#faad: uncovered

[babyjakes]

forever and a day | 47. uncovered.

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summary | a story in which america’s favorite captain gives a new life and family to a five-year-old girl who has suffered well beyond her years at the hands of hydra.

characters | dad!steve rogers, girl/willa rogers (original character)

warnings | AU similar enough to OU to include spoilers to many Marvel movies (Age of Ultron and beyond). action and fight scenes with violence and killing. injuries/mild gore. mature themes related to and semi-graphic depictions of child abuse/neglect, past CSA and CSM, and their aftermath (emaciation, wounds, scarring, etc). medical abuse and experimentation. ptsd/trauma symptoms in a child (developmental discrepancies, de-humanized behavior, detachment, extreme fears). medical treatment of CSM and other aftermath of abuse.trauma-informed therapeutic treatment of ECT. minor mentions of disordered eating. themes relating to abuse of power/authority and immoral interrogation tactics including SA (with brief depictions.) evil!Tony Stark.

[Steve]

“Rainbow,” Willa cheers happily as she points to the mess of fingerprints I’ve made in front of me across the art pad. Glancing over at her work, my heart softens as I notice she’s been trying to recreate my pattern.

“Not quite, sweetheart,” I correct gently with a chuckle, picking up all the pots that we’ve scattered across the area and putting them together in a pile. “The rainbow has a specific order. Do you know what it is?” The little girl shakes her head, a little bit of paint smudged adorably across her nose. I made sure to have her change into an old tee shirt and pair of jammie shorts before we got started just in case things got extra messy, and now I’m definitely grateful that I did. Besides the yellow on her face, she’s got a decent amount of paint smudged up her arms, and even some on her legs from sitting on the paper. I don’t mind in the slightest, though. She’s having fun, and that’s all that matters to me.

“The first color is red. Can you find the red paint?” I prompt, hoping to make a learning experience out of creating the rainbow together.

Willa looks down at the several pots in front of her, picking up a few by their white caps and looking at them through the clear plastic before holding one out in front of her, stating, “Red.”

“Almost, bug,” I encourage. “That one’s actually purple. Red is close to purple, but it’s a little bit different.” Frowning, the little girl sets the purple back down, her eyes again scanning over her options. After a few more moments, she picks up another one, offering it to me. “That’s right, sweetie. Good job!” I praise, unscrewing the cap and offering it to her. She dips one of her tiny fingers into the paint, turning back to the paper and running her finger across it in a long arch.

“Red,” she confirms, seeming pleased with the start.

“Next is orange,” I tell her, recapping the red and placing it back down with the others.

“O-range,” she sounds out the word, struggling a little bit with the “r.”

“Yep. Do you know which one’s orange?”

The little girl repeats the same process she went through with red, picking up a few different options before finally holding her guess out to me. “O-range,” she says.

“That’s right; you got it,” I tell her with a smile. Uncapping the plastic pot, she holds it out for me. “Oh, you want me to make a line? Okay, we can take turns,” I pick up on her idea, wetting a finger with the orange before running it along the paper next to the red arch.

“Red, o-orange,” Willa recites, pointing to each color as she says it.

“Yep. Red, orange, and then yellow comes next,” I tell her.

“Yellow!” she cheers, smiling brilliantly up at me.

“Yeah, and you’ve even got some yellow on your nose, you silly goose,” I tease, poking her cheek with my orange finger. Willa squeals, wiping at her face with the back of her hand, causing the paint to smear. “This really is a big mess, huh?”

“Big mess,” Willa beams, her eyes sparkling with joy. As I gaze softly down at the child, my heart can’t help but swell with warmth and affection for the little one. She is the most precious thing in the whole entire world, I think to myself, and she doesn’t even know it.

“Yellow’s one of your favorites, so I bet you can find it,” I encourage. Glancing down at her options, she immediately grabs the yellow, holding it up proudly.

“Yellow,” she nods, not even needing my confirmation to begin unscrewing the cap. She dips her thumb into the thick paint, sliding it smoothly across the page in front of her next to the orange. “Red, orange, yellow,” she lists.

“Next is green,” I tell her. “Do you think we can find it?” I take the yellow from her, replacing the cap as she looks at the other paints. A puzzled look forms on her face as she picks up the red again, then the purple, shaking her head at both of them before sighing.

“Green?” she asks carefully. I smile kindly at her, reaching out and pushing the correct container towards her. “Green,” she says again, looking it over. “Your turn.”

“Okay, my turn,” I agree, opening up the green and making a line next to Willa’s yellow. “Blue comes after green. Do you know which one’s blue?” The child instantly grabs the correct pot, holding it out to me. “You’re right; nice job, sweetheart,” I tell her, opening the jar for her. She makes a blue line with her pointer finger, quite small compared to my green that was made with my own. “And the last one’s purple. That’s the first one you picked up, the one you thought was red.”

“Purple,” she repeats, quickly finding the right color and handing it to me. Willa smiles proudly down at our work as I make the final line of the rainbow. “Red, orange, yellow…” she begins to point, pausing after the yellow line and looking up at me.

“Green,” I remind her gently, earning a nod.

“Green, blue, purple,” she finishes. “Th-that’s the rainbow!”

“That’s right, doll. Way to go, such a pretty rainbow,” I coo. “If you want, we can cut it out and hang it up on the fridge.” Willa’s eyes grow wide at this suggestion as she nods eagerly. A smile finds its way onto my face as I reach out, brushing her cheek gently with my paint-covered thumb. It’s moments like these that make it all worth it, seeing her smile and laugh and enjoy herself. Having this first day together has really meant so much to both of us, I think, and I’m already convinced that bringing Willa to a new home was the best decision I could have possibly made.

“Well, how about we let the paint dry and we can cut out our picture after dinner,” I propose. The child nods happily at this, and I return the gesture, picking up the paints and packing them back into the box. “Alright, missy. Give me just a sec to get my hands clean,” I say, standing up from my seat on the kitchen floor. I make my way over to the sink, running the tap and scrubbing all the paint off with soap. Once my hands are clean, I dry them off before returning to the little girl who’s still seated on the floor. “Okay sweetie,” I hum, thankful that I only got paint on my hands instead of all over like Willa. “What d'you say we take a bath, and then we can start making some dinner?”

But to my surprise, as soon as my words leave my mouth, the child’s entire body cowers back instantly against the cabinets behind her. Big green eyes peer up at mine, quickly filling with tears. “Woah, hey-” I murmur, startled by her sudden change in demeanor. “What’s up, Willa-bug? I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to scare you,” I soothe, crouching down a few feet away from the little girl.

“N-no, please,” she begs quickly, only causing my concern to grow deeper. Furrowing my eyebrows in worry, I try to inch a bit closer to her, only earning a defensive flinch in response.

“‘Please’ what, sweetheart? What’s the matter?” I ask, disappointed to have scared off her carefree mood.

“No bath, n-no bath,” she whimpers, a tear trailing down her rosy cheek, causing some of the paint to run. No bath? What’s got her so scared about the bath, I think to myself. Baths are something we do all the time, and while I know they’re not the girl’s favorite activity as they still bring up some anxiety, she’s never really put up too much of a fight against them. At least, not until now.

“Why not, doll? You know baths aren’t scary; we take baths all the time,” I coo gently, trying to remind her of her safety. But my words do little to reassure her, and suddenly, it clicks in my brain. It must have to do with whatever she’s been trying to hide, whatever’s been hurting her all day.

“Please, n-no bath,” Willa tries again, trembling fearfully against the wooden doors behind her.

“Sweetheart, we have to get all the paint off of you,” I reason with her softly.

Shaking her head almost desperately, she tries to convince me, “A-all dry,” running her hands up and down her arms to prove her point. “W-won’t be messy. P'omise,” she pleads.

My heart breaks at her distress as I shake my head softly, causing another round of tears to spill over down the poor girl’s cheeks. “I know it’s dry, but it’s not meant to stay on your skin for too long,” I explain patiently. “It’s okay, Willa, we can just take a nice warm bath and get it all off, okay? I promise it won’t be scary; I’ll be with you the whole time,” I assure her.

“Me- I-I-… do it myse'f? Please?” the poor thing asks hopefully, only for me to shake my head again, a slight sense of guilt bubbling up in my stomach.

“No sweetie,” I disagree sadly, wishing there was something I could do to ease her fears. “I- Daddy has to help you with it; it’s not safe for you to do it yourself.” The little girl sniffles, and having run out of options, she simply looks up warily at me, her bottom lip trembling in fear.

“Here, com'ere sweetheart,” I hum, approaching the child while opening up my arms and wrapping her up in my embrace. Willa lets out a heartbreaking whimper into my shoulder as I rise up onto my feet, swaying her back and forth gently while holding her close. “Shh, shh-shh… it’s okay, doll,” I hush softly, bouncing her shaking body slightly in my arms in hopes of calming her down. “What’s so scary about the bath, hmm? Can you tell me what’s got you so upset about it?”

“Please,” Willa mumbles into the fabric of my shirt, giving me no better idea as to why exactly she’s gotten so worked up.

“I’ve got some new bath toys we can use,” I tell her, hoping to maybe spark her interest. “There’s a boat, and a duckie, oh- and an octopus, too.”

“O'topus,” she says weakly, resting the side of her head against my shoulder. Rubbing a soothing hand up and down her back, I nod, wondering if it would be safe to try to bring her into the bathroom yet.

“That’s right, lovebug. Octopus. You wanna go see?” I offer. Her tear-filled eyes raise up to meet mine and she’s silent for a moment, seeming to be searching my face for signs of danger.

“B-boat, too?”

“Mhmm. And a rubber duckie,” I promise her. Taking a deep breath, she nods slowly, and I smile back down at her warmly. “Okay, sweetheart. Let’s go find them.”

Walking carefully past the painting supplies on the floor, I carry Willa back through the archway and into the hallway, opening up the door to the bathroom and stepping in. I flick on the light switch and the soft ceiling bulb flutters on, illuminating the baby blue room. “Okay pumpkin,” I murmur, setting Willa down in front of the door and shutting it gently behind her. “I think I stashed them in here,” I recall aloud as I bend down onto my knees, venturing into one of the cabinets under the sink. As I thought, the rubber toys are sitting on the shelf, waiting for us. Pulling them out, I set them down on the floor in front of Willa. A red boat, yellow duck, and purple octopus.

“O'topus,” Willa repeats again as I turn my attention to the white porcelain tub, turning on the faucet and ensuring that it’s a comfortable temperature. Once it’s warm enough, I plug the stopper into the drain, watching to make sure that the water level begins to rise.

“Octopus,” I say back, turning my attention once more to the little child standing by the door. “Alright sweetie pie, what d'you say we get you out of those clothes and hop in the bath,” I suggest; to my dismay, a thin line of tears quickly rebuilds in the girl’s eyes. “Hey,” I murmur, softening my voice and reaching a hand out to cup Willa’s cheek. She flinches back instinctively from my nearing hand, causing my heart to shatter just as it does every time she fears I’m about to strike her. “It’s okay, you’re okay,” I soothe mildly, rubbing a thumb over her cheek as a tear falls and trails down onto my finger. “You’re safe, Willa-bug. It’s just Daddy and Willa here; no one’s gonna hurt you, sweetheart.”

“K-keep my… keep my c'othes on? Please, Daddy?” Willa whimpers nervously.

Her request confuses me slightly; tilting my head to the side, I try to clarify what she means. “You mean- while you’re in the bath?” I ask. Her gaze falls to the floor as she nods silently. “Oh honey… Willa, baby, we gotta take clothes off to get in the bath, remember? Otherwise, they’ll stick to your skin and feel yucky.” Willa simply remains silent and I sigh, wishing I knew of something, anything that might make the child feel safer.

“Here, Willa-bug. I’m gonna help you, okay?” I sigh slowly, wanting to give her a fair warning before making any further moves. Willa’s big green eyes stay glued to the ground as my hand moves down from her cheek to the sleeve of her shirt, my other hand reaching up and finding the other sleeve. Tears drip down onto the floor as I begin to pull the garment off, receiving no resistance (but also no help) from the little girl. “It’s okay, you’re safe,” I continue to soothe as I pull the white shirt up off over her head, letting it fall away to the floor. Her chest and tummy, along with her sides, wrapping all the way around to her back are completely covered in marks from Tony’s trials. Guilt and anger rage behind my eyes as I do my best to keep a warm, non-threatening expression.

“You’re okay; you’re doing such a good job, sweetheart. Bein’ so brave for me,” I praise softly as I take hold of the waistline of her shorts, gently pulling them down to her feet. Guessing Willa doesn’t feel comfortable moving at this point, I help ease her feet out of the leg holes, placing the shorts down on top of the shirt when they’re finally removed.

“Okay doll, almost there,” I coo, reaching out to remove her underwear. But before my hands reach the garment, the child’s own have shot down and grabbed onto the elastic band, gripping it so tightly that her knuckles are turning white. “Honey-” I begin, but to my surprise, the young girl’s shaking voice rises over my own.

“P-please, please no- don’t, w-wait, s-s-stop,” she sputters, squeezing her eyes shut in fear as tears pour down her reddened cheeks.

“Willa, Willa, hey-” I murmur, a whole new wave of worry washing over me. “It’s okay; you’re safe, remember? It’s just me, I’m not gonna hurt you, sweetheart,” I promise, “nothing bad’s gonna happen to you.” My large hands come down to rest over her tiny ones and as gently but firmly as I can, I push down on the elastic band, causing the underwear to collapse around her ankles. As soon as they’ve fallen, the child lets out a sob, and the sight I’m met with causes my heart to stop beating dead in my chest.

Centered between her hipbones, right where her lower belly meets the top of her pelvic bone, a long incision runs parallel to her waist, fresh sutures stained bright red with blood.

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[its-maira]

Advantages of utilizing skin serum

Worn out on your skincare routine as of now? In the event that you will bring some change, ample opportunity has already past that you need to add an item with amazing fixings as a serum. A skin serum is considered as a lightweight lotion, planned and improved with a recipe that feeds, ensures, and hydrates the skin.

What about we get into the upsides of using a face serum and how different sorts of serums can benefit your skin. However, before that, how about we discover;

What is a serum?

"Serums are thin consistency successful things that contain concentrated proportions of dynamic trimmings," explained Dr. Tsippora Shainhouse, FAAD, board attested dermatologist at SkinSafe Dermatology and Skin Care.

The thought with a serum is that greater proportions of dynamic particles will possibly penetrate the skin's surface for ideal reasonability. Moreover, as a result of the more prominent obsession, it regularly requires a more restricted proportion of exertion to see clear results.

Various people can't resist considering why they can't just use a salve or face cream on their skin rather than a serum. While there is no inflexible standard, research from 2011Trusted Source proposes using both, and to layer in like way.

Since a serum is lighter and passes on powerful trimmings to the skin quickly, it goes on first, after you've decontaminated your skin.

In any case, you in like manner need to seal the serum to intensify the benefits, which is the explanation a salve or face cream is the accompanying stage.

Consider a serum the unmistakable benefit for treating skin issues like staining, obtuseness, barely noticeable contrasts, or skin break out — and a salve as the best approach to hydrating your skin.

What are the benefits?

If you use a skin serum that is suitable to such an issue you need to address, a serum can have different benefits.

What about we look even more cautiously at a segment of the essential benefits of adding this thing to your skin wellbeing the executives plan.

Skin serum benefits

· Absorbs quickly into your skin. Serums are lighter skin wellbeing the executives plans than creams. The more slim consistency allows the serum to be ingested even more viably into your skin. This frowns serum an ideal beginning stage in the layering cycle.

· Soothes sensitive skin. Serums, with their light game plans, are every now and again better for individuals with skin irritation slanted or smooth skin types, as shown by Dr. Melanie Palm, board insisted dermatologist at Art of Skin.

· Improves the presence of barely noticeable contrasts and wrinkles. Some face serums contain trimmings like retinol that may help decline the presence of scarcely unmistakable contrasts and wrinkles.

· Protects your skin from free radicals and future mischief. Serums with trimmings like supplement C, supplement E, ferulic destructive, green tea, resveratrol, and astaxanthin help keep oxidative mischief from brilliant (UV) light and pollution, which can provoke less than ideal skin developing and wrinkles.

· Has the likelihood to give more clear results. The higher combination of dynamic trimmings may give more observable results, differentiated and various kinds of skin things.

· Feels light on your skin. Since they ingest quickly into your skin, a face serum doesn't feel profound or slick.

There are numerous different advantages of skin serums; Check now!!!

Kinds of face serums and trimmings

Concerning picking a skin serum, it's basic to see there are different kinds of serums, similarly as express trimmings to look for reliant on your targets.

When in doubt, face serums fall into the going with classes:

• against developing serums

• skin-illuminating serums

• hydrating serums

• free-progressive fighting serums

• skin inflammation slanted and sensitive skin serums

• reparative/surface improvement serums

Against developing serums

Against developing serums invigorate skin re-energizing and collagen creation. According to Palm, such a serum habitually joins retinol or bakuchiol, or both.

Recommended hostile to developing serums include:

• Neutrogena Rapid Wrinkle Repair Night Moisturizer

• CeraVe Skin-Renewing Retinol Serum

Skin-illuminating serums

Skin-illuminating serums are oftentimes loaded with cell fortifications and shade doing combating trimmings to improve skin tone.

"Key trimmings may consolidate things like supplement C, glycolic destructive, kojic destructive, ferulic destructive, mushroom independent, licorice root, or lactic destructive, among others," Palm explained.

Proposed skin-illuminating serums include:

• L'Oreal Paris Revitalift 10% Pure Vitamin C Concentrate

• CeraVe Vitamin C Skin Renewing Serum

• TruSkin Vitamin C Serum review

Hydrating serums

Hydrating serums contain hyaluronic destructive, a molecule that truly attaches water in the skin to make it look new, full, and more energetic.

"Kids make lots of hyaluronic destructive, and it's associated with their collagen, yet as we age, we lose collagen and lose the joined destructive," explained Shainhouse.

Compelling serums with hyaluronic destructive can unexpectedly tie water in the shallow layers of the skin, which, as demonstrated by Shainhouse, can make your skin appear to be fresher and dewier. It similarly can by chance restrict the presence of hardly recognizable contrasts.

Hydrating skin serums as often as possible contain supplement B5, which helps with hydrating skin, making it show up smoother and more hydrated.

Proposed hydrating serums include:

• SkinMedica HA5 Rejuvenating Hydrator

• Neutrogena Hydro Boost Hydrating Serum

Free-extremist battling serums

Cell reinforcements fight free extremists that can hurt sound skin.

To help hinder skin hurt from free extremists, pick a serum that contains trimmings like supplements C, A, and E, and resveratrol.

Proposed skin-illuminating serums include:

• SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic Serum

• Drunk Elephant D-Bronzi Anti-Pollution Sunshine Drops

Skin break out and touchy skin serums

Skin break out and touchy skin serums contain salicylic destructive or similar plant-based subordinates.

Also, look for niacinamide (a sort of supplement B3), which, as shown by Shainhouse, is a moderating, hydrating, and quieting fixing that is gotten together with other unique trimmings to restrict unsettling influence and reduce sensitive skin.

Recommended skin-illuminating serums include:

• Paula's Choice Niacinamide Booster 10%

• The Ordinary Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1%

Skin surface serums

To help support your skin's surface and the outward presentation of your skin, Shainhouse proposes using a serum with glycolic destructive serum.

"This sugarcane-construed alpha hydroxy destructive can enter the top layers of the epidermis to disturb the intercellular bonds. It can in like manner help shed the dulling, stained, dead cells to uncover smoother, shimmering skin with more uniform surface, tone, and concealing," she explained.

Proposed skin-illuminating serums include:

• L'Oreal Paris Revitalift 10% Pure Glycolic Acid

• NO7 Lift and Luminate Triple Action Serum

Step-by-step guidelines to use a serum

Shainhouse explains that the best way to deal with use a face serum is as a base layer under your heavier things like cream, sunscreen, and beautifying agents.

"While more young skin overall needn't waste time with impressively in excess of a fragile cleaning specialist and consistently wide reach sunscreen, it's valuable to get into a sound, assurance solid skin schedule."

"Doing so may help prevent staining, oxidative damage, parchedness, and inconvenient skin developing and wrinkles," she added.

You can use a face serum a couple of times each day ensuing to decontaminating and molding your skin. Think of it as the movement after you clean.

How routinely you apply a serum to your skin depends upon your targets. Palm prescribes the tips under to help you with choosing when to apply face serum to your skin.

Repeat of face serum application

• Anti-pigmentation and cell support serums work best when applied in the initial segment of the day. This gets your skin against common assaults and free limit creation conveyed by light, including UV and high energy perceptible light.

• Anti-developing serums are routinely generally fitting for evening application. This allows the trimmings to work with your body's circadian state of mind for skin fix and turnover.

• Hydrating serums for drier skin can be applied twice step by step to help keep your skin dewy and immersed.

To profit by a face serum, Shainhouse recommends the going with tips:

• Apply solid skin things from generally slim to thickest. Most serums work best when applied as the principle layer, in direct contact with clean skin after you've used a substance.

• If the unique fixing is exorbitantly upsetting or drying, you can apply it over another thing to have a buffering effect.

Last Verdict

Face serums are lightweight things that contain a high centralization of dynamic trimmings. They ingest quickly into your skin, making them a brilliant ensuing stage in the wake of cleansing.

There are a wide scope of sorts of serums, each with a novel explanation and trimmings. A couple of serums help to illuminate your skin or reduce imperfections, while others base on boosting hydration or engaging the signs of developing.

A couple of serums work better close to the start of the day, while others work best when applied in the evening. In the event that you don't know whether a face serum is suitable for you, or which type to use for your skin, banter with a board affirmed dermatologist for more information.

[adambstingus]

Meet The Most Powerful Political Organization In Washington

This article was originally published in the journal Democracy. Subscribe to it here, because why not?

WASHINGTON — Coverage of the influence of money in politics tends to suffer from the same weakness that all horse-race politics writing does: it almost never connects day-to-day movements to any broader reality or purpose. We learn about the size of ad buys or overall spending plans, but there’s no so what? Following the 2012 presidential election, the political press decided, rather unanimously, that all the talk about the Citizens United decision had been overblown because, after all, Democrats more or less matched Republicans on the spending front, a Democrat was reelected to the White House, and the party even hung on to the Senate, so no rich conservative was able to buy the election. Sure, Republicans later took over the upper chamber in 2014, but plenty of Democrats still managed to win.

This focus on campaigns and elections tends to exclude coverage of the political agenda itself. In other words, what is it that Congress and the regulatory agencies are thinking about and, just as importantly, not thinking about? And so this focus has missed one of the most fundamental transformations within our political system: the way in which corporate interests have moved the playing field away from party politics and into the bowels of agencies, courts, and Congress. The media have yet to figure out how to keep score. Author and journalist Alyssa Katz, in her new book The Influence Machine, charts the history and measures the power of one of the leading drivers of this shift, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which she calls the “single most influential organization in American politics” (as would anybody else writing a book on it).

The Chamber, unique in American politics, is the only organization that simultaneously spends big money on elections, lobbies Congress heavily, drills into the regulatory process and, if all else fails, drags the government to court. As Katz keenly observes, the Chamber routinely promises to spend eye-popping sums of money on federal elections, but then in its tax documents several months later reports spending far less. Its critics suggest the Chamber does spend the money and somehow hides it from the IRS, but more likely the organization is following in the footsteps of Mark Hanna, the 19th century Roveian consultant who helped get William McKinley elected in 1896. Before the campaign was over, he returned a sizable contribution, telling the donor they had more than enough money to win. The goal of business in politics is not to win elections or run up the partisan score; the goal, rather, is to make money. If that goal can be accomplished for less, all the better.

Katz doesn’t deliver many groundbreaking revelations; close Chamber watchers won’t learn much new. But hers is the first book-length exposé of a phenomenon that is generally known only deep inside Washington: namely, that the Chamber is not what it appears. The nonprofit Chamber’s official mission is “to advance human progress through an economic, political, and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity, and responsibility.” Beyond that, it is thought to be a coalition of business groups that collectively push for a free-market agenda aimed at improving the climate for business broadly. It is also often assumed to be a partisan operation aimed simply at electing Republicans. But, in fact, it’s neither of those things. Rather, it is a gun for hire, a façade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand. All of this, Katz argues convincingly, has often flown brazenly in the face of tax law, but power in Washington trumps both the spirit and letter of the law.

The Chamber is a gun for hire, a faade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand.

In 2005, the Federal Election Commission cast a 4-2 vote finding “preliminary evidence that  . . . [Chamber head Tom] Donohue had violated federal law by steering corporate campaign contributions directly to a federal campaign committee in order to influence an election,” Katz reports. Similar movements of money had destroyed the career of Tom DeLay, but the Chamber came out just fine. After the commission settled the case, three commissioners voted in 2008 to reject the settlement, deadlocking the panel. It has been so since. “Again and again, in state elections and in federal ones, including presidential races, the U.S. Chamber and its affiliated organizations were operating as political organizations and effective ones at that. But as far as the IRS was concerned, they remained educational groups, free to do what they would with their funds,” she writes.

The Chamber stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying.

Thinking of the Chamber as an organization at all winds up missing the point. Yes, it has a headquarters — a hulking one that stares down the White House from across Lafayette Square — an HR department, water coolers, and so on. But knowing what can legally be known about the Chamber gets you almost nowhere. The Chamber, instead, stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying. It has become an essential cloak for corporate special interests looking to get in and out of Washington without anybody seeing.

For decades, the Chamber tried to be what it seemed to be: a respectable coalition of businesses. But it found itself neutered by its need for consensus—companies are all in competition, after all—and easily outmatched by the combined might of labor and consumer advocates throughout the 1970s. It also was distracted by the anti-communist paranoia that consumed much of the politically active business community after World War II.

The new model was launched secretly, first uncovered on a day where the news wound up being utterly ignored. Jim VandeHei, then a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, broke it on September 11, 2001: The Chamber was selling its advocacy services to specific industries and companies at quite specific price levels. Drug makers paid for cover in a fight over pharmaceutical prices, Ford wanted to beat back legislation sparked by the deadly tire failures on its Ford Explorers, and so on. (For businesses without any particular interest at the moment, the dues paid to the Chamber are better thought of as protection money: Nice company you have there — would be a shame if a little congressional curiosity should happen to it.)

Today’s Chamber addresses a central problem for businesses in Washington: While business and business owners in general might be broadly popular — the business of America is business, after all — the particular things that individual businesses want tend to be extremely unpopular. Oil companies fighting the acceptance of climate change, insurers opposing health-care reform, tobacco companies opposing smoking regulations, gas companies opposing fracking laws, and trucking companies opposing driver-fatigue rules don’t exactly capture the public’s heart. Since the public might be broadly sympathetic to business but not individual businesses, the Chamber offers to cloak corporate self-interest in vague principles. That means that the Chamber is generally incapable of or uninterested in thinking strategically about the direction of the country. Instead, it simply moves from skirmish to skirmish, leaving behind a scorched landscape.

Katz, who is also the author of the well-received and timely Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, is a policy writer, a cultural critic, and a member of the New York Daily News editorial board. Throughout her career, she has leaned more toward research and synthesis than banging the phones and surfacing scandal. This is not a Game Change-style book that will put you inside turbulent meetings or in the heads of officials. Neither embittered former employees nor mischievous insiders are gossiping or sharing damning emails. Nobody’s cell phone lights up while driving their Audi on the GW Parkway, or the other sorts of obscure narrative details that populate a certain genre of Washington insider literature. Her book is no less rigorous for it, but the lack of intimacy with the key figures does serve to remove a sense of drama from the narrative, and the book becomes more a compilation of facts and events, a point-by-point indictment rather than a page-turning tale. Katz’s approach yields a thorough piece of work, but the lack of tantalizing scooplets that are the currency of Washington and New York publishing today will diminish its impact.

That’s a shame, because Katz builds what is a very strong case brick by brick, and it’s remarkable to watch the Chamber’s power rise chapter by chapter. The Chamber’s first foray into the pay-for-play game came just after the November 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, from the kind of industry that desperately needed cover: tobacco. “The Chamber has been kind of a weak sister in recent times,” one Philip Morris lobbyist wrote in a memo Katz relays. “However, based on a meeting we had with Chamber staff last week (and reflective of our sharp reduction in dues), the Chamber is eager to regain its former position of policy influence AND regain its stead in our once upon a time good graces.” The memo continues, “If we go to them with a specific action agenda, I believe they will do their utmost to attempt to see it through.” So on behalf of cigarette makers, the Chamber challenged the science around addiction and the link to cancer, lobbied Congress, went to court, battled regulators, and waged a public-relations campaign — in short, the all-in-one Chamber playbook.

“My goal is simple — to build the biggest gorilla in this town — the most aggressive and vigorous business advocate our nation has ever seen,” Donohue told a tobacco executive in 1998. Katz quotes one tobacco exec memo describing the approach: “Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day.” But what does fighting for smoking have to do with the broader business climate? The Chamber just kind of made up a rationale. “One can only imagine which industry will be next,” Donohue wrote to Congress members, pretending his work on behalf of tobacco was motivated by a “first they came for the cigarette-makers”-style solidarity, rather than the paid service it was. “The gaming industry? The beer and wine makers? Over-the-counter pharmaceutical companies? Fast food?” asked Chamber strategist Bruce Josten.

Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day. — memo from a Philip Morris lobbyist

For decades prior to its tobacco epiphany, the Chamber had largely walked softly, without a stick, through the streets of Washington. It came into being at the urging of President Taft, who wanted a more efficient way of knowing just what it was business wanted from the government. Birthed largely at the request of the government, it was given special tax-exempt status, which the organization today deftly exploits to keep its sources of funding hidden (the Chamber and its legal arm spent more than $200 million in 2012 and 2013, the most recent years tax documents are available — a figure that will presumably grow in 2016). That the Chamber, America’s great voice of free enterprise, was created by the government is, depending on how colored your politics are by vulgar Marxism, somewhere between deliciously ironic and entirely unsurprising.

The Chamber was established to operate mostly by consensus, which, as veterans of Occupy Wall Street know all too well, means that for decades it did very little in the way of operating. When it did, it did so in collaboration with — brace yourself — Democrats. And not just any Democrat, but that man himself. “Chamber president Henry Harriman, a former textile manufacturer, spent much of the spring of 1933 across Lafayette Square from the Chamber of Commerce headquarters, collaborating with [Franklin] Roosevelt’s brain trust to develop the National Recovery Act,” writes Katz. When the Supreme Court struck down the parts of the act the Chamber liked, and FDR moved forward with New Deal programs it didn’t, it presaged a decades-long run of impotence, punctuated by panics about communism.

So while the Chamber spent the middle part of the twentieth century bickering and licking its New Deal wounds, Big Labor ran up the score. Katz relays that when an 8 percent hike in Social Security payments was being considered, the Chamber politely suggested a more modest increase. It’s hard to remember or imagine today, but there was a time when Congress bowed before the might of the consumer lobby, and businesses panicked at word that Ralph Nader’s band of raiders had an eye on their enterprise — a moment in time that Katz captures with the help of a “Mad Men” episode. “Roger Sterling is on the phone with a client,” Katz writes. “ ‘Oldsmobile. He wants to know if there’s any way around Nader,’ Sterling tells Pete Campbell, his hand on the mouthpiece. Responds Campbell, without hesitating: ‘There isn’t.’ ”

The president of the Chamber in those days, Ed Rust Sr., not only acknowledged Nader’s sway, but even made the argument in 1973 that business was better off because of him, that Nader and business ought to want the same things. Nader and the Chamber could agree, Rust said, on “products that work as they are supposed to, on warranties that protect the buyer at least as much as the seller, on services that genuinely serve.” It was a different kind of Chamber, but the forces that would create the new one were already bubbling. Rust lasted less than a year.

For Katz, it was Tom Donohue who played the pivotal role in executing the new strategy, and she lays out just how instrumental this one man has been in shaping the Chamber and, with it, Washington politics. Donohue was right for the job because he was not a businessman. Rather, he rose up as a university fundraiser, then deputy assistant postmaster general of the United States, then a lobbyist for the trucking industry, which perfectly positioned him to understand how Washington works, shorn of any pretense about free enterprise or a “pro-business climate.” For Donohue, the climate is irrelevant. What matters is who’s paying the Chamber, and what they want for it.

Some critics of the Chamber have argued that its efforts have largely backfired because the top priorities of business — infrastructure investment, comprehensive immigration reform, and a stable business climate not shaken by random threats of debt default and government shutdowns — have been foiled by the very conservative element of the GOP it helped fuel in 2010. But that assumes the Chamber cares about the overall business climate; instead, with its nihilistic approach to politics and the economy, the Chamber can fail only if its particular project fails. And in the event that happens, it’s really a failure only if the Chamber manages to get blamed and loses clients as a result.

Even readers familiar with the Chamber’s reach into the political system will be taken aback by the breadth and depth of its ability to shape the very legal structures of states where it has key business. While the stories Katz pulls together were not entirely unknown to the public at the time, the Chamber’s involvement, and its wholesale strategic assault on state judiciaries, are brazen enough that the chamber could come to define our era of corporate capture of the levers of republican government.

One instance, in Illinois, was an all-out war for a judicial seat in order to sway the outcomes of two particular cases. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance had been tagged with a $1.05 billion judgment for systematically ripping off and deceiving customers. And a jury had awarded $10 billion in a judgment against Philip Morris, a penalty for its marketing of “light” cigarettes in a way that suggested they were somehow less harmful. The Chamber needed a candidate who’d rule the “right” way on those cases and, sure enough, one was recruited by a State Farm lobbyist. The company and the Chamber pumped millions into the 2004 race. It would be an interesting judicial system that submitted verdicts to the democratic process, allowing companies on the losing end to take their case directly to the public on appeal. It would be a strange one, but at least there would be a logic to it.

But the public debate in Illinois, of course, was not about whether the verdicts against State Farm and Philip Morris should stand. It was instead a standard political fight, fought over personalities with misleading-at-best claims made about each side. The Chamber won, and while the public might not have known what the reward would be for the victor, it soon became clear. Their candidate, now dressed in robes, cast the deciding votes to throw out the two verdicts. Were this merely a case of the Chamber finding a rare opportunity to exert outsized influence in one race, it would still be a remarkable turn of events. But it was just one of numerous cases documented by Katz, many of which only became exposed as Chamber projects long after voters had gone to the polls.

Katz does her level best to wind up on a hopeful note. The raw success of the Chamber’s model, she argues, could be replicated by progressive groups working in alliance with enlightened businesses toward a common goal:

The Democratic Party could use its own version of the Chamber of Commerce — an outside intervention to force dynamic change, and unite its own activists behind a common agenda and strategy that encompasses workers, consumers, and companies that care about their welfare. The Sustainable Business Council isn’t willing to wage a war in which money is the ammunition, but someone else will have to, and the world of dynamic new business powers is not impoverished. The combatants may end up being companies like Skanska and Apple that left the U.S. Chamber, disillusioned; perhaps Google will finally heed the ceaseless calls to drop its Chamber membership and find fresh avenues for influence. The same technologies that foster crowdfunding for emerging business à la Kickstarter also harbor tremendous potential to pull together funding for political action from a constellation of fragmented companies, empowering them to form their own lobbying and campaign-cash forces to disrupt legacy industries’ deep-pocketed lock on power.

As the Republican Party increasingly operates outside the realm of reason, it’s the Democrats’ turn to answer a call to duty, and to build a bridge for business to political power based on prosperity and social advancement.

We know the strategy works. After all, it’s been done before.

Setting aside the prospect of aligning Apple with workers’ rights groups, Katz’s prescription gets her own analysis wrong: The Chamber is not a real coalition, as she makes plain throughout the book. And the promise of secrecy it offers to, say, an oil company is not one needed by the Sierra Club. Environmental and consumer groups are just fine with the public knowing they are pushing for whatever they’re pushing for, and it does the project no harm for anybody to know it. They don’t need cover.

The prospect of crowdfunding in Washington has the potential to be real in some situations, but matching the scale of billionaire industrialists, who can easily chip in several hundred million per election cycle, is no easy task. What Katz finds is not that the Chamber has found a new way to win the game, but that it is, in significant ways, playing a different game entirely. While the parties jockey for position ahead of the next election, the Chamber plays for keeps.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/meet-the-most-powerful-political-organization-in-washington/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/183299560867

[allofbeercom]

Meet The Most Powerful Political Organization In Washington

This article was originally published in the journal Democracy. Subscribe to it here, because why not?

WASHINGTON — Coverage of the influence of money in politics tends to suffer from the same weakness that all horse-race politics writing does: it almost never connects day-to-day movements to any broader reality or purpose. We learn about the size of ad buys or overall spending plans, but there’s no so what? Following the 2012 presidential election, the political press decided, rather unanimously, that all the talk about the Citizens United decision had been overblown because, after all, Democrats more or less matched Republicans on the spending front, a Democrat was reelected to the White House, and the party even hung on to the Senate, so no rich conservative was able to buy the election. Sure, Republicans later took over the upper chamber in 2014, but plenty of Democrats still managed to win.

This focus on campaigns and elections tends to exclude coverage of the political agenda itself. In other words, what is it that Congress and the regulatory agencies are thinking about and, just as importantly, not thinking about? And so this focus has missed one of the most fundamental transformations within our political system: the way in which corporate interests have moved the playing field away from party politics and into the bowels of agencies, courts, and Congress. The media have yet to figure out how to keep score. Author and journalist Alyssa Katz, in her new book The Influence Machine, charts the history and measures the power of one of the leading drivers of this shift, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which she calls the “single most influential organization in American politics” (as would anybody else writing a book on it).

The Chamber, unique in American politics, is the only organization that simultaneously spends big money on elections, lobbies Congress heavily, drills into the regulatory process and, if all else fails, drags the government to court. As Katz keenly observes, the Chamber routinely promises to spend eye-popping sums of money on federal elections, but then in its tax documents several months later reports spending far less. Its critics suggest the Chamber does spend the money and somehow hides it from the IRS, but more likely the organization is following in the footsteps of Mark Hanna, the 19th century Roveian consultant who helped get William McKinley elected in 1896. Before the campaign was over, he returned a sizable contribution, telling the donor they had more than enough money to win. The goal of business in politics is not to win elections or run up the partisan score; the goal, rather, is to make money. If that goal can be accomplished for less, all the better.

Katz doesn’t deliver many groundbreaking revelations; close Chamber watchers won’t learn much new. But hers is the first book-length exposé of a phenomenon that is generally known only deep inside Washington: namely, that the Chamber is not what it appears. The nonprofit Chamber’s official mission is “to advance human progress through an economic, political, and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity, and responsibility.” Beyond that, it is thought to be a coalition of business groups that collectively push for a free-market agenda aimed at improving the climate for business broadly. It is also often assumed to be a partisan operation aimed simply at electing Republicans. But, in fact, it’s neither of those things. Rather, it is a gun for hire, a façade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand. All of this, Katz argues convincingly, has often flown brazenly in the face of tax law, but power in Washington trumps both the spirit and letter of the law.

The Chamber is a gun for hire, a faade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand.

In 2005, the Federal Election Commission cast a 4-2 vote finding “preliminary evidence that  . . . [Chamber head Tom] Donohue had violated federal law by steering corporate campaign contributions directly to a federal campaign committee in order to influence an election,” Katz reports. Similar movements of money had destroyed the career of Tom DeLay, but the Chamber came out just fine. After the commission settled the case, three commissioners voted in 2008 to reject the settlement, deadlocking the panel. It has been so since. “Again and again, in state elections and in federal ones, including presidential races, the U.S. Chamber and its affiliated organizations were operating as political organizations and effective ones at that. But as far as the IRS was concerned, they remained educational groups, free to do what they would with their funds,” she writes.

The Chamber stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying.

Thinking of the Chamber as an organization at all winds up missing the point. Yes, it has a headquarters — a hulking one that stares down the White House from across Lafayette Square — an HR department, water coolers, and so on. But knowing what can legally be known about the Chamber gets you almost nowhere. The Chamber, instead, stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying. It has become an essential cloak for corporate special interests looking to get in and out of Washington without anybody seeing.

For decades, the Chamber tried to be what it seemed to be: a respectable coalition of businesses. But it found itself neutered by its need for consensus—companies are all in competition, after all—and easily outmatched by the combined might of labor and consumer advocates throughout the 1970s. It also was distracted by the anti-communist paranoia that consumed much of the politically active business community after World War II.

The new model was launched secretly, first uncovered on a day where the news wound up being utterly ignored. Jim VandeHei, then a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, broke it on September 11, 2001: The Chamber was selling its advocacy services to specific industries and companies at quite specific price levels. Drug makers paid for cover in a fight over pharmaceutical prices, Ford wanted to beat back legislation sparked by the deadly tire failures on its Ford Explorers, and so on. (For businesses without any particular interest at the moment, the dues paid to the Chamber are better thought of as protection money: Nice company you have there — would be a shame if a little congressional curiosity should happen to it.)

Today’s Chamber addresses a central problem for businesses in Washington: While business and business owners in general might be broadly popular — the business of America is business, after all — the particular things that individual businesses want tend to be extremely unpopular. Oil companies fighting the acceptance of climate change, insurers opposing health-care reform, tobacco companies opposing smoking regulations, gas companies opposing fracking laws, and trucking companies opposing driver-fatigue rules don’t exactly capture the public’s heart. Since the public might be broadly sympathetic to business but not individual businesses, the Chamber offers to cloak corporate self-interest in vague principles. That means that the Chamber is generally incapable of or uninterested in thinking strategically about the direction of the country. Instead, it simply moves from skirmish to skirmish, leaving behind a scorched landscape.

Katz, who is also the author of the well-received and timely Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, is a policy writer, a cultural critic, and a member of the New York Daily News editorial board. Throughout her career, she has leaned more toward research and synthesis than banging the phones and surfacing scandal. This is not a Game Change-style book that will put you inside turbulent meetings or in the heads of officials. Neither embittered former employees nor mischievous insiders are gossiping or sharing damning emails. Nobody’s cell phone lights up while driving their Audi on the GW Parkway, or the other sorts of obscure narrative details that populate a certain genre of Washington insider literature. Her book is no less rigorous for it, but the lack of intimacy with the key figures does serve to remove a sense of drama from the narrative, and the book becomes more a compilation of facts and events, a point-by-point indictment rather than a page-turning tale. Katz’s approach yields a thorough piece of work, but the lack of tantalizing scooplets that are the currency of Washington and New York publishing today will diminish its impact.

That’s a shame, because Katz builds what is a very strong case brick by brick, and it’s remarkable to watch the Chamber’s power rise chapter by chapter. The Chamber’s first foray into the pay-for-play game came just after the November 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, from the kind of industry that desperately needed cover: tobacco. “The Chamber has been kind of a weak sister in recent times,” one Philip Morris lobbyist wrote in a memo Katz relays. “However, based on a meeting we had with Chamber staff last week (and reflective of our sharp reduction in dues), the Chamber is eager to regain its former position of policy influence AND regain its stead in our once upon a time good graces.” The memo continues, “If we go to them with a specific action agenda, I believe they will do their utmost to attempt to see it through.” So on behalf of cigarette makers, the Chamber challenged the science around addiction and the link to cancer, lobbied Congress, went to court, battled regulators, and waged a public-relations campaign — in short, the all-in-one Chamber playbook.

“My goal is simple — to build the biggest gorilla in this town — the most aggressive and vigorous business advocate our nation has ever seen,” Donohue told a tobacco executive in 1998. Katz quotes one tobacco exec memo describing the approach: “Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day.” But what does fighting for smoking have to do with the broader business climate? The Chamber just kind of made up a rationale. “One can only imagine which industry will be next,” Donohue wrote to Congress members, pretending his work on behalf of tobacco was motivated by a “first they came for the cigarette-makers”-style solidarity, rather than the paid service it was. “The gaming industry? The beer and wine makers? Over-the-counter pharmaceutical companies? Fast food?” asked Chamber strategist Bruce Josten.

Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day. — memo from a Philip Morris lobbyist

For decades prior to its tobacco epiphany, the Chamber had largely walked softly, without a stick, through the streets of Washington. It came into being at the urging of President Taft, who wanted a more efficient way of knowing just what it was business wanted from the government. Birthed largely at the request of the government, it was given special tax-exempt status, which the organization today deftly exploits to keep its sources of funding hidden (the Chamber and its legal arm spent more than $200 million in 2012 and 2013, the most recent years tax documents are available — a figure that will presumably grow in 2016). That the Chamber, America’s great voice of free enterprise, was created by the government is, depending on how colored your politics are by vulgar Marxism, somewhere between deliciously ironic and entirely unsurprising.

The Chamber was established to operate mostly by consensus, which, as veterans of Occupy Wall Street know all too well, means that for decades it did very little in the way of operating. When it did, it did so in collaboration with — brace yourself — Democrats. And not just any Democrat, but that man himself. “Chamber president Henry Harriman, a former textile manufacturer, spent much of the spring of 1933 across Lafayette Square from the Chamber of Commerce headquarters, collaborating with [Franklin] Roosevelt’s brain trust to develop the National Recovery Act,” writes Katz. When the Supreme Court struck down the parts of the act the Chamber liked, and FDR moved forward with New Deal programs it didn’t, it presaged a decades-long run of impotence, punctuated by panics about communism.

So while the Chamber spent the middle part of the twentieth century bickering and licking its New Deal wounds, Big Labor ran up the score. Katz relays that when an 8 percent hike in Social Security payments was being considered, the Chamber politely suggested a more modest increase. It’s hard to remember or imagine today, but there was a time when Congress bowed before the might of the consumer lobby, and businesses panicked at word that Ralph Nader’s band of raiders had an eye on their enterprise — a moment in time that Katz captures with the help of a “Mad Men” episode. “Roger Sterling is on the phone with a client,” Katz writes. “ ‘Oldsmobile. He wants to know if there’s any way around Nader,’ Sterling tells Pete Campbell, his hand on the mouthpiece. Responds Campbell, without hesitating: ‘There isn’t.’ ”

The president of the Chamber in those days, Ed Rust Sr., not only acknowledged Nader’s sway, but even made the argument in 1973 that business was better off because of him, that Nader and business ought to want the same things. Nader and the Chamber could agree, Rust said, on “products that work as they are supposed to, on warranties that protect the buyer at least as much as the seller, on services that genuinely serve.” It was a different kind of Chamber, but the forces that would create the new one were already bubbling. Rust lasted less than a year.

For Katz, it was Tom Donohue who played the pivotal role in executing the new strategy, and she lays out just how instrumental this one man has been in shaping the Chamber and, with it, Washington politics. Donohue was right for the job because he was not a businessman. Rather, he rose up as a university fundraiser, then deputy assistant postmaster general of the United States, then a lobbyist for the trucking industry, which perfectly positioned him to understand how Washington works, shorn of any pretense about free enterprise or a “pro-business climate.” For Donohue, the climate is irrelevant. What matters is who’s paying the Chamber, and what they want for it.

Some critics of the Chamber have argued that its efforts have largely backfired because the top priorities of business — infrastructure investment, comprehensive immigration reform, and a stable business climate not shaken by random threats of debt default and government shutdowns — have been foiled by the very conservative element of the GOP it helped fuel in 2010. But that assumes the Chamber cares about the overall business climate; instead, with its nihilistic approach to politics and the economy, the Chamber can fail only if its particular project fails. And in the event that happens, it’s really a failure only if the Chamber manages to get blamed and loses clients as a result.

Even readers familiar with the Chamber’s reach into the political system will be taken aback by the breadth and depth of its ability to shape the very legal structures of states where it has key business. While the stories Katz pulls together were not entirely unknown to the public at the time, the Chamber’s involvement, and its wholesale strategic assault on state judiciaries, are brazen enough that the chamber could come to define our era of corporate capture of the levers of republican government.

One instance, in Illinois, was an all-out war for a judicial seat in order to sway the outcomes of two particular cases. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance had been tagged with a $1.05 billion judgment for systematically ripping off and deceiving customers. And a jury had awarded $10 billion in a judgment against Philip Morris, a penalty for its marketing of “light” cigarettes in a way that suggested they were somehow less harmful. The Chamber needed a candidate who’d rule the “right” way on those cases and, sure enough, one was recruited by a State Farm lobbyist. The company and the Chamber pumped millions into the 2004 race. It would be an interesting judicial system that submitted verdicts to the democratic process, allowing companies on the losing end to take their case directly to the public on appeal. It would be a strange one, but at least there would be a logic to it.

But the public debate in Illinois, of course, was not about whether the verdicts against State Farm and Philip Morris should stand. It was instead a standard political fight, fought over personalities with misleading-at-best claims made about each side. The Chamber won, and while the public might not have known what the reward would be for the victor, it soon became clear. Their candidate, now dressed in robes, cast the deciding votes to throw out the two verdicts. Were this merely a case of the Chamber finding a rare opportunity to exert outsized influence in one race, it would still be a remarkable turn of events. But it was just one of numerous cases documented by Katz, many of which only became exposed as Chamber projects long after voters had gone to the polls.

Katz does her level best to wind up on a hopeful note. The raw success of the Chamber’s model, she argues, could be replicated by progressive groups working in alliance with enlightened businesses toward a common goal:

The Democratic Party could use its own version of the Chamber of Commerce — an outside intervention to force dynamic change, and unite its own activists behind a common agenda and strategy that encompasses workers, consumers, and companies that care about their welfare. The Sustainable Business Council isn’t willing to wage a war in which money is the ammunition, but someone else will have to, and the world of dynamic new business powers is not impoverished. The combatants may end up being companies like Skanska and Apple that left the U.S. Chamber, disillusioned; perhaps Google will finally heed the ceaseless calls to drop its Chamber membership and find fresh avenues for influence. The same technologies that foster crowdfunding for emerging business à la Kickstarter also harbor tremendous potential to pull together funding for political action from a constellation of fragmented companies, empowering them to form their own lobbying and campaign-cash forces to disrupt legacy industries’ deep-pocketed lock on power.

As the Republican Party increasingly operates outside the realm of reason, it’s the Democrats’ turn to answer a call to duty, and to build a bridge for business to political power based on prosperity and social advancement.

We know the strategy works. After all, it’s been done before.

Setting aside the prospect of aligning Apple with workers’ rights groups, Katz’s prescription gets her own analysis wrong: The Chamber is not a real coalition, as she makes plain throughout the book. And the promise of secrecy it offers to, say, an oil company is not one needed by the Sierra Club. Environmental and consumer groups are just fine with the public knowing they are pushing for whatever they’re pushing for, and it does the project no harm for anybody to know it. They don’t need cover.

The prospect of crowdfunding in Washington has the potential to be real in some situations, but matching the scale of billionaire industrialists, who can easily chip in several hundred million per election cycle, is no easy task. What Katz finds is not that the Chamber has found a new way to win the game, but that it is, in significant ways, playing a different game entirely. While the parties jockey for position ahead of the next election, the Chamber plays for keeps.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/meet-the-most-powerful-political-organization-in-washington/

[samanthasroberts]

Meet The Most Powerful Political Organization In Washington

This article was originally published in the journal Democracy. Subscribe to it here, because why not?

WASHINGTON — Coverage of the influence of money in politics tends to suffer from the same weakness that all horse-race politics writing does: it almost never connects day-to-day movements to any broader reality or purpose. We learn about the size of ad buys or overall spending plans, but there’s no so what? Following the 2012 presidential election, the political press decided, rather unanimously, that all the talk about the Citizens United decision had been overblown because, after all, Democrats more or less matched Republicans on the spending front, a Democrat was reelected to the White House, and the party even hung on to the Senate, so no rich conservative was able to buy the election. Sure, Republicans later took over the upper chamber in 2014, but plenty of Democrats still managed to win.

This focus on campaigns and elections tends to exclude coverage of the political agenda itself. In other words, what is it that Congress and the regulatory agencies are thinking about and, just as importantly, not thinking about? And so this focus has missed one of the most fundamental transformations within our political system: the way in which corporate interests have moved the playing field away from party politics and into the bowels of agencies, courts, and Congress. The media have yet to figure out how to keep score. Author and journalist Alyssa Katz, in her new book The Influence Machine, charts the history and measures the power of one of the leading drivers of this shift, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which she calls the “single most influential organization in American politics” (as would anybody else writing a book on it).

The Chamber, unique in American politics, is the only organization that simultaneously spends big money on elections, lobbies Congress heavily, drills into the regulatory process and, if all else fails, drags the government to court. As Katz keenly observes, the Chamber routinely promises to spend eye-popping sums of money on federal elections, but then in its tax documents several months later reports spending far less. Its critics suggest the Chamber does spend the money and somehow hides it from the IRS, but more likely the organization is following in the footsteps of Mark Hanna, the 19th century Roveian consultant who helped get William McKinley elected in 1896. Before the campaign was over, he returned a sizable contribution, telling the donor they had more than enough money to win. The goal of business in politics is not to win elections or run up the partisan score; the goal, rather, is to make money. If that goal can be accomplished for less, all the better.

Katz doesn’t deliver many groundbreaking revelations; close Chamber watchers won’t learn much new. But hers is the first book-length exposé of a phenomenon that is generally known only deep inside Washington: namely, that the Chamber is not what it appears. The nonprofit Chamber’s official mission is “to advance human progress through an economic, political, and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity, and responsibility.” Beyond that, it is thought to be a coalition of business groups that collectively push for a free-market agenda aimed at improving the climate for business broadly. It is also often assumed to be a partisan operation aimed simply at electing Republicans. But, in fact, it’s neither of those things. Rather, it is a gun for hire, a façade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand. All of this, Katz argues convincingly, has often flown brazenly in the face of tax law, but power in Washington trumps both the spirit and letter of the law.

The Chamber is a gun for hire, a faade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand.

In 2005, the Federal Election Commission cast a 4-2 vote finding “preliminary evidence that  . . . [Chamber head Tom] Donohue had violated federal law by steering corporate campaign contributions directly to a federal campaign committee in order to influence an election,” Katz reports. Similar movements of money had destroyed the career of Tom DeLay, but the Chamber came out just fine. After the commission settled the case, three commissioners voted in 2008 to reject the settlement, deadlocking the panel. It has been so since. “Again and again, in state elections and in federal ones, including presidential races, the U.S. Chamber and its affiliated organizations were operating as political organizations and effective ones at that. But as far as the IRS was concerned, they remained educational groups, free to do what they would with their funds,” she writes.

The Chamber stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying.

Thinking of the Chamber as an organization at all winds up missing the point. Yes, it has a headquarters — a hulking one that stares down the White House from across Lafayette Square — an HR department, water coolers, and so on. But knowing what can legally be known about the Chamber gets you almost nowhere. The Chamber, instead, stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying. It has become an essential cloak for corporate special interests looking to get in and out of Washington without anybody seeing.

For decades, the Chamber tried to be what it seemed to be: a respectable coalition of businesses. But it found itself neutered by its need for consensus—companies are all in competition, after all—and easily outmatched by the combined might of labor and consumer advocates throughout the 1970s. It also was distracted by the anti-communist paranoia that consumed much of the politically active business community after World War II.

The new model was launched secretly, first uncovered on a day where the news wound up being utterly ignored. Jim VandeHei, then a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, broke it on September 11, 2001: The Chamber was selling its advocacy services to specific industries and companies at quite specific price levels. Drug makers paid for cover in a fight over pharmaceutical prices, Ford wanted to beat back legislation sparked by the deadly tire failures on its Ford Explorers, and so on. (For businesses without any particular interest at the moment, the dues paid to the Chamber are better thought of as protection money: Nice company you have there — would be a shame if a little congressional curiosity should happen to it.)

Today’s Chamber addresses a central problem for businesses in Washington: While business and business owners in general might be broadly popular — the business of America is business, after all — the particular things that individual businesses want tend to be extremely unpopular. Oil companies fighting the acceptance of climate change, insurers opposing health-care reform, tobacco companies opposing smoking regulations, gas companies opposing fracking laws, and trucking companies opposing driver-fatigue rules don’t exactly capture the public’s heart. Since the public might be broadly sympathetic to business but not individual businesses, the Chamber offers to cloak corporate self-interest in vague principles. That means that the Chamber is generally incapable of or uninterested in thinking strategically about the direction of the country. Instead, it simply moves from skirmish to skirmish, leaving behind a scorched landscape.

Katz, who is also the author of the well-received and timely Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, is a policy writer, a cultural critic, and a member of the New York Daily News editorial board. Throughout her career, she has leaned more toward research and synthesis than banging the phones and surfacing scandal. This is not a Game Change-style book that will put you inside turbulent meetings or in the heads of officials. Neither embittered former employees nor mischievous insiders are gossiping or sharing damning emails. Nobody’s cell phone lights up while driving their Audi on the GW Parkway, or the other sorts of obscure narrative details that populate a certain genre of Washington insider literature. Her book is no less rigorous for it, but the lack of intimacy with the key figures does serve to remove a sense of drama from the narrative, and the book becomes more a compilation of facts and events, a point-by-point indictment rather than a page-turning tale. Katz’s approach yields a thorough piece of work, but the lack of tantalizing scooplets that are the currency of Washington and New York publishing today will diminish its impact.

That’s a shame, because Katz builds what is a very strong case brick by brick, and it’s remarkable to watch the Chamber’s power rise chapter by chapter. The Chamber’s first foray into the pay-for-play game came just after the November 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, from the kind of industry that desperately needed cover: tobacco. “The Chamber has been kind of a weak sister in recent times,” one Philip Morris lobbyist wrote in a memo Katz relays. “However, based on a meeting we had with Chamber staff last week (and reflective of our sharp reduction in dues), the Chamber is eager to regain its former position of policy influence AND regain its stead in our once upon a time good graces.” The memo continues, “If we go to them with a specific action agenda, I believe they will do their utmost to attempt to see it through.” So on behalf of cigarette makers, the Chamber challenged the science around addiction and the link to cancer, lobbied Congress, went to court, battled regulators, and waged a public-relations campaign — in short, the all-in-one Chamber playbook.

“My goal is simple — to build the biggest gorilla in this town — the most aggressive and vigorous business advocate our nation has ever seen,” Donohue told a tobacco executive in 1998. Katz quotes one tobacco exec memo describing the approach: “Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day.” But what does fighting for smoking have to do with the broader business climate? The Chamber just kind of made up a rationale. “One can only imagine which industry will be next,” Donohue wrote to Congress members, pretending his work on behalf of tobacco was motivated by a “first they came for the cigarette-makers”-style solidarity, rather than the paid service it was. “The gaming industry? The beer and wine makers? Over-the-counter pharmaceutical companies? Fast food?” asked Chamber strategist Bruce Josten.

Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day. — memo from a Philip Morris lobbyist

For decades prior to its tobacco epiphany, the Chamber had largely walked softly, without a stick, through the streets of Washington. It came into being at the urging of President Taft, who wanted a more efficient way of knowing just what it was business wanted from the government. Birthed largely at the request of the government, it was given special tax-exempt status, which the organization today deftly exploits to keep its sources of funding hidden (the Chamber and its legal arm spent more than $200 million in 2012 and 2013, the most recent years tax documents are available — a figure that will presumably grow in 2016). That the Chamber, America’s great voice of free enterprise, was created by the government is, depending on how colored your politics are by vulgar Marxism, somewhere between deliciously ironic and entirely unsurprising.

The Chamber was established to operate mostly by consensus, which, as veterans of Occupy Wall Street know all too well, means that for decades it did very little in the way of operating. When it did, it did so in collaboration with — brace yourself — Democrats. And not just any Democrat, but that man himself. “Chamber president Henry Harriman, a former textile manufacturer, spent much of the spring of 1933 across Lafayette Square from the Chamber of Commerce headquarters, collaborating with [Franklin] Roosevelt’s brain trust to develop the National Recovery Act,” writes Katz. When the Supreme Court struck down the parts of the act the Chamber liked, and FDR moved forward with New Deal programs it didn’t, it presaged a decades-long run of impotence, punctuated by panics about communism.

So while the Chamber spent the middle part of the twentieth century bickering and licking its New Deal wounds, Big Labor ran up the score. Katz relays that when an 8 percent hike in Social Security payments was being considered, the Chamber politely suggested a more modest increase. It’s hard to remember or imagine today, but there was a time when Congress bowed before the might of the consumer lobby, and businesses panicked at word that Ralph Nader’s band of raiders had an eye on their enterprise — a moment in time that Katz captures with the help of a “Mad Men” episode. “Roger Sterling is on the phone with a client,” Katz writes. “ ‘Oldsmobile. He wants to know if there’s any way around Nader,’ Sterling tells Pete Campbell, his hand on the mouthpiece. Responds Campbell, without hesitating: ‘There isn’t.’ ”

The president of the Chamber in those days, Ed Rust Sr., not only acknowledged Nader’s sway, but even made the argument in 1973 that business was better off because of him, that Nader and business ought to want the same things. Nader and the Chamber could agree, Rust said, on “products that work as they are supposed to, on warranties that protect the buyer at least as much as the seller, on services that genuinely serve.” It was a different kind of Chamber, but the forces that would create the new one were already bubbling. Rust lasted less than a year.

For Katz, it was Tom Donohue who played the pivotal role in executing the new strategy, and she lays out just how instrumental this one man has been in shaping the Chamber and, with it, Washington politics. Donohue was right for the job because he was not a businessman. Rather, he rose up as a university fundraiser, then deputy assistant postmaster general of the United States, then a lobbyist for the trucking industry, which perfectly positioned him to understand how Washington works, shorn of any pretense about free enterprise or a “pro-business climate.” For Donohue, the climate is irrelevant. What matters is who’s paying the Chamber, and what they want for it.

Some critics of the Chamber have argued that its efforts have largely backfired because the top priorities of business — infrastructure investment, comprehensive immigration reform, and a stable business climate not shaken by random threats of debt default and government shutdowns — have been foiled by the very conservative element of the GOP it helped fuel in 2010. But that assumes the Chamber cares about the overall business climate; instead, with its nihilistic approach to politics and the economy, the Chamber can fail only if its particular project fails. And in the event that happens, it’s really a failure only if the Chamber manages to get blamed and loses clients as a result.

Even readers familiar with the Chamber’s reach into the political system will be taken aback by the breadth and depth of its ability to shape the very legal structures of states where it has key business. While the stories Katz pulls together were not entirely unknown to the public at the time, the Chamber’s involvement, and its wholesale strategic assault on state judiciaries, are brazen enough that the chamber could come to define our era of corporate capture of the levers of republican government.

One instance, in Illinois, was an all-out war for a judicial seat in order to sway the outcomes of two particular cases. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance had been tagged with a $1.05 billion judgment for systematically ripping off and deceiving customers. And a jury had awarded $10 billion in a judgment against Philip Morris, a penalty for its marketing of “light” cigarettes in a way that suggested they were somehow less harmful. The Chamber needed a candidate who’d rule the “right” way on those cases and, sure enough, one was recruited by a State Farm lobbyist. The company and the Chamber pumped millions into the 2004 race. It would be an interesting judicial system that submitted verdicts to the democratic process, allowing companies on the losing end to take their case directly to the public on appeal. It would be a strange one, but at least there would be a logic to it.

But the public debate in Illinois, of course, was not about whether the verdicts against State Farm and Philip Morris should stand. It was instead a standard political fight, fought over personalities with misleading-at-best claims made about each side. The Chamber won, and while the public might not have known what the reward would be for the victor, it soon became clear. Their candidate, now dressed in robes, cast the deciding votes to throw out the two verdicts. Were this merely a case of the Chamber finding a rare opportunity to exert outsized influence in one race, it would still be a remarkable turn of events. But it was just one of numerous cases documented by Katz, many of which only became exposed as Chamber projects long after voters had gone to the polls.

Katz does her level best to wind up on a hopeful note. The raw success of the Chamber’s model, she argues, could be replicated by progressive groups working in alliance with enlightened businesses toward a common goal:

The Democratic Party could use its own version of the Chamber of Commerce — an outside intervention to force dynamic change, and unite its own activists behind a common agenda and strategy that encompasses workers, consumers, and companies that care about their welfare. The Sustainable Business Council isn’t willing to wage a war in which money is the ammunition, but someone else will have to, and the world of dynamic new business powers is not impoverished. The combatants may end up being companies like Skanska and Apple that left the U.S. Chamber, disillusioned; perhaps Google will finally heed the ceaseless calls to drop its Chamber membership and find fresh avenues for influence. The same technologies that foster crowdfunding for emerging business à la Kickstarter also harbor tremendous potential to pull together funding for political action from a constellation of fragmented companies, empowering them to form their own lobbying and campaign-cash forces to disrupt legacy industries’ deep-pocketed lock on power.

As the Republican Party increasingly operates outside the realm of reason, it’s the Democrats’ turn to answer a call to duty, and to build a bridge for business to political power based on prosperity and social advancement.

We know the strategy works. After all, it’s been done before.

Setting aside the prospect of aligning Apple with workers’ rights groups, Katz’s prescription gets her own analysis wrong: The Chamber is not a real coalition, as she makes plain throughout the book. And the promise of secrecy it offers to, say, an oil company is not one needed by the Sierra Club. Environmental and consumer groups are just fine with the public knowing they are pushing for whatever they’re pushing for, and it does the project no harm for anybody to know it. They don’t need cover.

The prospect of crowdfunding in Washington has the potential to be real in some situations, but matching the scale of billionaire industrialists, who can easily chip in several hundred million per election cycle, is no easy task. What Katz finds is not that the Chamber has found a new way to win the game, but that it is, in significant ways, playing a different game entirely. While the parties jockey for position ahead of the next election, the Chamber plays for keeps.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/meet-the-most-powerful-political-organization-in-washington/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/03/07/meet-the-most-powerful-political-organization-in-washington/

[acciodracarys-blog]

Studio Gang's American Museum of Natural History Expansion Set to Begin Construction

Visitor view from the entrance of the Gilder Center into the Central Exhibition Hall. Image AMNH/D. Finnin

After receiving approval by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission last fall, Studio Gang's expansion of the American Museum of Natural History is preparing to begin construction, reports New York YIMBY, as permits for the project have been filed with Department of Buildings.

To be known as the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, the expansion will consist of 245,000 square feet across six floors, approximately 80 percent of which will be located within the current museum footprint. Three existing museum buildings/wings will be reduced and adapted to accommodate the Gilder Center, which will house a variety of new exhibition and educational spaces, while enhancing connections to existing galleries. In total, approximately 203,000-gross-square-foot will be added to the Museum, already one of the largest natural history museums in the world.

The view of the exterior faade of the Gilder Center from 79th Street and Columbus Avenue. Image AMNH/D. Finnin

We uncovered a way to vastly improve visitor circulation and Museum functionality, while tapping into the desire for exploration and discovery that are emblematic of science and also part of being human, said Jeanne Gang, founder of Studio Gang, at the reveal of the design in 2015. Upon entering the space, natural daylight from above and sightlines to various activities inside invite movement through the Central Exhibition Hall on a journey towards deeper understanding. The architectural design grew out of the Museum's mission.

Section revealing "connections" throughout. Image AMNH/D. Finnin

The new Central Exhibition Hall, which also serves as the Columbus Avenue entrance. Image AMNH/D. Finnin

Other collaborators on the project include Ralph Appelbaum of Ralph Appelbaum Associates (exhibition design), landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand and Davis Brody Bond Architects.

Construction on the $340 million Gilder Center is anticipated to before the end of 2017 with a tentative target completion date set for 2020.

News via New York YIMBY, American Museum of Natural History.

Jeanne Gang to Expand New York's American Museum of Natural History

A conceptual design by Studio Gang was unveiled today as the preferred expansion to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. The proposed building, named the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, aims to host an array of public exhibition space as well as become a premier "active scientific and educational institution" that enhances connections with the existing Museum and encourages exploration amongst its users.

[babyjakes]

I couldn’t choose just one so here’s 3:

‘a tear has still managed to make its way down your cheek, causing you to flinch back, wiping at it quickly as your cheeks begin to burn.

“Oh honey, it’s okay,” Bucky soothes, reaching out and pulling you into his arms. “Com'ere, babydoll. It’s okay. I’ve got you, sweetheart. You’re just overwhelmed, aren’t you, pumpkin?” ‘ - a little loud.

Sometimes I get told off for crying when I get stressed out and overwhelmed so I try not to cry in front of people anymore- just thinking of Bucky acknowledging that’s it’s okay to cry when overwhelmed 🥹

one hand nestles against her rosy cheeks, her thumb tucked between her lips. Reaching out a gentle hand, I brush a few stray strands of hair away from her face to uncover her cheeks, pale and flushed with pink, freckles dotting her nose. I can’t help but smile as I look at her. -chapter 24 ‘a name just for her’ in faad.

Steve’s love for her is just and She’s just a lil baby 😭

Andy fusses you gently as he lifts you up into his arms, snuggling you close to his chest as your head tucks under his chin. “You’re okay, I gotcha.” - refrigerator rules

I just want a daddy Andy, that’s all I ask! Just a big cuddle from Andy pls 🥺

aww omg omg i love alllllll of these 🥺 bucky in a little loud is so soft and yes !!! as someone who also gets told off for crying, it is so important we get a nice soft gentle man being patient with us instead. and omg steve’s love for little willa in faad always melts my heart, he really adores her and i love writing it, it feels like writing poetry and that’s so fun for me! and omg refrigerator rules you already know 😔✌️ andy makes the best nicest softest daddy fr!!

🧸 come tell me your fav fic of mine + why 🧸