Born in 1938, I grew up in an era when the New
York Times, the “grey lady”, was the reliable paper of record, whose
reporting was generally considered accurate and relatively unbiased, as was the
nightly newscast by Walter Cronkite, and the model of an FBI agent was Elliot
Ness, straight-arrow and un-bribable. There have always been conspiracy
theories around that claimed the world was run by this or that cabal, and there
were always a few nuts on the fringes that believe in things like the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, that originally-Russian antisemitic fabrication from
1903 that somehow still circulates today. But in general my generation believed
that the US government was essentially benign, if occasional inept, and that
most things one reads in the newspapers and hears on the nightly TV news were
reasonably accurate.
My naivete was first challenged during the Goldwater
campaign in 1964. I was in graduate school at Indiana University when Goldwater
came to the campus to make a campaign speech, and I attended the event. Before
the event a large, quiet, orderly crowd, mostly supportive of Goldwater,
gathered, and I was in that crowd. And then I went in and heard the speech
live. Imagine my surprise when the evening TV news showed only an agitated
group of half a dozen protesters carrying signs that the news crews had found
somewhere on the fringes of the crowd (I never saw them), and portrayed the
whole event as a violent protest against Goldwater. And then I read the New
York Times coverage of the speech. They printed the speech accurately,
but they also printed part of the question and answer session afterward, and to
my amazement they had transposed part of the answers from some questions to
other questions, to make Goldwater look crazy. That was an uncomfortable
eye-opener for me.
Over the ensuing years I have gained a more realistic – some
might say cynical – view of the world. Nixon and the Watergate affair, Daniel
Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers affair, including particularly the illegal
government actions to try to discredit him (which is why the government case
against him was thrown out by the judge – he was never prosecuted for leaking
the secret report), and even more recently the revelation of widespread secret
surveillance of Americans revealed by Edward Snowden before he fled to Russia, among
other events, have all contributed to this “more realistic, or more cynical”
view of the world. But I still never
bought into the more extreme views of people like Noam
Chomsky or Edward Herman, or that are peddled by QAnon.
True, I have always understood basic truths, such as that
those in power will always do what they can to maintain their power and protect
their wealth and privileges, that corporations exist primarily to make money
and may not be too concerned about ethical matters, that the Peter Principles
really do operate (people tend to rise to their level of incompetence, and as a
consequence over time many upper-level positions in an organization tend to get
filled by people who have reached their Peter Principle level), that it is
career-limiting to embarrass your boss in public, and that there are always a
few bad apples in any barrel. But I never really thought that there was a
coordinated “cabal” or “regime” or “deep state” somewhere in a smoke-filled
room pulling the strings. But I am beginning to wonder now if I am still naïve.
It’s hard to identify when this worry began to nag at me.
Perhaps it was when I realized that in the end no one was ever prosecuted for
the excesses of the 2008 subprime crisis so wonderfully and entertainingly explained
by the 2015 movie The Big Short. Or perhaps it was when I learned that some
traders actually were paid million-dollar bonuses out of the TARP taxpayer
money supposedly used to bail out the failing banks. (If you didn’t know,
Citigroup, which received $45 billion in government money to bail it out, then
gave 738 of its executives bonuses of at least $1 million. Bank of America,
which also received a government bailout of $45 billion, paid 172 bonuses at least $1 million, while Merrill
Lynch, eventually acquired by Bank of America in a distress sale, doled out 696
bonuses of at least $1 million to its executives.)
Or perhaps my concern was triggered by a YouTube lecture by
Mark Blyth, professor at Brown University and author of Angrynomics, about
inequality in America (you can see it here.
It runs about an hour and a half). It’s technical economics, but Mark with his
Scottish accent is entertaining enough to make it palatable, and the message is
important, so it is worth working through this lecture – even re-watching parts
if necessary. The two charts that really got my attention are below (the left
chart shows that after 1970 productivity increases didn’t mean wage increase.
So where did all the money, roughly $1.8 trillion, from the productivity
increases go? The right chart shows where – mostly to the top 0.01%, the
billionaires.) And how did this happen? Cozy deals that tailored legislation to
favor capital over labor, and probably some questionable private deals.
Or perhaps it was when I read Sarah Chayes 2020 book
On Corruption
in America: And What Is at Stake. Chayes, a journalist, studied
corruption in Afghanistan where she lived for some years, and was not surprised
when the wildly corrupt government collapsed in a matter of days. She sees the
same pattern of corruption in America, though with a slightly different style.
For those who don’t read much, see her 50-minute talk about her new book
Everybody
Knows: Corruption in America. It is very good, and can be seen
here.
What Cheyes sees in America is not the sinister secret cabal
headed by an evil mastermind like some QAnon conspiracy theories, or like
SPECTRE in the James Bond movies. What she saw in Afghanistan and Nigeria and Egypt
and some other countries she studied was a pervasive business model – business
as usual - in which all the participants - government, military, financial,
legal, the underworld – supported each other and got their cut. She describes
it as like the Hydra in Greek mythology – many heads working independently, not
necessarily coordinating their efforts, but all working toward the same
underlying goal. And like the Hydra, cut off a head and two more grow back in
its place.
What she sees in America is much the same model, kind of an
old-boys network (though there are women in it too now) of people who went to
the same schools or clerked for the same judge or were on the board of the same
company or worked at the same law firm or somehow were part of the same “elite”
group, who “help” each other. She describes it as an extensive network rather
than a hierarchical organization. And the corruption in America is more “genteel”.
Generally not money delivered in paper bags, but generous campaign donations
from a corporation in return for favorable legislation, cushy lobbying jobs on
K street for retired members of Congress who were “helpful” to this or that
industry, lucrative vice-president positions at Lockeed-Martin or Boeing for
“helpful” retired military people. Perhaps the extensive and expensive trips
billionaire Harlan Crow gave to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas over the
past 20 years fits this pattern. Most of it is not illegal, but it is
pervasive. People really ought to read her book – I can’t describe it as well
as she does.
Two other books I found unsettling are Dark Money: The Hidden History of
the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by New
Yorker writer Jane Mayer, and Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the
Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by Duke University historian
Nancy MacLean. These are unsettling not so much because of the radical right
associations, though that is disturbing enough in itself. They are unsettling
in the way they outline the extensive interlocking and incestuous networks across
Congress, the government bureaucracy, NGOs (non-government organizations), corporations,
law firms, financial institutions, academia, and even the underworld. And there
are left-wing equivalents: George Soros, Eli Broad, Jon Stryker and Dirk Ziff
among others. As Sarah Cheyes says, they may be on opposite sides on some
issues, right vs left, Democrat vs Republican, but they nevertheless work
toward a common goal – private control of the nation and its wealth.
Or perhaps my concern was created by the obvious media bias
during the Trump administration. Trump is a nasty piece of work, to be sure.
But during his years in office two things were clear: (1) the mainstream media
spun everything they could against him, trumpeting all the investigations but
suppressing revelations that undercut their preferred narrative, and yet (2)
gave him ample air time, which he used very effectively to keep his base
energized. And then there was social media, blocking accounts selectively to
support a preferred narrative or suppress uncomfortable revelations (for
example, Facebook has blocked several New York Post articles, one that
revealed uncomfortable financial dealings by one of the Black Lives Matter
leaders, one that explored the theory that COVID originated in a Chinese lab,
and most famously, a series of articles about the uncomfortable (to Democrats)
contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.)
As I said before, I have generally ignored the writings of people
like Noam Chomsky or Edward Herman, seeing them as fringe extremist figures.
That may have been a mistake. After reading Chayes book, I went back and read
their 2002 book Manufactured Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,
and Chomsky’s 2017 book Requiem for the American Dream: the 10
Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power. I still find their
writing style annoys me, but nevertheless I think they may have valid
arguments, and I should have paid attention to them earlier.
Sarah Chayes most recent book is titled Everyone knows: Corruption in
America. And it’s true. At some level we all do know. We all know the
super rich pay almost no taxes, often keeping much of their wealth hidden in
off-shore shell companies. We all know corporations buy favorable legislation
from Congress and state legislatures. We all know politician these days are
generally backed by big-money benefactors, who expect something in return for their
generous campaign donations. We all know the media and social media platforms
are owned by very rich people, who control the “spin” their platforms put on
the news. We all know the rich and powerful get special treatment everywhere –
from banks, from the legal system, from corporations, etc. etc.
What I didn’t know until now was how intertwined all of these
things were – how it is all an extensive network in which everyone gets their cut,
all aimed at the single purpose of harvesting much of the nation’s wealth into
a few hands. And I didn’t realize how long-range the planning has been, for
example to set up law schools years ago to train a generation of lawyers with
the right “judicial outlook” to favor corporations and the wealthy. Or to set
up and fund various charity or educational “fronts” to push policy initiative
favorable to the wealthy – a step worthy of the Russian KGB.
But if one thinks about it for a moment, how else could the
0.01% manage to capture such a huge amount of the nation’s wealth? It could
only be done by a very extensive network working together – legislatures,
lawyers, judges, bankers, corporations, and perhaps even a few underworld
figures, all getting paybacks for their part.
I think perhaps I
have been naïve. I’m not absolutely sure yet, but more and more I think so. And
if Sarah Chayes is right, this does not bode well for our nation.
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