Washington is a strange city. You’re confronted with billboards for things normal humans can’t buy, like fighter jets. Small groups of lobbyists cluster in corners of office buildings and swap inside information in hushed tones. And there are the invites. Loads upon loads of invites to seminars and open-bar events and celebrations, all for obscure reasons. Washington trades on these invites. While at a glance they can seem confusing or meaningless, they typically have an ulterior motive. You can build a story around the real and sometimes insidious reasons for the gathering. The Prospect gets a lot of these emails, and each week, we’re going to share one of them with you, and take you inside what might be going on behind the scenes.
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This is a classic of the genre: the mismatched corporation/policy event. A company gives out some food and drinks and brings together experts on a topic that seemingly bears no relationship whatsoever to its work. Why would a phone company host a forum on criminal justice reform, and put their own executive vice president on the panel? (Craig Silliman used to be Verizon’s top lawyer; now he oversees the legal and “public policy” teams, which is a euphemism for its lobby shop.)
I can’t say for sure, but here’s the beginning of an answer. Verizon has an entire public safety division that provides “reliable communications for first responders.” It has saved a band of its next-generation 5G network for emergency response. It has staked at least a portion of the company’s future on providing these services. So there’s a tangential relationship to criminal justice in a broad sense.
Perhaps more important to Verizon is maintaining connections to the civil rights community, which paid off during the fight over net neutrality (here’s Craig Silliman in an embarrassing propaganda video about it). Back in 2014, ten members of the Congressional Black Caucus controversially supported the telecoms in rejecting net neutrality. All of them had received donations from companies like Verizon. Groups like the NAACP and the Asian American Justice Center also took Verizon’s side in that fight.
An old Verizon subsidiary, Bell Atlantic, put up $100,000 to build the website that the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights now uses, at civilrights.org. Verizon was a co-sponsor of the Leadership Conference’s 2012 Hubert Humphrey Civil and Human Rights awards dinner. A member of the Leadership Conference is speaking on the panel. (So is a Republican state judge from Louisiana, and I can’t explain that one.)
By running panels like this, Verizon keeps these relationships open and vibrant. In addition to seeming like a good corporate citizen concerned with mass incarceration and injustice against people of color, if Verizon needs help in other aspects of its business, it has some goodwill, as well as a list of people to call. Just another brick in the wall Verizon puts up around regulating their practices.
Do you have a ridiculous D.C. invite you want to share? Email us at DCinvites@prospect.org
