Washington Babylon
By Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein
Verso, 1996. 316 pp, $24.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/13077
The US has the best politicians that money can buy. This is an old joke that never fades but, although certain Australian politicians with shares in piggeries and banks have attracted some limelight recently, for sheer scale and effrontery, US politicians take the cake — and the cream and other rich goodies of the American corporate-political culture.
Cockburn and Silverstein's book on corruption in US politics documents, with the wicked humour of quality muck-raking journalists, the pork-barrellers of US politics and the substance they are as happy as pigs in.
Democrat or Republican, the theme song is the same — Taking Care of Business.
Senator Jesse Helms, for example, heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which has initiated legislation to benefit the business interests of the "people who most successfully plundered Cuba under the Batista dictatorship" — the Florida-based sugar barons, cattle-ranchers and distillers. Helms receives campaign contributions from these and other anti-Castro Cuban groups in Miami.
Senator Lauch Faircloth has helped to push through laws favourable to the pork industry in his state (Carolina). He has $19 million in pork farming shares.
Defense Secretary William Perry is an investor in a military subcontractor. Defence-related corporations funnelled $7.5 million to members of Congress, including Perry, in 1993-94. Defence spending is healthy and rising (Clinton is to increase defence procurement by 50% over the next five years) and the corporate contracts are big and fat as a result.
Senator Bennett (Louisiana) receives money from a major Louisiana-based mining company with $1 billion investments in gold, copper and logging ventures in Indonesia. Bennett is a leading lobbyist for the Suharto regime in Indonesia. Many corporations drool at the prospect of the $60 billion in infrastructure contracts Suharto will let in the next few years and they buy up politicians to ensure that the US does all it can to ensure Indonesian control of East Timor and to see to it that no democratic political reform in Indonesia threatens the average wage of 28 cents per hour in Indonesian manufacturing industry.
"Money in, subsidy out" pretty accurately describes the system of corruption. In 1994, $100 billion of government money was given to the corporate sector in price supports and other subsidies. This corporate welfare outranked expenditure on all social welfare ($75 million). The corporate contributions to politicians are a remarkably cheap business overhead. The $2 million from the tobacco industry, for example, buys $400 million in government subsidies for that industry (a 19,000% return is some investment!).
Every industry is in for its financial chop or to buy political influence. The health insurance industry, for example, finds a receptive audience in the 130 Congress and Senate members who have investments in the health care industry and who can thwart any hint of reforms which may seek to control health care costs at the expense of health industry profits.
Corruption oozes like slime into all the pores of the establishment body. For intellectual sleaze, nothing can top the establishment "intellectual" culture. Bob Woodward, regarded as the journalist slayer of Nixon at Watergate, now spends his time attacking the powerless, helping to destroy in 1994 a federal subsidy for disabled children. Safe media commentators dull the critical faculties and promote the conservative consensus in every square inch and every second of media space-time. They are materially rewarded for having the right values, the values of the corporate sector.
Liberal think-tanks, like Clinton's Democratic Leadership Council, are funded by the corporate world and help to keep Clinton on the straight and narrow (i.e. the crooked and corporate). Not that that takes much doing — in a system where the average Congress campaign costs half a million dollars, the Senate $4.5 million and the Presidency $20 million, only fools would expect to see a cleanskin president (Clinton's favourites have been logging, real estate and poultry concerns).
Right-wing think-tanks motor on corporate dollars, of course, often behind benignly named fronts, like Citizens for a Sound Economy with such neighbourly citizens as Amoco, Citibank, GE and GM. Researchers at the Princeton Dental Resource Centre made the startling finding that eating chocolate is good for the teeth. The centre is funded by confectionary giants M&M and Mars.
The US has, not only the best politicians, but also the best critical, independent minds that money can buy.
The lobbyists who transact the money-for-influence deals are part of the soiled chain of corruption, too. The 80,000 of them infesting Washington include corporate-friendly green lobbyists with their business funding and $250,000-salary CEOs. Forest pillage is worse under Clinton than under Bush.
Corrupt union bureaucrats complete the picture. The Mob-connected officials of the 70,000 member Laborers' International Union have been treated more kindly than most by Clinton. One of the Democratic Party's top 10 donors, the union's $220,000 a year boss has been saved by Clinton from official investigation.
Other union bureaucrats have their illusions in the Democrats milked with ease. Pledges of support for the working stiffs soon turn to free market rubble. As the once-bitten Arkansas AFL-CIO head said of Clinton, the former governor of that state, "this guy will pat you on the back and piss down your leg".
In the face of bipartisan corruption and government by the rich for the rich, it is little surprise that voter turn-out is so low — "cynicism is the rational response". Only 20% of the population voted for the Republicans in their "landslide" win in the Congressional elections in 1994. Parliamentary majorities built on population minorities do not indicate any "dramatic shift to the right" in the broad population.
This is a marvellous book — for the seasoned cynic as well as the young innocent. The conclusion both should draw, although not theoretically explored by the authors, is that the common or garden variety corruption so verdantly on display is but a symptom of a much deeper political corruption inherent in capitalism. Political parties (Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Labor) which accept the needs and values of the capitalist system will do its bidding at our expense; they will all serve the Dollar, with or without creaming off more or less of the green stuff for themselves in the process.