BW Inquiry Exposes Bandow Payola Scheme
Press Action
Friday, December 30, 2005
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/bandow12302005/
Doug Bandow may have lost his fellowship at the Cato Institute and his syndicated column gig with Copley News Service as a result of BusinessWeek reporter Eamon Javers snooping into Bandow’s relationship with indicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
But perhaps owing to his strong evangelical Christian beliefs, Bandow’s fall from grace was short-lived. Less than two weeks after he resigned from Cato and Copley, Bandow was hired as VP of policy by Washington, D.C.-based Citizen Outreach, “a limited-government public policy organization dedicated to putting the ‘public’ back in public policy.”
Citizen Outreach President Chuck Muth evidently was unfazed by Bandow accepting as much as $2,000 per column—without disclosing these payments—for writing favorably about Abramoff’s clients since the mid-1990s.
Here’s what Muth had to say about Bandow in a news release announcing his hiring, effective Jan. 1, 2006:
“I’ve been reading Doug’s columns for many years now. And even on the rare policy issue in which he and I might not agree 100 percent, I always know that Doug’s reasoning is based on objective thought and not emotion. He’s able to justify any public policy issue from a limited government standpoint in the best tradition of our Founding Fathers. I wish we had more public officials who think like Doug in elective office. Citizen Outreach couldn’t be happier that he is joining our organization.”
I respected Bandow, primarily for his work as editor of Inquiry magazine, one of the all-time great political magazines, particularly in its late-1970s heyday. Here’s how investigative journalist Jonathan Marshall remembers Inquiry:
Inquiry magazine was founded in 1977 as a San Francisco-based biweekly journal of investigative reporting and libertarian-oriented opinion.
Published by the Cato Institute, which still operates as a think tank in Washington DC, Inquiry aimed to find common ground between libertarians and liberal-leftists critical of state power.
The magazine, once described by William Safire as a “lively, lefty magazine” and by the New Republic as “best of the right-wing rags,” featured regular columns by Nat Hentoff on civil liberties, foreign reporting by Penny Lernoux, and CIA exposes by such writers as David Wise and Fred Landis. As associate editor of the magazine for several years, I contributed articles on the Nugan Hand banking scandal, the Nixon administration’s plot to assassinate Omar Torrijos of Panama, and the JFK assassination.
In 1982, after moving to Washington with the Cato Institute, Inquiry went monthly and became a more strictly libertarian journal, with a stronger emphasis on free-market principles. The magazine was finally folded in 1984. At its peak it had a circulation of about 30,000.
After leaving Inquiry, Bandow served in the Reagan administration (I’ve never understood how a libertarian could rationalize working for such a big-government president as Reagan). Since the 1980s, he’s written books, articles and op-eds and served as a fellow at Cato. He has generally followed the mainstream, right-wing libertarian line on the top issues of the day.
There’s little surprise when big government right-wingers like Armstrong Williams are found to be secretly receiving government funds to tout Bush administration programs. But how a libertarian like Bandow could get involved with a public trough-feeding lobbyist like Abramoff is quite perplexing.