Profiles in Corruption

Modern-day politicians (and by “modern-day” I have pretty much anyone elected after 1900 in mind) are famous for being spineless rags that twist whatever way the wind and for being willing to adopt pretty much any position for the right sum of money (usually a lot lower than one would think it should be).  One of my favorite examples of this is Louisiana’s former U.S. representative, William Jefferson, who took a ton of bribes and was caught when federal investigators found $90,000 wrapped up in aluminum foil in his freezer.  Both of America’s major political parties are susceptible to this major fault.  In books and movies, corruption has a little bit of a glamorous or adventurous feel to it, often tied to the mob or opulent, fast-lane living.  The truth certainly includes some of that, but is mostly full of boring paperwork that lawyers and accountants deal with in an attempt to cover the trail between politicians and the dirty money they use to enrich themselves, their friends, and their families.

Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite by Peter Schweizer (ISBN: 978-0-06-289790-9) examines the corruption of some of the American Left’s biggest stars: Vice President Kamala Harris, Senator Bernie Sanders, President Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Eric Garcetti, and Senator Elizabeth Warren.  Schweizer could’ve written a book like this about Republicans, too, but chose not to since Leftists claim they fight against big business and cronyism and are believed by a significant swath of the public.  With that hypocrisy as a background, the corruption seems even worse as it’s not just corruption, but also a lot of lying.  All of them are long-term public officer holders that have been involved in hardly any business activities, yet have wielded the power that comes with their offices to enrich themselves, their friends, and their families.  Schweizer chronicles these politicians’ activities throughout their careers, which includes their time in local and state office as well as on the national stage.  As they move up the ladder, their influence grows, and the amount of money they’re able to command in exchange for various favors grows in a corresponding manner.  One of the most popular schemes was earmarking federal funding for ones’ friends and families via authority over grants and programs (all of them) or writing laws that benefit a friend’s law firm (Harris, Klobuchar) or a brother’s real estate development project (Biden).  The book is full of stories of politicians claiming to be tough on crime, for example, but then not prosecuting their political allies.  There are stories of politicians writing laws that make it possible for family and friends to develop property formerly off limits.  In every case, the politician in question also comes out ahead.  Schweizer ends by claiming that there is a certain level of responsibility for the corruption with the American voter because these politicians keep being re-elected.

The book is a quick read and quite interesting.  It’s also depressing on a certain level because these are only a few of the examples of corruption.  Like Schweizer claims, everyone knows it’s a bipartisan problem, too.  I thought the fact that there were so many examples made the book’s case stronger.  These examples of corruption were not some one-off thing.  These are embedded habits.  While I tend to generally agree with Schweizer’s conclusion that we get what we vote for, one thing that depressed me throughout the book was simply the amount of public money available.  A lot of this corruption would not be possible if there was not so much public money available.  There are so many things the government has no business being involved in.  If it was smaller, the way it should be, there would be a lot fewer opportunities for politicians to be bought.  In that way, I disagree with Schweizer’s conclusion.  Reduce the size of government and this problem takes care of itself to a certain degree.

 

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Clinton Cash

Bill Clinton was president for two terms from 1993 to 2001, so for more than one-third of what I think of as my youth.  Clinton’s presidency was seminal (both definitions 1 and 4), and I got to watch a lot of it unfold.  Clinton’s time as president was filled with scandal, whether it be his affair with Monica Lewinsky, the Watergate real estate scandal, campaign finance controversy involving the Lincoln Bedroom, or allegations of sexual misconduct in his past.  Like Romania’s Communist dictator being overthrown, I got to watch as President Clinton was impeached.  It was interesting to watch the country split along the line of which side one was on regarding the impeachment.  As I watched, I detected a certain level of hypocrisy coming from the American Left and the media, who told Americans that much of Clinton’s conduct did not affect the job he was doing as president (which may have been true), but were then adamant that Republican politicians accused of similar or even lesser crimes resign, be impeached, or be prosecuted in court.  This approach to the way politicians conduct themselves in America changed the political landscape because the Right has often decided that fighting fire with fire has been more effective than rolling over.

Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich by Peter Schweizer (ISBN: 978-0-06-265943-9) talks more about Bill and Hillary Clinton after the Clinton presidency than during it, but the story told would not have been possible if it weren’t for Bill Clinton having held America’s highest office first.  After leaving office after eight years, the Clintons decided to stay intimately involved in politics.  Hillary was elected to the Senate, ran for president, and was secretary of state under Obama.  In the book, Schweizer chronicles how the Clintons leveraged their proximity to power to rake in piles and piles of money.  The author points out that there is nothing technically wrong about that fact.  What was so suspicious was the timing, amount, and source of much of that money.  The book carefully points out the machinations that often took place under the radar.  When certain shady businessmen wanted to get involved in the Kazakh mining business, big donations were made to the Clintons’ foundation, Bill made a high-profile visit to Kazakhstan, said some stuff that, in some ways, legitimized Kazakhstan’s dictator, and suddenly those same businessmen had a deal.  When Russia wanted in on buying American uranium and Hillary sat on a Senate committee that was involved in the approval of that plan, those involved in the deal were donating to the Clintons.  Similar actions took place when India wanted to get nuclear technology.  The Clintons had shadowy dealings in South America and in Africa.  When the Clintons were in a position to possibly affect the outcome of a decision, they and their friends seemed to benefit and America seemed to lose.  Schweizer ends his book with an appeal to those who have the legal authority to investigate these suspicious dealings.

I found the book a very interesting read.  There were times when it seemed a little heavy on dollar amounts and obscure names (people described as things like “mining royalties expert[s]” are quoted in the book), but the picture painted was fascinating.  Politicians around the world of every political persuasion engage in this type of behavior.  This is not unique to the Clintons, so it was neat to see these types of concrete examples and see how power and position can be bought and how little one’s word seems to mean to many if they can achieve power or riches.  Given the track record established by Bill while in the White House, none of the things here seemed particularly surprising, but the in-depth nature of the book added to the gravity of the seriousness of what is going on.  I was also reminded that no matter how many rules, laws, regulations, and agreements are made to fight corruption in politics, if someone’s willing to pay the right price, there’s a politician ready to wheel and deal.  The book is as much an indictment of the Clintons as it is a call to everyday citizens to vote out career politicians and take their countries back.

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Dave Barry’s Money Secrets

Reading the newspaper was an institution of my childhood.  My parents always subscribed to the Deseret News, one of Utah’s two major papers.  I remember seeing my mom and my dad read the paper.  When I was really young, my interaction with the newspaper was limited to asking my parents to “read me the ‘Circle,’” which is what I called the Family Circus, since it was the only comic published in a circle instead of squares or rectangles.  Later on, I started to read the newspaper for myself.  I found it fascinating and read articles and columns from all the sections, but admit that the comics and the sports were the priorities.  Sunday’s massive paper with extra sections and tons of advertising inserts also featured Dave Barry’s nationally syndicated column, and I usually thought they were amazing.

Dave Barry’s Money Secrets: Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar? (ISBN: 1-4000-4758-7) is a parody of financial advice books or self-help books and contains a lot of Barry’s goofball humor as well as the kinds of juxtapositions of what people are always saying and what actually happens in real life that have kept comedians in business since the dawn of time.  He talks about the need for money, the lack of money, the history of money, investment opportunities, financial gurus, famous rich people (the bit on Donald Trump was surprisingly germane), tipping, and the stock market, among other things.  None of it is sound financial advice, but it the vast majority of it hits home, like all good humor, because there’s some truth to it.

With the demise of newspapers, I haven’t read Dave Barry in close to twenty years, so the book was a fun read.  I had never read a book by Barry, so this was also a new experience.  As always, I enjoyed the most of the humor.  I made the mistake of reading it on an airplane and I unsuccessfully stifled a few laughs out loud.  I think the book format was just maybe a little too much for me.  The column once a week was probably more the portion size I prefer.  I also thought there was more gutter humor in the book than I remember in the columns (unsurprising, given that I was reading the columns over twenty years ago, when standards were a little different, especially in the newspaper industry as opposed to the book industry).

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The Oligarchs

This was a critical decision for the insurgent democrats — they decided
to go local and make Moscow, not the national government, an engine for real change.
When I arrived in Russia as a young missionary, my first month was full of the other, more experienced missionaries telling me of the infamous ruble crash of 1998.  I honestly couldn’t fathom what it meant.  By summer of 1999, things seemed somewhat stable to a 19-year-old missionary from Utah who had never traveled outside the United States before.  I remember that the first time I heard about the crash was as I looked out over a sea of high-rise apartment buildings — the Russians refer to them as “anthills” — from the balcony window of a missionary apartment, also in a high-rise building, in the Vesyoly Posyolok area of St. Petersburg.  It was sunny, warm, and a bit of a sleepy afternoon with a streetcar rumbling by down below.  I was regaled with stories of runs on ATMs, stores, and bakeries.  It all seemed so foreign and so far away.

The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (ISBN: 1-58648-001-4) by David E. Hoffman starts long before the ruble crash and financial crisis, telling the story of how Russia came to that point after the fall of Communism.  The story is told in a very personal way, relying heavily on the author’s many personal interviews with the major players in industry and politics, as well as his and other journalists’ first-hand experiences during the “wild ’90s” in Russia.  The book provides short biographies of the major players, household names in Russia and sometimes beyond well into the early 2000s: Aleksandr Smolensky, Yuri Luzhkov, Anatoly Chubais, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky.  The book chronicles these men’s rise to power.  They were entrepreneurs, opportunists, risk takers, visionaries, and criminals all rolled into one.  The book also provides a lot of information on Boris Yeltsin since the story of the oligarchs is inseparably woven into Yeltsin’s story.  From the dying throes of Communism to the dawn of Putinism, the book tracks the actions of the oligarchs and politicians they worked closely with and what the consequences were for Russia, Russians, and the West.  The oligarchs were an interesting group because of the they were at the forefront of a entrepreneurial movement that helped move the country forward, but they were wholly unprepared to play by rules foreign to them.  They cut a lot of back-room deals during Soviet times and continued using that same playbook the farther in the rear-view mirror the Soviet Union got.  To compensate for the changing financial and economic landscape, the oligarchs joined up with Yeltsin, going against he sentiment they had in the quotation above and helping him win a second term in the presidency because it kept the oligarchs in power.  A case is made for the necessity of that maneuver.  Finally, the book presents a few notes about how that move, keeping Yeltsin in power, ended up hurting the oligarchs because Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, has worked hard against them.

The book is rather old, written in 2001.  It is still relevant today, though.  It ends with a discussion of Putin and his rise to power and the early signs that his time in power was going to be different.  The book provides some warnings to the West (mega-rich bazillionaire George Soros is quoted in the book saying that some of his early investments in Russia were his worst investments ever) should Russia ever recover from Putinism and thaw like it did after the Cold War.  Hoffman spared no punches, and Western darling Khodorkovsky was shown to be a bit of a slimy rat.  (In fairness, all the other Russian oligarchs were portrayed that way, too, but Khodorkovsky seemed to be the leader of the pack.)  Khodorkovsky took it on the chin from Putin, but he was no angel and likely doesn’t deserve quite the level of adulation he gets from the Western press.  I enjoyed reading the stories from the ’90s and thinking back on the crazy Russia that I knew as a missionary and wishing it could’ve worked out a little better for Russia after the Cold War.  The oligarchs were likely a help and a hindrance.

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