The Revolving Door: the holy grail of politics. If you can’t write a book and charge $10000 for speaking engagement, you shoot for the revolving door. Making a good government salary and reaping all those great benefits is only good for a few years at a time. It’s really a pay cut with the expectation you’ll make enough new friends that you can grab a nice job in the private sector in a couple of years.
Inherently, there isn’t anything wrong with the revolving door. Imagine you’re a low level analyst at GE and you get offered a job that pays $40k working somewhere in government. It’s a pay cut but you know you’ll make lots of new friends. So you leave GE and work in government for 5 years and get offered a job for another company that now pays $100k. You went from private sector to public sector and back to private sector. Hence the name: revolving door.
Again, there isn’t anything wrong with this. Private companies want people who are experienced in government on their payroll. Many lobbyists used to work in government themselves. Congressmen have been know to become lobbyists too. Some high profile Obama officials have leveraged their exposure to some great jobs too. Peter Orzag is an economist who served as Obama’s budget guy. Now he’s a Vice Chairman at Citigroup. Robert Gibbs recently left his post as Press Secretary to work as a consultant on Obama’s campaign for reelection. But it will be a private sector post, so he’ll be making bank.
But sometimes the revolving door gets jammed and it looks more like a straight up sellout. Before I talk about Meredith Baker I want to make it clear no one knows what went on behind the scenes, I can only talk about what things look like on the outside. And this is the wrongest possible way to use the revolving door. Meredith Attwell Baker is a departing FCC commissioner. The FCC regulates everything from radio waves to censorship on TV and setting the rules for internet providers. They have a board of sorts that acts as judge and jury on important events that roll up under their oversight. Most recently, the FCC ruled to approve of a merger between NBC Universal and Comcast. This was a big issue because NBC makes content for TV and Comcast broadcasts it. But Comcast also broadcasts competitors like ABC and CBS. They might show favoritism to their channel now that NBC is a Comcast company. This was a controversial ruling and Baker was one of the biggest cheerleaders for this merger happening. Previously, she’d been supporting of other policies regarding internet access that screws users and benefits companies like Comcast.
So the merger was finally approved and a couple of months later, guess who got a job at Comcast? Baker of course. Better still, her official title makes this revolving door example painfully blatant: senior vice president of governmental affairs. A conspiracy theorist would say she voted to approve the merger and Comcast gave her a job as a thanks. I doubt this is the case but we really can’t know. She is actually qualified for the position considering her time with the FCC. And she was a lobbyist (natch) before she was appointed to the FCC too. From the outside looking in this seems terrible. But there are rules about this stuff and as long as she obeyed them she won’t be in any legal trouble. I suspect there might at least be an investigation.
It would look worse if she had never been supportive of Comcast and did an about-face. But she’s been pro-business and lobbying for companies like Comcast for the better part of her career. She does serve as a really good example of the revolving door, and exactly how not to do it.
Photo: Knight Foundation
 By weakonom |
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