Jack Abramoff, OWS and A Nation Turns its Lonely Eyes To You
“Life is relentlessly ironic” - R. McKay
You might ask yourself this question. “Why?” “Why is America the only western democracy in serious, measurable economic decline?” Ironically, the answer is simple. Political corruption. Political corruption is a corrosive. It corrodes basic social balance, it encourages a criminal/political class, it saps a country’s vitality, and guarantees both social and economic regression. Corruption is a bad thing.
In the Marcos era Philippines, nothing was done unless the Marcos family got a piece, and a big piece. The overall effect was one of parasitic load. Business slowed down. All foreign aid was looted to the last penny. The borrowing stopped. The currency was devalued. Inflation ran wild. The people starved. Their money had been stolen from them without a hand anywhere near their pockets.
The same exact scenario played out in Argentina, when the right wing military junta seized power in the late 1970s, started the absurd Falklands war, looted everything in sight, and train wrecked the economy to a degree of severity that is similar to the U.S. today. Argentina spent 23 years in depression, with 25% unemployment.
The “Argentina Syndrome” is believed by some to be an unavoidable future for the once proud and strong America.
Put yourself, for a moment, in the place of the corporate looter. What do you need to loot in an industrial sector, like finance, prescription drugs, student loans, health care, mortgages, etc? A brain dead public and unlimited political cooperation.
The first component was free. Americans, on balance could care less about what happens in their country, until they have to move out of their foreclosed house, or they have to declare bankruptcy on credit card debt, or until their children fall out of a tree. Then you meet your new masters, and they are both relentless, and vicious.
Now, although it is mostly too late, Americans are paying attention, and the OWS movement did much of the awakening. But, unless the rubber meets the road, it will all be a whisper, a long burst of anger that dissolved into the atmosphere.
One of the great ironies of the Holocaust was that the Jews of Europe, especially Germany, could not bring themselves to believe that the Germans, the most educated and erudite people in Europe would actually do anything bad to the Jews.
Poor planning.
In much the same way. Americans blithely believed that criminals could not run wild in such sacrosanct areas as finance and health care, and that some nebulous government of the good fairy from the west was there to protect them.
Poor planning.
You guessed it. What was believed to be a good government, shielding the defenseless from the highly organized and sophisticated criminals was, let us say, under new management.
The Bush Administrations gave the Wall Street criminals, and racketeers in many other sectors of the American economy, a green light to steal with both hands. Even veteran observers of Wall St. were shocked when Bush appointed Harvey Pitt to head the now completely discredited SEC. Pitt was one of Wall St’s most notorious great white sharks. The message was clear, just like in the Savings and Loan debacle years earlier. THE PIG OUT IS ON sign was hung out for all the corporate boys to read.
The creed? Rape everything you can’t steal, and then lie while running away. No one is going to stop you, or even slow you down. And no one did.
Both of the two factors that led to the virtual train wrecking of the American economy are still in place. A brain dead public, and a vast corporate criminal class with their very own political party. The GOP.
A brief note here to the courageous OWSers. Seven of the ten Republican Senators up for re-election this cycle voted against the watered down, tepid Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The envelope please: Kyl-AZ, Lugar-Ind, Wicker-Miss, Heller-Nev, Corker-Tenn, Hutchison-Texas, Hatch-Utah, Barrasso-Wy. All of these Senators are up for re-election, all voted against Wall St. reform, and should be at the top of the to do list for OWS in their states.
If you’re looking for a poster child for the corporate criminals, and their all-important political agents, who better? And they’re looking for more work. Much more. What fun. Here is the point of attack.
Even today, with all the over educated, really smart, connected, face booked kids, they still haven’t comprehended what happened to their future, their jobs, their finances, their health care, their ability to buy a house, and their poor, pitiful country.
It’s simple really. The American national government has become the most corrupt, inept, disloyal, duplicitous, and dangerously irresponsible government among all of the western democracies. Almost no one will even argue that with you. And what did this corrupt government do? Sell out the interests of its citizens, en masse for over two decades.
Just how did the once great Federal government become a vast vending machine? For starters, it was foreign governments; in the late 1980s in particular the Japanese who discovered the entire American trade apparatus was virtually for sale. They could do anything, dump cars and trucks, hollow out whole American industrial sectors, dump fiber optic cable, capture the flat panel display industry, and on and on.
How? Buy corrupt American trade officials, like Carla Hills. Call Danny Quayle to get a number for a trade ruling, bribe members of Congress if needed, and anesthetize the regulatory agencies. Simple. Cheap. Fast. Effective. When they tried it in Europe they got nowhere. Why? Because the Europeans do not allow corruption in their national governments.
You have what you tolerate.
Pat Choate, one of a very few authors on the topic of American political and economic decline dedicated an entire book, Agents of Influence in 1991 to the then somewhat new paradigm of purchased political cooperation and protection by foreign governments. Many other nations watched Japan get away with mercantilist murder, and then aped their operations. So did American interests. Sadly, Choate’s book was used as a playbook by many corporate interests anxious to get something out of Washington.
Ah, if we could just hear how it works from the inside, from the mouth of one of the men who ruined America, now that would be cool. Who could argue with that?
Enter an angel. A fallen angel, just to keep things ironic. And just last week.
Jack Abramoff.
Jack Abramoff was a wildly successful lobbyist who wallowed in the Speaker of the House Tom DeLay’s corruption spree during the Bush years. The political corruption was one really wild pig out for the Republicans and the corporate robber barons. It was so bad, David Brooks even referred to the process of selling political favors as “Delayism.”
In a delicious irony, Jack Abramoff, recently released from the Federal Penitentiary becomes a visionary. A light into the dark bowels of the monster that is killing America. A voice of way finding. Or so it would appear.
60 Minutes aired one of its best pieces on Nov. 6th 2011. Leslie Stahl interviewed the poster child of the runaway lobbyist heaven that was the Tom DeLay/Bush era. One of the many heart breaking and sickening revelations Jack makes is his joking reference to writing a book entitled The Idiot’s Guide To Buying A Congressman. He was the only one
laughing. Actually, the only people not buying Congressional favors are the voters.
The rest of the interview went like this.
Lesley Stahl is shocked at the scale of his lobbying activities. When asked if providing over a million dollars a year in prime sports and performance tickets en masse to Members of Congress was legal, he replied:
“We would certainly try to make the activity legal, if we could, at times we didn’t care.”
One might ask the question how do you try to make an illegal activity legal? And, why don’t you care? Good questions.
Pat Choate detailed the methods lobbyist use to compromise members of Congress twenty years ago in Agents of Influence, and nothing has changed. Their favorite tactic? Offer their staff people jobs as lobbyists. Abramoff’s approach perfectly mirrored this tactic. His pitch went like this.
“You know, when you're done working on the Hill, we'd very much like you to consider coming to work for us." Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to 'em, that was it. We owned them. And what does that mean? Every request from our office, every request of our clients, everything that we want, they're gonna do. And not only that, they're gonna think of things we can't think of to do.” - J. Abramoff.
I use the term vending machine to describe the American National Government, because it fits. But, I also make the point that a vending machine is not a government, not in the rest of the world anyway. Until real electoral reform is instituted in this country, nothing will change. Look at what one single industry was able to do in the health care reform debacle.
Sadly, this reform will probably never come, at least from within the Federal Government. Abramoff makes my point much better than I do.
“The reform efforts continually are these faux-reform efforts where they'll change, they'll tweak the system. They'll say, "You can have a meal with a congressman if they're standing up, not sitting down."
In other words, all of the campaign reform and lobbying reforms are fake. Then, he goes on to make my central point. The American national government is incapable of meaningful campaign or lobbying reform.
“There's an arrogance on the part of lobbyists, and certainly there was on the part of me and my team, that no matter what they come up we, we're smarter than they are and we'll overcome it. We'll just find another way through. That's all.”
How’s that for hubris? And this is from a guy who did Federal time, mostly for charging 10 times more than the rest of the pack, and then cleaning out his Indian tribe casino clients for a juicy 45 million.
You can see why so many of the OSWers are so cynical they embrace some kind of vague anarchist views. Refusing to become involved in the political process. It’s almost hard to believe the Tea Party people are smarter, but they are in this regard. They vote and they stirred things up, sadly all for the worst. I hope the adults in the OWS pick up the slack and take the 99% to the polls next year.
The point poor old Jack Abramoff makes, his central take home message is simple. This government is so far gone, it is virtually incapable of reform. Which is my point. We are a nation with a government so dysfunctional and corrupt, it has become the laughing stock of the entire world and recorded the lowest approval rating of any democracy in history.
Where do we go from here? What can we do? Who has been working in this area, and what do they say?
Next: Real Political Reform in America: Some of the voices in the darkness
The 60 minutes interview, with transcript can be seen here. And yes it as bad as you think.
P.S. Abramoff’s ideas for reform include term limits for Congress. This is a bad idea that favors lobbyists in a big way. California is a perfect example of the political decline that term limits cause. His other caveat of prohibiting Congressional staff members from becoming lobbyists is probably un-constitutional. A one year ban on this activity is already in place, and has been widely ignored.
