious, what is it that appeals to you about this work? What drives you to do it where you don’t have the normal fame and fortune reward?
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CM: Boy, you know, that’s kind of a tough question and that’s an evolving question. I—I’ve always been a political junky, so this fits me perfectly. I think I was, you know, watching the Huntley-Brinkley Report back in the 50’s when I was five years old, on TV. So I’ve always had interest in politics and actually r—ran my first political campaign when I was—I guess I was ten years old at Kent Hills Elementary School. We did a mock presidential campaign and I was Dick Nixon. And—so I was a surrogate Dick Nixon and we kicked JFK’s ass at Kent Hills, even though JFK became the president eventually. So I’ve always been involved in politics and on—it’s just been a fascination for me. And I think a growing sense that you could commit yourself to justice and get by, you know, you could—you could do good work
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and that was the—the highest calling you could do. I think that was instilled in me, in part, I grew up during the Civil Rights Movement and I always felt bad that I might’ve been a little too old for it—or too young for it. It was, you know, it was a—there wasn’t much of a role for me then, but I certainly observed it and saw the power that—the—the change you could bring to the political system through individual action. You know, and you kind of witness it and they say isn’t that tremendous that that can be done and maybe you should dedicate yourself to that. And I actually years later, even in Grand Rapids, ended up knowing a couple of freedom riders and people who have been in the Civil Rights Movement, so that inspired me. And I was politicized by the Vietnam War. I was a high school dropout,
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I was a draftee. In ’69 I’d lost the lottery, you know, it was the first lottery, and so I had to go to the war. There wasn’t much of a support system back th—this wasn’t Amherst, this was Grand Rapids, Michigan, conservative factory town. I felt I had, you know, no other alternative but to go, so I went. And when I came back, I actually took a GED and went to college and got an education. But I think that experience spoke to me to say I’m never—you know, I’m never going to be their fool again. I’m never going to get fooled like this and I’m going to try to have the courage to do what’s right because th—that was a, I think, a major regret of mine, that I went and served in a war that I certainly thought was unjust. I just didn’t know what to do about it or how—how to articulate it at the time. So I think I
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dedicated myself to learn how to make political change. And—and when I went to work for Ralph, you know, you s—hear these sp—I had to carry the books around for years to all the speeches and you hear them day in and day out and some are just beautiful and marvelous. But one thing you learn from Ralph, that if you follow him around long enough, and some people only have to hear one speech to learn it, but if you follow him around long enough, is that I de—do believe what he says, that the, you know, the highest calling in a democracy is citizenship, it’s being an active citizen that makes political change and that dedicates themselves to trying to make the country a better place, make the world a better place, fight for political change. And there’s not enough people to do it so—but I think that helped inspire
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me to do it, to be in a position, to have the ability, to have the support system I have, to, you know, get up every day and work for justice. It’s a wonderful thing, most people don’t get to do that but, you know, I do, so.
DW: Oh, go—go on, as long as we’re at it, it’s—who knows when we’ll all next meet again. Working for justice sometimes lead to burnout, can lead to loss of…
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CM: And you’re witnessing it right here as (laughing).
DW: But when that does happen, given that you do work to support environmental issues and keep—keep an environment that’s worth having around, is there a place in nature or a place you like to go to refresh and recharge or just take in the—the beauty that’s—that’s there?
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CM: Yeah, absolutely, I mean, I—we’ve always—I—I think I grew up with an appreciation for the outdoors. I remember as a kid going to Sam Campbell lectures who would come around, he’s known as one of the first environmentalists, I think, in the 1950’s. He was a naturalist who would go ar—who—who did a public school speaking circuit throughout the Midwest and present these wonderful nature films that were funny and entertaining that he—he had created. He came from Minnesota. And he had—every summer they’d go play with the animals and he put together these incredibly funny, entertaining monologues. I couldn’t wait every year for my school to go down and get the Sam Campbell lecture. So I kind of grew up with an appreciation of nature. And living in Michigan, Michigan’s a wonderful natural place, just wonderful. We were twenty minutes from the shores of Lake Michigan, the
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beautiful sand dunes and the forest. And, you know, we’re a working class family, most of our v—vacations were in tents and camping. And so that kind of instilled an appreciation for nature. And most often with my family, though we do take—I mean, we have gone to New York City and Chicago, we d—do take urban vacations, but I think the vacations that we liked best with my wife and two kids are, you know, the natural ones. We go to the national parks; we go out and hike the desert. We go rafting, we go kayaking and so i—I—I don’t know which is my favorite place. I certainly enjoy going to Big Bend, I think it’s just a magical, magical place. And being a Michigander, I didn’t have much appreciation for the desert, you know, we’re pretty snobs. Many of my friends in Michigan have never been to—never seen the desert and would—wo—would not find any beauty or any redeeming values there but haven’t—haven’t come here. And in my travels with Ralph, I’ve just had a wonderful
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life. I traveled with Ralph every—I’ve gone—I’ve been everywhere and that’s because my years with Ralph on the road. I—I’ve also had a—found an appreciation for Big Bend and the deserts that, you know, kind of—type of turn you don’t see in Michigan. So I really like going out there. And maybe my favorite place to get back to and get away from it all in Texas is probably on South Congress, inside of Continental Club but there’re natural places as well.
DT: Good, well, well said. I—we—we’ve asked a lot of questions. Is there anything you’d like to add?
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CM: No, no but I—thank you for the opportunity. I’ve had opportunity to talk enough.
DT: Well, thank you very much.
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CM: I hope it worked out for you, if you like…
[End of Reel 2445]
[End of Interview with Craig McDonald]