The start date for the controversy over Internet taxes is 1992, and its precipitating event a Supreme Court decision that had nothing to do with the embryonic Internet. In Quill Corp. v. North Dakota the Court ruled that the state had no legal basis to impose tax on the sales that Quill made through its catalog because the office supply company had no physical footprint in the state.

Quill may have been selling pens through an old media format, but the Court’s decision soon became the legal tent pole for arguments about why government can’t tax the online sales of remote providers, never mind why it shouldn’t.

To say that the Quill ruling has deprived state and local governments of incalculable revenue is by now a hallowed political cliché. To cite one example, the state of Wisconsin, already suffering recession-deep budget shortfalls, lost an estimated $127 million in uncollected on-line tax revenue in 2011. It needn’t have been so. For the Court clearly indicated in Quill that its decision could be overturned by new legislation in Congress that streamlined the convoluted tax laws that had prompted its ruling.

States have not suffered this quietly, continually lobbying—lobbying ferociously—for the kind of Congressional remedy. At the same time resistance from Internet sellers and anti-tax lobbyists has been no less bullish, and much more successful. In the nearly two decades since Amazon launched in 1994 no comprehensive tax policy has been forced onto e-commerce.

Last year this online-offline deadlock cracked when Amazon announced its support for a bi-partisan deal coming out of the Senate, the Marketplace Fairness Act (SB 1832). Sponsored by Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee), the legislation would close the Internet sales tax loophole—ironically the “Amazon loophole”—by implementing a national framework that enables the states to collect sales taxes from online sales.

Amazon’s decision was a dramatic turn-about for the company, which for years had sought to deal with prickly state tax commissioners one at a time. Currently it collects sales tax in New York, Kansas, North Dakota, Washington State and Kentucky and has established phase-in deals with another eight states. Many of these deals have required significant lobbying investments by the company. For example, the passage of an Internet sales tax exemption in South Carolina, heavily promoted by Amazon, cost the company over $156,000 in advocacy fees, with the bulk of this spent on direct lobbying. Ultimately Amazon acquiesced to South Carolina’s demand that is start remitting sales tax, although its broad-front lobbying successfully pushed off that date until 2016.

But operating in such a patchwork manner has created costs in time and money for Amazon, and resulted in fractured and inefficient lobbying strategy, all of which would be smoothed out with the implementation of the Marketplace Fairness Act.

Opponents of the Act make the argument that state governments suffering shortfalls have issues of spending, not revenue, and should seek budget remedies by cutting expenses, not increasing taxes. Grover Norquist’s lobbying powerhouse Americans For Tax Reform has announced it has serious concerns with the legislation, a view shared by the National Taxpayers Union and Tea Party favorite, Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina). And in spite of Amazon’s softening, other huge online retailers like Ebay continue to vehemently lobby against the Act in its current form.

In spite of pushback from Norquist and other anti-tax partisans many political observers predicted that the Act, buttressed with such bi-partisan muscle, was headed for success in 2012. The interests that have jelled to support the Marketplace Fairness Act are a diverse and potent mix of players. Public sector unions, their members feeling the pinch of diminished state budgets, have rallied to the side of Republican governors, conservative retail associations, and major league brick-and-mortar operators like Wal-Mart and Home Depot. To all appearances it seemed that a rare instance of across-the-aisles compromise had been reached, a moment that would extraordinarily change the national tax base.

This optimism seems to have been misplaced. In an election year all the talk of new taxes has, like so much political kryptonite, wilted the bipartisan energy needed to pass the Act. Major online businesses remain strident in their opposition. And perhaps most importantly, with legislation stymied in Washington, Amazon appears to have changed track once again, pulling back on its efforts to pass the Act in this Congress, and redirecting its lobbying back to the state level. Although Washington will almost certainly take up the issue after the November elections, for the time being consumers can expect to enjoy another blissful seasons of untaxed shopping from home.

Major pharmacy trade groups have massed their resources to lobby for H.R. 1946, otherwise known as the “Preserving Our Home Town Independent Pharmacies Act.”  Sponsored by Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), the bill would create an exemption in antitrust laws to allow independent drug stores to collectively bargain over prices when negotiating with health care providers and pharmacy benefit managers.  Opposing the legislation is an odd bedfellows consortium of interests, including the Federal Trade Commission, labor unions, employers and federal agencies. They argue that passage of H.R. 1946 would raise drug costs for health plans and health consumers.

Driving for the enactment of H.R. 1946 are the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, the National Community Pharmacists Association and the Association of Community Pharmacists.   The sharp end of their pitch is that the pharmaceutical marketplace has been radically transformed by the emergence of companies known as pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) including major players like Express Scripts, Inc. which was recently given FTC approval of its $29 billion dollar acquisition of Medco Health Solutions.  PBMs control the prices that health plan providers pay for prescription drugs.   A few years ago they managed approximately 10% of U.S. prescriptions.  Now that number has skyrocketed to 85% of prescriptions, with PBMs emerging as multi-billion dollar operations.   This new level of market power exasperates pharmacy trade groups who insist PBMs have created an anticompetitive environment that gouges pharmaceutical providers.  For independent pharmacies not to get squeezed out in negotiations with the giant PBMs, runs their argument, they need to be allowed to act as a united, collective front.

Prescription drug costs are higher in the US than in any other country, with annual consumer spending on retail pharmaceuticals topping $300 billion dollars.   Critics of H.R. 1946 insist that permitting drug stores to unite on pricing would force these costs up even higher.  A recent study, commissioned by the trade group Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, concluded that H.R. 1946 would spike prescription drug rates by $15.6 billion over the next five years.

Opponents of the bill also point to a recent U.S. News & World Report article that labeled “pharmacist” as one of the “Best Jobs” in America, with Labor Department statistics revealing that the median pharmacist salary is  $111,570 a year.   Given this level of security and profitability, critics dispute the argument that community drug stores are imperiled in the current marketplace, or require new rules to guarantee their survival.

For all of this back and forth the naysayers of H.R. 1946 are likely to have it their way.  The website GovTrack, which keeps tabs on Congressional legislation and prognosticates success, gives the bill a meager 3% chance of ever being enacted.

Is this some sort of begging or is this the future of capitalism?  Replace the juggler with a tech innovator’s idea, Times Square with a website, and that hat with a virtual “Donate” button, and you have crowdfunding, the street performer of e-commerce.

One of the most dynamic innovations in web economics, the concept of crowdfunding has exploded in popularity on sites like Kickstarter, where fans of just about any idea — commercial, artistic, political — can subsidize with donations their favorite causes or commercial ventures.  But for now all of this enthusiasm is strictly one-dimensional.  Want to go further with your favorite juggler and buy a stake in his future earnings?  Want to turn crowdfunding into “crowd-investing”?  A very strict line guarded by stringent securities law says you can’t do that.

There is a high probability this will change.   An improbable army of advocates, including net roots techies, Occupy Wall Street activists, tea party Republicans, Chambers of Commerce, and President Obama are pushing with irresistible force for the SEC to carve out a specific “crowd-invest” exception in investment rules entrenched since the Great Depression.

Currently the SEC regulates every link in the investor-broker-entrepreneur dynamic. Its rules make the standard IPO a massively complex and expensive mix of disclosures, approvals, and benchmarks.  Historically this mass of regulations has protected investors from predatory investment fraudsters.

But history is something that happened a long time ago for those lobbying in favor of a crowdfund exemption.  They argue that the SEC protocols are cob webbed with pre-internet paranoia and do not account for the dynamism and openness of e-commerce.  Modernize these regulations, they argue, by loosening and streamlining laws that dictate how small businesses go public and who can crowd-invest in them, limit crowd-investments to small dollar amounts to reduce risk and, finally, relax regulatory oversight and replace it with the common sense “wisdom of the crowd” that already governs how people spend their money on-line.  To proponents at advocacy sites like crowdfundinglaw.com, these reforms will unleash a tsunami of web-based microfinancing, pumping millions of investor bucks into start-ups and local businesses while creating over a million new jobs.

Millions of new jobs?  The politicians have been convinced.  This past November the House acted, passing a crowd-investing exemption bill, H.R. 2930.   Introduced by Tea Party Republican Patrick McHenry, the bill passed with deep bi-partisan support 470-17.  Two similarly written bills are currently before the Senate banking committee.

Critics of deregulation argue that you don’t have to go back to the Great Depression to see the risks in junking regulation, or to recognize that crowd mentality is not necessarily the gold standard on wisdom.  The AFL-CIO has lobbied hard against H.R. 2930 as dangerous, a deregulatory give away to Wall Street that will weaken the economy by enabling fraudsters and scammers to float shady “investment opportunities” on the net.  Consumer groups have derided it as “ill-conceived.”  The North American Securities Administrators Association, a professional lobby for securities regulators, has been strongly opposed to multiple sections of the bill that they consider foolhardy, rash and reckless.  And given the staggering rate of small business failure in this country, others have questioned the inflated rhetoric of proponents in terms of the actual payback investors will see on their money.

“Velociprator! Cannibalism!,” a card game of “survival, mutation and stealing body parts,” is now crowdfunding on Kickstarter.   Indeed this fun game of mutating dinosaurs has currently hit 550% of its funding objective through donations, with room to grow.  Crowdfunding has become popular and provides evidence of a mass appeal that crowd-investing could certainly match and exceed.  So if the President signs these SEC reforms into law, only then, when the game is played with money, not cards, will the vision of unfettered crowd-investing be tested by any velociraptors that lurk in the jungle of the internet.

In hearings before a House subcommittee Republicans grilled Kathleen Sebelius, the head of Health and Human Services (HHS), over the disclosure that a small number of the 230 million stimulus dollars sourced to anti-obesity programs ended up being used by grant recipients to hire lobbyists.  At least some of this lobbying promoted the raising of taxes on sugar and soda products.  Initially Sebelius pushed back against her questioners by claiming that because the lobbying was done locally, and not at the Federal level, it did not contravene HHS rules. But smelling a new scandal, HHS ultimately chose to close this local-exemption loophole in its 2012 appropriation bill.

Last week two House Republicans sent a letter to Sebelius that cited a provision in law, Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Section 1913, that prohibits the use of Federal money to hire lobbyists at the local, state and Federal levels.  Clearly HHS showed a degree of negligence in drawing up its stimulus guidelines, because this law is not a new one.  It has been on the books for so long it explicitly prohibits lobbying by telegram.

Ultimately this HHS “scandal” drills down to the question of whether there is something fundamentally so irreconcilable between government and lobbyists that the advocacy community should never be engaged to participate in large government-directed initiatives.  On the issue of the HHS grants, conservative critics of the administration seem to be buying into this oppositional argument. And as Congressional Republicans were only too happy to point out to Secretary Sebelius it also happens to be enshrined in law.

But try on the counter-argument. If the stimulus bill was designed to promote economic progress with some degree of efficiency, is it really such a scandal when a local health care non-profit, probably understaffed and mostly underfunded, streamlines their advocacy by engaging the strategic knowledge of a lobbyist?   Lobbyists know their stuff and they know how to get things done, and if cost-effectiveness is a goal then that should count for something.  Bottom line: should lobbyists, with their talents, smarts and plain know-how, be forever, under any circumstances, cut out of playing a part in vast projects for national renewal like President Obama’s stimulus bill?

Motivated by Zackery’s story, a partnership of community groups and medical associations successfully lobbied Washington State for passage of the Zackery Lystedt Law in 2009. These advocates demanded more education for school coaches about the signs of brain injury, and greater medical oversight in the event that a concussion should occur. Soon other states adopted similar “concussion laws” to protect young athletes from brain injuries. Propelled by the lobbying efforts of the National Football League, 33 states and the District of Columbia have put on the books some version of the Lystedt Law in an attempt to prevent some of the 135,000 sport-inflicted head traumas suffered every year by American children.

While the NFL has been a strenuous partner in prompting Lystedt Law, this advocacy is not without its skeptics. The case has been made that the League’s passion on this issue is at odds with its own spotty record on head injuries. Nearly a dozen NFL players residing in Louisiana filed suit this past month against the League, charging it with negligence in dealing with the danger of concussions. This move occurs in the shadow of a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of former Chicago Bears Safety Dave Duerson. The suit alleges that Duerson’s suicide resulted from crippling mental impairment he suffered due to blows on the field. To critics, the League’s lobbying efforts for the Lystedt Law can be viewed as a P.R. bait-and-switch, allowing the League to shield its own culpability for head injuries behind its advocacy for young players, athletes for whom the League is not responsible.

Whatever the NFL’s motivation for leading the charge on the Lystedt Law, there is no disputing the weight of its influence. The high shine prestige of the League, plus the passionate appeal of local health care interests have made concussion laws a popular, bi-partisan issue.

Yet while the states have moved with rapidity towards implementation, efforts at the Federal level to enshrine base-line national standards, most notably H.R. 469, “The Protecting Student Athletes from Concussions Act,” have so far been stymied. While a compromise between advocates and skeptics will almost certainly be struck in Washington — few legislators want to be branded as unsympathetic to the needs of injured children — the issue has clearly run afoul of the national mood. Critics of a Federal initiative resist the idea of big government meddling in small town athletics, strapping middle and high-school programs with expensive new rules, including the costs of medical oversight, during an era of cinched budgets.

In the end, the whole debate over Zachery Lystedt’s legacy presents an interesting case study for lobbyists. Concussion laws have strong bi-partisan support and few organized naysayers. Lobbying efforts by a consortium of interests have had remarkable success at the state level. But as the NFL has found, this advocacy has not translated into a big score in Washington. Once again there are some issues, no matter how broad and deep their popular support, among Democrats and Republicans that simply have to be resolved at home. And nothing is closer to home than high school football. So while people seem willing to accept common sense answers to the problem of concussions in youth sports, lobbyists or advocacy groups won’t get far with them if the solution they push gives Uncle Sam a seat on the fifty-yard line, casting his shadow on the Friday night lights of local pride.

But the story doesn’t end there. If Racepoint has succeeded in re-furbishing Rwanda’s image, it has done so by taking hits to its own reputation. New reporting by Geoffry York in the Canadian paper The Globe and Mail has put Racepoint in the bulls-eye of mounting criticism over the work American firms do on behalf of governments, like Rwanda’s, that many see as aggressively repressive. In this way Racepoint is a case study in how American lobbyists and P.R. shops can turn significant profits as surrogates for problematic foreign governments, but only if they are prepared to weather serious media blow-back.

In addition to Rwanda, countries like Ethiopia, Angola, Senegal and Equatorial Guinea, all identified as human rights abusers, have connections to top American political facilitators. K-street firms continue to ring up significant fees for arranging meetings, shaping legislation and promoting trade favorable to these client states. The precise scope of this interaction is hard to pin down, although the numbers involved can be staggering. The Foreign Agents Registration Act, on the books since 1938, requires lobbyists engaged by foreign governments to disclose and define those ties. However enforcement of this rule has been almost nonexistent, with no successful prosecution of a violator since the 1960s.

For 32 years the petro-state of Equatorial Guinea has been ruled by Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. On human rights issues the watchdog group Freedom House rates the Obiang regime as among the “worst of the worst.” Despite this record of abuse Equatorial Guinea, with its major oil deposits, has not been shut out in Washington. The law firm of Lanny Davis, a top aide in the Clinton White House, once secured a whopping 1 million dollar contract to coordinate for the Obiang government. In 2010-2011 the country hired the P.R. firm Qorvis Communications on a 60,000 dollar monthly retainer to massage its national image with upbeat press releases and email blasts. This investment has reaped political dividends. In 2006 Condaleeza Rice took a meeting with Obiang and hailed him as a “good friend.” Three years later Obiang secured an even bigger kudo, a photo-op with President Obama.

Firms like Racepoint define their advocacy as pro-growth and pro-openness, allowing poor countries to correct misperceptions and challenge false information that might inhibit desperately needed investment. Lobbyists argue that their intervention creates vital channels between Washington and developing nations. These links stabilize U.S. interests in global trouble spots, and build corridors of negotiation and influence that American politicians can access to pressure for human rights reforms.

Nevertheless, not every contract is worth a payday, no matter the retainer, as Racepoint discovered when one of its former clients landed squarely on the wrong side of history. That country? Libya. That ruler? The late Moammar Qadhafi.

77,000 Jews and other victims, including a few American POWs, were shipped to German camps on SNCF trains.  The Holocaust Railway Justice Act would erase the legal and jurisdictional issues that have barred survivors of deportation from pursuing SNCF in the U.S.   Recognizing that the success of this legislation might create jeopardy for other European railways, Deutsche Bahn AG, the German national railway, has secured the services of the Strategy XXI Group to lobby on the issue.

Proponents of the legislation argue that SNCF’s behavior during World War II was so extreme as to moot foreign sovereignty protection.  They press the point that in the nearly 67 years since the end of war the French rail line has never made restitution or reparations to the victims, or their families, of those deported on French trains. Additionally, they allege that SNCF was not only responsible for organizing the death-camp transports, but received significant financial compensation from the Germans for this role, including German payment of third-class fares for each deportee.

Defenders of SNCF, including Arno Klarsfeld, son of renowned Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, argue that the legislation misrepresents the history of SNCF during the war, when it operated under the extreme duress of German occupation.  Nearly 1,700 French railways workers were executed during the war for their role in anti-Nazi resistance movements.

All of this historical drama plays out against a backdrop of heightened attention to the role of European railways in World War II as these companies compete for high-speed rail business in the United States.   Whether or not the Holocaust Rail Justice Act gets out of committee, SNCF is treating the affair as a public relations quagmire.  In January 2011 the President of SNCF issued the company’s first formal apology to Holocaust victims.

The setting for this conflict is Coles Hill, deep in Virginia’s Southside region.  Embedded beneath the bucolic charms of the picturesque Southside is a massive untapped uranium deposit, the largest in the country.  With a projected life span of 35 years, the Coles Hill mine would extract and mill 119 million pounds of the radioactive metal.  The market value for this mother lode: 7 billion dollars.

Virginia Uranium Inc., the mine operator, has made an all out push for approval to dig at Coles Hill.  In addition to monster profits, the company argues the mine would create thousands of jobs in an economically downturned area, and do so while abiding by strict health and safety guidelines.  In addition to their jobs push, Virginia Uranium makes the case that current shortages in domestic uranium production could be alleviated if the mine goes operational, allowing the U.S. to buy less of the scarce material from unreliable foreign sources.  Pivoting on these issues of employment and defense, Virginia Uranium has spent $ 270,000 on 16 lobbyists from major firms to muscle its message in Richmond, boosted by an aggressive PR roll-out.  They have also spread around $ 152,000 in campaign contributions to state legislators.

The immediate hurdle that confronts Virginia Uranium is that for the last 30 years the Commonwealth has banned the mining of its product.  As they attempt to knock down this moratorium, Virginia Uranium marches into a fierce counterattack by an eclectic consortium of environmentalists, small town mayors, businessmen and even a stock-car hero, Champ Burton.  In total these groups and alliances have retained 26 lobbyists to work the aisles against repeal of the ban.  For the environmentalists in the Sierra Club and the civic leaders of the Virginia Municipal League, the argument against the mine is clear: its risks a scenario of radioactive catastrophe, one that permanently blights the Southside along the lines of the recent nuclear disaster in Japan.

This vision of imminent apocalypse also weighs on the minds of conservative businessmen who have formed their own regional alliances against the mine.  For these accidental environmentalists, many of them die-hard Republicans unused to bonding with the likes of the Sierra Club, the mine would not revitalize the flagging economy of the Southside, but actually imperil that revival.  In their dark view, the mine would be a PR disaster, collapsing land values in adjacent counties and driving away businesses apprehensive about setting up shop in a potentially dangerous region.

With friends and allies on both sides of the debate, Virginia governor Bob McDonnell is sitting on his hands.  Without a decision from his office, and with inconclusive scientific studies on the Coles Hill mine’s feasibility, it is unlikely that the mining ban will come to the floor of the Virginia General Assembly before 2013.

NPR’s

Listen To The NPR Report 
“Forget Stocks or Bonds, Invest In A Lobbyist” by Alex Blumberg
4:44 min.