Though Ms. Baker was appointed to what is considered an independent regulatory agency, she signed the administration’s ethics pledge upon taking office in July 2009. Under the pledge, she will not be allowed to lobby anyone at the F.C.C. for two years after her departure.
Let me see... in the Australian context such things can and do happen, but happen much less because "lobbyist" is a bit less of a job category than it is in the US.
Part of the reason, I think, is that individual parliamentarians make fewer of their own decisions than they do in the US. It's almost unheard of for an individual member of parliament to vote against their party on a given issue, so all decisionmaking on whether to support a given law is done at the party rather than individual level. And you can't persuade a whole party to support a law just by buying it steak dinners and hookers, you have to convince 'em that it's actually a votewinner. (Or you could just get your industry group to donate huge sums of money to the party, which is how, for instance, the Australian Hoteliers' Association keeps liquor licencing laws written to their advantage in most states).
How would such laws be created with such a personnel system in place? If they existed, who would enforce them?
I'd love to be proved ignorant on this and see some unrelated-to (and therefore incorruptible-by) enforcement agency slap the fuck out of Ms. Corrupt Lobbyist, but I'm doubtful.
Every now and then I contemplate a system where, after leaving office, former high-level government officials are provided with a generous pension but subjected to a 100% tax on any income whatsoever from non-government sources. Obviously such a system has plenty of disadvantages - but apart from those, I wonder whether it would help the revolving door problem at all, or whether cronyism would persist even without financial motivation.
But then you have to also regulate the income of their family - it would be all to easy to give those financial motivations to their spouse, children, or others close to them.
Right, and there's also the ever popular "we'll donate to your favorite charity" maneuver (for a non-government example, witness the Captain Morgan NFL touchdown dance mini-controversy of a few years back).
It might be possible to do something about the friends/family issue with careful crafting of the laws - or maybe I'm just a closet monarchist. ;)
They would establish something like time-limited non-compete agreements: when you accept a position, you'll know that, when you leave it, you'll have to spend 2-3 years without working in a related field. Hell, they could even be 2 paid years.
(that) any official in a position within a government body, whether elected or appointed, which regulates a particular industry, area of industry, or the laws and compliance of said industry, may not take a position within any company that benefited directly from any regulatory or oversight decision of the oversight body within the last 5 years on any case where the stated company or organizations competitive status with respect to monopolies, anti-trust, or anti-competitive business environment was considered.
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This would mean that anyone who was in a position of oversight for a given industry and who had to consider, directly, regulations which may or may not benefit a particular company may not accept a position with that company for at least 5 years after their departure from that official position.
The immediate reaction to this proposal will be the argument from every corner that you have just barred anyone with industry knowledge or expertise from being willing to take any government regulation position. Thereby guaranteeing incompetent regulation. (Insert long list of examples where unknowledgeable regulators have proven incompetent to regulate.)
You can be sure that this argument will be accompanied by large donations to lobbyists, and by outrage among all government regulators who were expecting to wind up in the industry that they regulate (and that they frequently came from).
Sorry, no. The FCC has been pushing a relaxation of media ownership rules that benefits the whole industry and has the active support of both ABC and Time Warner. (Active up to and including the level of buying newspaper ads to sway people towards their position that the FCC should be allowed to do this.) That fact would bar people in the FCC from working in the entire industry if the proposed anti-corruption rule were in place.
How then are conflicts of interest handled within any given law firm. This is effectively the same thing. Let them bitch about it - we need to solve this problem.
You think that law firms do a good job of handling conflicts of interest? Really?
Let me give you an important example. David Bois won his anti-trust case against Microsoft, and then proposed a penalty that was a slap on the wrist. He turned around, and then was handed an endless stream of revenue from the SCO case. There is evidence that said legal proceeding was funded behind the scenes by Microsoft. Coincidence? I think not.
As for the argument that I said you would face, I didn't make it up. That is the bog standard argument that is always trotted out to support the standard practice of having regulators come from, and then return to, the industries that they regulate. In practice people really do get swayed by the argument that a person who knows the industry is at an advantage in understanding it well enough to get involved in regulation. Either that or they pretend to be while accepting donations, but it works out to the same thing in the end.
Then all you do is increase the cost by about 5 years worth of pay and we're back to square one. Admittedly, it'll handle lobbying at the local level for construction jobs for example, but it won't stop the oil lobby in Alaska.
