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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