The new (but also kinda old) norm of corruption in plain site
The wealth of Congress, the buying of the judiciary ... it's all become too normal.
Subscribe! And forward this to a smart friend who wants to help rethink how to understand this political moment and what we should do about it. Or likes to read stuff.
Iowa Caucus Countdown: 323 days
At Untold Story, I’m looking to work through and diagnose both what ails political media coverage and deliver journalism that clarifies our American political moment going into the presidential election in 2020. It’ll be a process. I’m Jeremy Borden, independent journalist, reluctant political junkie, with bylines in publications big and small but with a sense that more of us need to tilt at windmills if the mess that has been made of the American Experiment is going to continue.
So far, I’ve announced a new project called The Gonzo Primary by defining the broad parameters for what healthy media coverage might look like as we start from scratch. I’ve worked through some of the key questions for what the value of both the project and this newsletter should be and promised that there is (or should be) a middle ground between so-called “boring,” eat-your-vegetables, issues based coverage, understanding the world from the gonzo perspective and the exhilaration that should come from seeking to understand a presidential campaign. And I’ve examined the biggest issue of our time, inequality.
This week, we’ll dive into the persistence of corruption in American life that, for the most part, continues to fester and eat at the health of the whole system.
Currently Reading: Harper’s “No Joe!”
I’ve also been meandering my way through Ben Fountain’s Beautiful Country Burn Again and the classic Boys on the Bus.
Still, I was floored at Andrew Cockburn’s takedown of, essentially, Joe Biden’s entire career. This is a meticulously researched account which doesn’t wade through the typical pettiness of who wronged whom or waste time with two-sideisms that water down the clear takeaway: Cockburn follows a straight line from policy decisions Biden helped architect either in the Senate or White House and how that policy led to disastrous results. Previously, George Packer’s The Unwinding which lends itself to the theory that “centrist Democrats” were really not all that distinguishable from right-wing Republicans on policy are as much to blame for the betrayal of the middle class that has wrought our current fractured state, also got at what Washington did to the ideals of Biden. (Packer’s book features a former member of Biden’s staff and how he, and Biden, became members of the moneyed Washington elite rather than the crusaders on financial corruption they had set out to be.)
In Harper’s take:
Biden was responsible the crack vs. powder cocaine disparity
By the 1980s, Biden had begun to see political gold in the harsh antidrug legislation that had been pioneered by drug warriors such as Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, and would ultimately lead to the age of mass incarceration for black Americans. One of his Senate staffers at the time recalls him remarking, “Whenever people hear the words ‘drugs’ and ‘crime,’ I want them to think ‘Joe Biden.’” Insisting on anonymity, this former staffer recollected how Biden’s team “had to think up excuses for new hearings on drugs and crime every week—any connection, no matter how remote. He wanted cops at every public meeting—you’d have thought he was running for chief of police.”
The ensuing legislation might also have brought to voters’ minds the name of the venerable Thurmond, Biden’s partner in this effort. Together, the pair sponsored the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other repressive measures, abolished parole for federal prisoners and cut the amount of time by which sentences could be reduced for good behavior. The bipartisan duo also joined hands to cheerlead the passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and its 1988 follow-on, which cumulatively introduced mandatory sentences for drug possession. Biden later took pride in reminding audiences that “through the leadership of Senator Thurmond, and myself, and others,” Congress had passed a law mandating a five-year sentence, with no parole, for anyone caught with a piece of crack cocaine “no bigger than [a] quarter.” That is, they created the infamous disparity in penalties between those caught with powder cocaine (white people) and those carrying crack (black people). Biden also unblushingly cited his and Thurmond’s leading role in enacting laws allowing for the execution of drug dealers convicted of homicide, and expanding the practice of civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement’s plunder of property belonging to people suspected of crimes, even if they are neither charged nor convicted.
He can also take a big chunk of the blame for the current exodus of Hondurans toward the U.S. border:
Promise Me, Dad [ed note: Biden’s memoir] also covers Biden’s involvement in the other countries allotted to him by President Obama: Ukraine, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Anyone seeking insight from the book into the recent history of these regions, or of actual US policy and actions there, should look elsewhere. He has little to say, for example, about the well-chronicled involvement of US officials in the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, still less on whether he himself was involved. He records his strenuous efforts to funnel IMF loans to the country following anti-corruption measures introduced by the government without noting that much of the IMF money was almost immediately stolen and spirited out of Ukraine by an oligarch close to the government. Nor, for that matter, do we learn anything about his son Hunter’s involvement in that nation’s business affairs via his position on the board of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by a former Ukrainian ecology minister accused by the UK government of stealing at least $23 million of Ukrainian taxpayers’ money.
Biden’s recollections of his involvement in Central American affairs are no more forthright, and no more insightful. There is no mention of the 2009 coup in Honduras, endorsed and supported by the United States, that displaced the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, nor of that country’s subsequent descent into the rule of a corrupt oligarchy accused of ties to drug traffickers. He has nothing but warm words for Juan Orlando Hernández, the current president, who financed his 2013 election campaign with $90 million stolen from the Honduran health service and more recently defied his country’s constitution by running for a second term. Instead, we read much about Biden’s shepherding of the Hernández regime, along with its Central American neighbors El Salvador and Guatemala, into the Alliance for Prosperity, an agreement in which the signatories pledged to improve education, health care, women’s rights, justice systems, etc., in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid. In the words of Professor Dana Frank of UC Santa Cruz, the alliance “supports the very economic sectors that are actively destroying the Honduran economy and environment, like mega-dams, mining, tourism, and African palms,” reducing most of the population to poverty and spurring them to seek something better north of the border. The net result has been a tide of refugees fleeing north, most famously exemplified by the “caravan” used by Donald Trump to galvanize support prior to November’s congressional elections.
This Really Happened
I will try to reserve this section for some warm fuzzies at some point, but you didn’t come here for the puppies, now did you? A remarkable Vox Q-A gets at what’s at stake for millennials in the coming years, and it as depressing and dire a picture as you can imagine.
From author Malcolm Harris in which a quick scroll of his tweetings had me lapping up the cynicism:
Sean Illing and Harris discuss his new book, which begins thus:
If Millennials are different, it’s not because we’re more or less evolved than our parents or grandparents, it’s because they’ve changed the world in ways that have produced people like us.
But this isn’t a typical Millennial v. Boomer showdown (which, honestly, I can’t get enough of because how did the idealism of that generation turn into Trump?). Harris explains that capitalism has led to a massive exploitation of the human part of that capital.
His point can be summed up here:
But his solution feels dire. And I hope he’s wrong but fear he’s right.
Sean Illing
…I’d say we have to get out of this frame of generational conflict and think much bigger, but that opens up a whole new set of challenges.
Malcolm Harris
I totally agree. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the historical task confronting us may be larger than we ever imagined. It may well be that America dies or the world dies, or that this global economic order dies or our problems just get worse.
Sean Illing
So I want to make sure I’m clear on what you’re saying here. You’re essentially arguing that the system is fundamentally flawed and thus there is no ultimate solution short of overthrowing it. In other words, the only solution is revolution. But that’s a very difficult thing to control or predict.
Malcolm Harris
It is. A much smarter Malcolm than I, Malcolm X, said you don’t have revolutions without bloodshed, and he was probably right. But we’re in a situation now where the ruling class feels so powerful and I’m not sure what it will take to change things.
The Gonzo Primary Edition: Trump is what we see as ‘the swamp’ hides corruption in plain site
When people think back to Trump’s “drain the swamp” mantra back when he was running for president, we thought he was talking about corruption in Washington. I guess he just meant anyone who liked Obama? Because, of course, ever since, he’s ushered in the craziest whirlwind of corruption imaginable. Robert Mueller’s investigation and the possibility that Trump conspired with Russian adversaries to steal the 2016 election dominates Washington chatter, but … it’s the tip of the iceberg. The list of misdeeds, allegations and resulting resignations just underneath all that is as good a case in point for the brokenness of it all. And one level deeper — the influence of money on an increasingly hapless and unproductive Congress — goes well beyond what too often is able to capture our attention.
Of course, all of this gets written about and covered as an episodic affair, the latest in scandal. Meanwhile, at the state level, corruption continues because so few watchdogs, journalists (when they exist) or otherwise, are paying attention. Our political system is being bought and sold before our eyes.
The rate of turnover in key White House positions — which the Brookings Insitutiton calls the “A” Team — tells part of the story. There’s no separate category for corruption (although there should be) but the Brookings Institution has tracked key White House staff turnover, which it calls the “A Team,” at 66% so far in Trump’s term. Notable scandals that led to ouster of key Administration officials:
The installation of Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor when he had trafficked on overseas connections for profit;
More than 15 official investigations, including the potential profit of a sale from land, into former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke (who is being replaced by a deputy, David Bernhardt, with so many oil and gas conflicts he carries a small list of 22 companies on a small card, The Washington Post reported);
Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt built a phone booth in his office, kept three separate set of calendars and renting a condo virtually for free from a Washington lobbyist, among other obvious misdeeds.
So why have Republicans largely played along with all this corruption, deficit-busting budgets, sympathy for Neo-Nazis and overt race-baiting? Some people might say it’s simply the naked politics of the right, that they see a long-term strategy (and have for decades, through what’s innocuously called the “Southern Strategy”) in dividing people against one another by race and gerrymandering toward long-term electoral success.
The real secret to keeping the status quo on your side, though, is doing the bidding of those who write the checks. And I think the less-than-sustained nature of criticism on the right has more to do with Trump’s outsourcing of the judiciary, including Supreme Court picks, to influential groups on the right and the ready and willing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has moved quickly to stack the courts with lifetime appointments of ideologues in robes.
The ideologues were ready to go, having been put into place by a moneyed network of conservatives who had trained them. But instead of running campaigns, these are judicial appointments who are ready to see the world through a GOP lens. While there are legitimate debates to be had over the Constitution or any legal issue, the “right vs. left” lens only of the law serves the two parties — which shows you just how deep the partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans seem to control all segements of society for the rest of us — even the parts which are supposed to be independent.
Ed Meese, a former attorney general under Ronald Reagan, helped spearhead the conservative judicial effort after Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy.
Per the NYT:
Inspired by Mr. Meese, groups like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the Judicial Crisis Network, the Judicial Action Group and Mr. Levey’s Committee for Justice have for years sought to develop a new generation of younger legal conservatives who would go into government and fill out lower levels of the judiciary. “You have to have that army before you can credential them, and that army just didn’t exist before Reagan,” Mr. Levey said.
So that slow-moving takeover of the “independent” judiciary represents one form of corruption in plain site (and I know of no blindly partisan effort on the left). But, as the judiciary appointments show, the biggest one is the takeover of big money and corporate interests in politics.
It’s one thing, through money and connections, to have influence. It’s quite another to outright run things.
While Trump had a rocky relationship with the Koch Brothers during his campaign, his administration has been far friendlier, installing 44 Administration officials with close ties with the group working in the White House, according to 2017 Public Citizen report.
The Kochs are getting their agenda through:
And then there’s Congress. We’ll have to save all the shenanigans, money and pandering this oh-most-hated institution does, but to me the thing that tells you the most is how people who make an average of $174,000 for being in Congress are so rich. Many, yes, are independently wealthy before they get there, but whether they’ve made their wealth in careers prior to Congress or expanded it while in their seats — what does that tell us?
As Roll Call pegged the status quo in 2018, the total net worth of Congress was $2.43 billion. The biggest stat tho:
Beyond that grand total, the median minimum net worth (meaning half are worth more, half less) of today’s senators and House members was $511,000 at the start of this Congress, an upward push of 16 percent over just two years — and quintuple the median net worth of an American household, which the Federal Reserve pegged at $97,300 in 2016.
How do you get rich in Congress? Insider trading is illegal — unless, seemingly, if you’re a member of Congress. While a case every now and then seems to draw the interest of authorities, this has mostly gone under the radar between flare-ups of people remembering this exists.
A 2017 Politico investigation found:
[T]hat 28 House members and six senators each traded more than 100 stocks in the past two years, placing them in the potential cross hairs of a conflict of interest on a regular basis. And a handful of lawmakers, some of them frequent traders and some not, disproportionately trade in companies that also have an interest in their work on Capitol Hill.
And, I would imagine, that number is bound to go up when considering all business interests. I think we can all agree that those in Congress could at least have the dignity to wait until they’re out of Congress before cashing in. As it is, too few seem to be paying attention for them to pay much mind.