Washington on $10 Million a Day: How Lobbyists Plunder the Nation.

By Ken Silverstein Common Courage Press, $22.95

I grew up, in the 1970s, gulping down books with titles like Taming the Giant Corporation and Corporate Power in America. In those days, it seemed obvious that American government and American conservatism were both front groups for corporate oligarchs. General Motors was a sovereign economic state, imperious and impervious. "If they wanted to wipe out everybody by 1980," one American Motors executive said of GM in 1976, "the only one who could stop them is the government" We all know how that story turned out.

Well, maybe not quite all of us know. Reading Ken Silverstein's new book, I remembered flares, leisure suits, and velour. "Today, the vast lobbying power of corporations and the wealthy has reduced the collective voice of average citizens to a faint din, barely heard in the corridors of power," he writes. Beneath the surface, he says, "the two parties stand for virtually the same thing, namely, corporate rule" Indeed, "when corporations come calling, Washington lawmakers toss the opinion of their constituents -- and the public interest -- out the window."

In 1998, to read a new book that is shocked -- shocked! -- by corporate influence peddling is a slightly odd experience, like attending a convention of anthroposophists. One admires the author's passion, but wonders if it could not be applied more usefully, Silverstein is certainly right to smell something rotten in Washington's cynical lobbyist-for-hire culture. But what? To read his analysis is to be reminded of what a pity it is that the American left has had nothing interesting to say about government for 20 years.

As it happens, Silverstein has written one of the better descriptions of postmodern Washington in action. He infiltrates a couple of Washington fund-raisers -- good fun -- and describes with wicked accuracy the devious machinations of modern "astroturf" lobbying (bogus grass-room movements concocted by Washington consultants with computers and phone banks). Although he can't resist the urge to call military contractors "merchants of death" and anti-regulatory lobbies "the forces of darkness," he leavens his indignation with a welcome dash of mischievous humor ("Congress: Training Grounds for Real Jobs"). He should have included notes to show where his own reporting leaves off and other people's begins. Still, as a work of reportage, the book succeeds.

The trouble is that he writes from an analytical school that is still imprinted on 1970s populist-pluralism, in which the great democratic bazaar would act to reflect the public good, if only the corporate baddies and their vampiric K-Street minions could be prevented from corrupting the process. This view of Washington's problems is much like Dickens' view of industrialization: At bottom, the problem is moral. (A clue: Silverstein is co-editor, with Alexander Cockburn, of Counterpunch, described as "an investigative newsletter about power and evil in Washington.") The people need to take back Washington from its smarmy Heeps and brutal Gradgrinds.

To sustain this analysis, you need to believe that arrayed against the greedheads of corporate America is The Public Interest, and you also need to believe that it's obvious whose side The Public Interest is on. Silverstein is alarmed by the American Tort Reform Association, which he condemns as "a business-backed campaign that would shield corporations from product liability lawsuits arising from their sale of dangerous and defective products." Fair enough, I suppose; but does he, or anyone, imagine that the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, one of the fattest of the fat-cat lobbies, is a selfless tribune of the public good? He condemns private utility companies' legislative "assault on public power," but fails to mention that public power is a well-heeled and self-serving interest group in its own right. (The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is renowned for its lobbying clout; it is headed by the ex-Congressman who used to protect its subsidies, and in the 1995-96 election cycle its political action committee gave $773,000 to about 360 congressional candidates.)

In truth, the great bulk of corporate lobbying is defensive, or at least is perceived that way by the people doing it. (Ask Bill Gates.) Interest groups and activists discover problems, some more real than others (the day-care crisis, the education crisis, the health-care crisis, the drug crisis, the tobacco crisis, etc., etc.), and invent proposals that energize dense swarms of lobbyists, who win no matter who else loses. Politicians gin up legislation (tax bills, highway bills, banking bills, health bills, etc., etc.) that keeps the lobbies circling past the toll booth, dropping in campaign contributions as they go. On and on the cycle goes, escalating as everyone counters everyone else's lobbying with more lobbying.

Because the problem is systemic rather than moral, it is no use to condemn corporate lobbies while exculpating the Sierra Club, the teachers' unions, or the trial lawyers. The problem is not that business dominates; it is that no one dominates, so no one can stop the cascade. Washington today is like a demented casino whose motto is a twisted variant of that state lottery slogan: "You can't win if you don't play -- but, boy, can you lose." Unsurprisingly, everybody plays.

The left, which cares more than anybody about revitalizing government, should by rights be a fount of hard-headed thinking about the afflictions of American government. To become that, however, it will need to give up its comfortable melodrama of rapacious private companies bullying noble public institutions and stomping on plucky, underfunded citizens' groups. It will have to stop hunting for villains and see the system whole. Not an easy or a pleasant task, but might we hope that, in his next book, Ken Silverstein will start the project?

JONATHAN RAUCH is national correspondent of National Journal and author of Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government.