A fascinating, not widely reported blurb showed up a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Post, the newspaper of choice for Beltway wonks who are interested in how federal public policy is actually made by our government, as opposed to what our politicians claim those policies to be. It's worth quoting verbatim:

"Right after voting yesterday morning to limit debate on legislation clamping down on corporate abuses, 16 Democratic senators flew on corporate jets from Washington to Nantucket, Mass., for a weekend retreat with 250 major campaign donors.

"The cost of using the jets -- estimated by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee at just over $44,000 -- will be counted as in-kind soft-money contributions to the committee. Tovah Ravitz-Meehan, DSCC communications director, said invitations to the weekend gathering were sent to those who had given $20,000 or more..."

The Democrats, of course, are not to be outdone. You may have noticed that President Bush has been making a lot of policy pronouncements lately in heavily reported speeches to one or another local audience in North Carolina, or Alabama, or wherever -- as opposed to his simply announcing them from the White House.

Those speeches happen in the afternoon, and they aren't the point of his trips. The point is the fundraising dinner that invariably follows in the evening, for one or another Congressional or gubernatorial candidate. (In North Carolina, for example, it was for Elizabeth Dole, running for the Senate). As with the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the scramble is on to extract as much soft money from big donors as is physically possible before such donations become illegal this fall.

That will occupy most of the time of "our" representatives when they break for a month after this week. It's not like their freshly gerrymandered congressional districts require that most of them actually need to run competitive campaigns for their re-election; they're just addicted to the thinly disguised bribes.

All this comes as newspaper accounts were flooded for the past several days with headlines like "Senate Passes Crackdown on Corporate Crime." Don't believe it for a moment -- read Maria's lead article for the details of why you shouldn't, and what sorts of measures would actually make a difference.

But for evidence that the system is far more broken than the wobbling market and the misfortunes of Enron, WorldCom, and all the others, one need look no farther than last week's shameful passage, in the middle of the night, of presidential "fast track" trade negotiation authority.

Fast track, like most trade issues, is one of those arcane matters that causes many peoples' eyes to glaze over. Nonetheless, and particularly with the increased post-Seattle/WTO awareness of the importance of international trade agreements to all sorts of globalization-related woes, fast track has been one of the most controversial measures on Capitol Hill for the last seven years. Essentially, it would give the occupant of the White House authority to not only negotiate, but implement bilateral and multilateral trade agreements -- the Free Trade Area of the Americas is the most ambitious one currently on the plate, but there are a bunch of other regional and bilateral pacts in the pipeline, too. The Senate, which constitutionally is required to approve international treaties, essentially, with fast track, waives that right; it can, under fast track, vote after the fact, with no power to offer or demand amendments. By virtually all accounts fast track means that Congress is cut out of the loop of crafting free trade policies.

Fast track is something that first Bill Clinton and now George Bush have desperately craved -- Clinton made it a priority due to the grueling Congressional fight to pass NAFTA, a fight that succeeded only because the growing opposition to NAFTA was cut short by a surprise middle-of-the-night vote. Every year since, fast track has come up in Congress, and every year since it has failed. Until last week.

For months, with Bush riding high in the post-9/11 polls, fast track made slow progress; versions narrowly passed both the Senate and House, and last week a conference committee was working on hammering out a compromise version that would then be sent back to the Senate and House for what were expected, especially in the House, to be tightly contested final votes. But, remarkably given the headlines and public posturing last week of ending corporate business as usual, the whole debate got short-circuited.

Corporate lobbyists swarmed Capitol Hill last week, both to short-circuit any possible "difficult" provisions in the corporate fraud bill rushed through (they needn't have worried), and to push passage of fast track before Congress adjourned. Not surprisingly -- this is still Washington -- they got exactly what they wanted, and the public never knew about it. Late last week, key members of the joint conference committee reached agreement, and literally within hours -- at three in the morning on Saturday -- the House passed, by a 215-212 margin, a 300 page bill that gives the corporate "free trade" lobby everything it wanted.

Passage this week in the Democratic-controlled Senate is expected to be easier, perhaps by the time you read this. (If not, it can't hurt to deluge your local Senators, and all the rest of them if you have time, with phone calls, faxes, and e-mails. Do it now.) Just like that, half a decade's worth of controversy was ended, without benefit of any public awareness, let alone debate, as to the contents of the final bill. Chances are good that most representatives didn't read the final bill, either, and have no idea what provisions might be buried in it.

Across the country this week, people will be opening their monthly 401(k) statements and seeing what trust in corporate benevolence as our sole public policy criterion -- in their case, creating tax incentives for putting their savings into the corporate fund-raising scheme called the stock market -- has done to their dreams of retirement. That's the better off folks -- working class types don't have retirement plans, or any other job benefits, after two decades' worth of longer hours and stagnant earnings. They're lucky to have a credit card or two that isn't maxed out. Such is the "consumer confidence" that our economy is now built upon.

Both Democrats and Republicans have sold us out, and remarkably, even as they insisted otherwise and the headlines went along with the charade, last week, they were selling us out even more despicably than usual. But given the spectacle of corporate crime, peoples' decimated savings, and widespread disgust with our transparently corrupt political system, the difference is that people care, people are livid, and the duplicity of our public officials is in very real danger of catching up with them.