Last week, Clark gave us the short version of what’s wrong these days with Dick Gephardt. The Nation, in “Dick Gephardt’s Spectacular Sellout” gives us a more comprehensive summary. Indeed, author Sebastian Jones notes that all the major parts of the progressive agenda are struggling if not completely stalled in Congress, and Gephardt has lobbied against each one:

Key aspects of healthcare reform, like a public option, appear dead; climate change legislation, having narrowly passed the House in June, awaits an uncertain fate in the Senate; the Employee Free Choice Act and financial industry reforms have gone off the grid.

Is Jones’ assessment that the progressive agenda will fail in Congress darker than necessary? The next few months will tell. But there is no doubt that big business is throwing all its weight into stopping that agenda, and Jones feels that corporations are succeeding.

[The] momentum is with the corporate interests, thanks to players like Gephardt who have escorted them to the bargaining table. In a town where everyone seemingly has a price, Gephardt has distinguished himself, selling his reputation as a pro-labor, pro-universal healthcare, pro-environment expert and advocate to his new corporate masters, giving their efforts to kill and maim reforms a familiar, friendly face in the Democratic establishment. As a result, Gephardt has become a highly sought-after and very effective lobbyist. He has also betrayed nearly every principle he once claimed to hold.

Betraying those principles has included working for Goldman Sachs, helping Visa kill credit card reform, teaming up with Tom Daschle on behalf of UnitedHealth Group to oppose the public option, and playing Peabody Coal’s dirty game of opposing climate change legislation. When Gephardt’s 2004 presidential bid collapsed, he announced that he would spend time with his family and “consider a couple of employment opportunities.” Soon, he and his son, Matthew, formed a lobbying consulting firm–a classy one, though, Matthew claimed:

“We’re really getting involved with companies that share our values–ones involved in good corporate citizenry, with taking care of their employees, taking care of the environment and their local area as well, investing back in the community.”

By these standards, Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company and the firm’s first registered client, was a bizarre choice. Palmer, a senior vice president with the company, had helped to run the Greening Earth Society, a defunct industry front-group specializing in climate change denial, famously adopting as its motto “CO2 is beneficial to humankind and all of nature.” Describing their environmental record as “horrendous,” Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s National Coal Campaign, told me in a recent interview that Peabody’s “goal is to burn as much coal as possible.”

In an apparent attempt to counter this reputation, Peabody and Gephardt signed on to pushes for “clean coal”–something many environmentalists consider an oxymoron at best. In July Gephardt served as keynote speaker for the Clean Coal Technology Conference in Hope, Arkansas. All the big industry players were there, but several environmental groups, like the Sierra Club, were denied invitations. One speaker complained about excessive environmental regulation, while Mike Ross, the Blue Dog representative now famous for giving the White House daily headaches on healthcare, dropped by to reassure with platitudes like “coal is part of the solution to America’s energy problems.”

Then there is Peabody’s labor record. According to a July 2006 report prepared by Religious Leaders for Coalfield Justice and Interfaith Worker Justice, the company worked hard to strip its mines of unionized workers, with CEO Greg Boyce saying in 2005, “We have reduced the intensity of our unionization, and we would continue on that path.” The Rev. Theodore Erickson, a veteran of several coal-country labor disputes, told me that Peabody has been “aggressively decimating its unions” since the 1990s by closing unionized mines and opening new facilities nearby as a minority stakeholder. “Once the mine is fully staffed with nonunion people,” Erickson explained, “Peabody will buy the remainder…and the mine is forever nonunion.” The Sierra Club has joined union organizers at several recent St. Louis shareholder meetings in joint protests over Peabody’s environmental and labor policies. “They’re vehemently antiunion,” says Nilles.

After laying bare the reality behind Gephardt’s claim that Peabody Coal shares his progressive values, Sebastian Jones describes in some detail two other areas of Gephardt’s work: his efforts on behalf of pharmaceutical companies and his lobbying for professional employer organizations (PEOs), which Jones characterizes as a new twist on the ways of corporations in screwing employees. None of it is pretty.

Jones’ conclusion is harsh, not just about Gephardt but about the Democrats in D.C.

For Democrats, it raises the legitimate question of whether [Gephardt’s] ideological shift from progressive populist to big business champion is indicative of where the entire party is headed after two successive electoral victories.

(….)

While it is well within Gephardt’s rights to make money representing every anti-labor, anti-environmental, anti-universal healthcare client he can find, the former Congressman cannot have it both ways. Neither can the Democratic Party. In 2006 the top issue for voters was Washington’s “culture of corruption,” epitomized by Tom DeLay’s K Street Project and Jack Abramoff’s illegal excesses. Then, as in the 2008 campaign, Democrats were happy to decry the influence of lobbyists and special interests at every turn. As an electoral strategy, it worked brilliantly, but there has been little real reform to match the rhetoric. So it is hardly surprising that men like Gephardt continue to be welcome in polite progressive company, to be treated as statesmen by the media and their Congressional colleagues, and to serve as ostensibly neutral experts on issues they are heavily invested in on behalf of their new employers. Progressives would be fooling themselves to think the Gephardts of the Beltway are any different from their Republican predecessors. In fact, when it comes to cynically exploiting his reputation to profit his new employers, Gephardt is worse.

Congratulations to the Post-Dispatch for that title to its editorial on Ashcroft selling his reputation by accepting a no bid contract from his former underling at the Justice Department. His consulting firm has received “a no-bid gig that will pay out $27 million to $52 million over just 18 months” for monitoring a medical device company accused of making illegal kickbacks to doctors.

The sale of his soul reminds me of a minor tidbit from an old interview with Ashcroft that’s been sticking in my craw for several years now. In his last campaign, he came across all humble and homey by explaining how much he’s learned from his wife over the years. He offered the example of how she trained him to empty the dishwasher by putting the newly clean dishes on the bottom of the stack so that all the dishes got equal wear and tear. Isn’t that sweet? And so appropriate, the sort of thing his wife would be expected to know about. No Hillary Clinton in that household.

Pardon my cynicism–and I could be wrong–but I don’t even believe the example. I seriously doubt he did much emptying of the dishwasher, but if he really did, I hope he’ll accept my apology.  He and his wife are more careful housekeepers than I am. And I’ll just add that even after he earns multi-millions in the next year and a half, perhaps he’ll continue to live his humble, well ordered existence.

But even if he doesn’t spend any of those millions on waitstaff, I feel compelled to remind Mr. Ashcroft, considering how he has always worn his evangelicalism on his sleeve, of Christ’s admonition (Matt. 10:24):

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

Lest I seem too partisan in picking on Ash-trough, let me also congratulate the P-D on playing fair. The editorial remembered to take a well deserved shot at Dick Gephardt as well:

Somehow we thought Mr. Ashcroft would avoid the temptation to monetize his public service. We thought the same thing about former Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, D-St. Louis, another Mr. Clean while in office. We were disappointed there, too; Mr. Gephardt now is shilling for the investment banking and energy industries and the government of Turkey.

Shame on you, Dick Gephardt.

Paradise
Written by John Prine.

When I was a child, my family would travel,
To western Kentucky, where my parents were born.
And there’s a backwards old town that’s often remembered.
So many times that my memories are worn.
And Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg county,
Down by the Green River, where Paradise lay.
“Well I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in askin’.”
“Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.”

snip

Then the coal company came, with the world’s largest shovel,
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land.
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken.
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.

Listen to Prine sing the soulful lyrics:

A bill currently in committee, the Clean Water Protection Act (HR2169), a mere two sentences long, would reverse the Bush Administration’s 2002 decision that toxic “waste” from mountaintop removal sites could be classified as “fill material” and dumped into the local streams.  That order has led to sickening environmental depradations by the coal mining companies.

At last count, the bill had 107 sponsors.  Lacy Clay’s name is on there, but I don’t see any other Missouri representative.  It is of especial importance that Russ Carnahan is not on the list since Carnahan is on the Water Resources Subcommittee, where the bill will go first.  If you live in Carnahan’s district, you have an opportunity to get more bang for your phone call than usual (202-225-2671  or 314-962-1523).  Call him and urge him to co-sponsor the bill.  I’ve always been grateful to live in the district of a true progressive, Lacy Clay.  But in a way, those of you who live in Carnahan’s district are more fortunate, because you have the opportunity to influence someone who often sits on the fence to do the right thing.  Go for it!

By the way, why isn’t Cleaver’s name on this list?  And where is Skelton on the issue?  They need phone calls as well. 

Faithfull, a diarist at Daily Kos, emphasizes the importance of stopping mountaintop removal:

More than 1 million acres have been blasted away, and shoved recklessly into creek-beds and hollows. 1200+ miles of headwater streams have been buried, poisoning the water for us and those who live down stream.

All this damage is being done for what amounts to, at most, another 10-15 years of coal–coal that adds to global warming.

Another Missouri Democrat plays a part in this drama.  Dick Gephardt is now a lobbyist, and one of his most important clients is Peabody Coal, headquartered in St. Louis and the largest private sector coal company in the world.  He’s working to get funding for clean-coal technologies.  There’s controversy about whether that’s worth the investment, but there’s no question that in the meantime, Peabody has “tortured the timber and stripped all the land.”  There’s no excuse for such rape, and seeing Gephardt sell his soul like this puts me in mind of a scene from a famous play/movie of the sixties, A Man for All Seasons. 

The main character is Sir Thomas More, who was put to death because he wouldn’t publicly approve of Henry VIII’s marriage to Ann Boleyn.  At More’s trial for treason, he listened to an erstwhile friend, newly appointed as Attorney General for Wales, commit the perjury that doomed More to death.  As Richard Rich left the stand, Sir Thomas fingered the medal of office hanging around Rich’s neck and said:  “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world.  But for Wales?”  Let me reword that piece of dialogue:  “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world.  But for Peabody Coal?”