Sounds like NYC under the reign of Rudolph Giuliani, with his holly roller
friends in the Archdiocess of NY having their opulent orgies out in the
Hamptons.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2015 3:56 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A.
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A.
By Rebecca Gordon
Posted on November 24, 2015, Printed on November 24, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176073/
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: There will be no Thursday post this week. The
next TD post will be on Sunday, November 29th. And a good Thanksgiving to you
all! Tom] I recently took a little trip into the past and deep into America's
distant war zones to write a piece I called "It's a $cam." It was, for me, an
eye-opening journey into those long-gone years of American "nation-building"
and "reconstruction" in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mind you, I still remembered
some of what had been reported at the time like the "urine-soaked" police
academy built in Baghdad by an American private contractor with taxpayer
dollars. But it was the cumulative effect of it all that now struck me -- one
damning report after another that made it clear Washington was incapable of
building or rebuilding anything whatsoever. There were all those poorly
constructed or unfinished military barracks, police stations, and outposts for
the new national security forces the U.S. military was so eagerly "standing up"
in both countries. There were the unfinished or miserably constructed schools,
training centers, and "roads to nowhere." There were those local militaries
and police forces whose ranks were heavily populated by "ghost soldiers."
There was that shiny new U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan that cost
$25 million and no one wanted or would ever use. It was, in short, a litany of
fiascoes and disasters that never seemed to end.
Financially, Washington had invested sums in both countries that far exceeded
the Marshall Plan, which so successfully put Western Europe back on its feet
after World War II. Yet Iraq and Afghanistan were left on their knees amid a
carnival of corruption and misspent taxpayer money. What made revisiting this
spectacle so stunning wasn't just the inability of the U.S.
military, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Agency for International
Development, and a crew of crony warrior corporations raking in the big bucks
to do anything right, but that this was the United States of America.
It was the country I -- and I was hardly alone in this -- had grown up thinking
of as the globe's master builder. In the 1950s and early 1960s, my childhood
years, it seemed as if there was nothing Americans couldn't build successfully
from an unparalleled highway system to rockets that were moonward bound.
Half a century later, it's clear that, at least in our war zones, there's
nothing we've been capable of building right, no matter the dollars available.
And that, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon suggests today in an
eye-opening piece, is just the beginning of our new American reality.
Tom
Home, Sweet Kleptocracy
Kabul in America
By Rebecca Gordon
A top government official with energy industry holdings huddles in secret with
oil company executives to work out the details of a potentially lucrative
"national energy policy." Later, that same official steers billions of
government dollars to his former oil-field services company.
Well-paid elected representatives act with impunity, routinely trading
government contracts and other favors for millions of dollars. Meanwhile,
ordinary citizens live in fear of venal police forces that suck them dry by
charging fees for services, throwing them in jail when they can't pay arbitrary
fines or selling their court "debts" to private companies.
Sometimes the police just take people's life savings leaving them with no
recourse whatsoever. Sometimes they steal and deal drugs on the side.
Meanwhile, the country's infrastructure crumbles. Bridges collapse, or take a
quarter-century to fix after a natural disaster, or (despite millions
spent) turn out not to be fixed at all. Many citizens regard their government
at all levels with a weary combination of cynicism and contempt.
Fundamentalist groups respond by calling for a return to religious values and
the imposition of religious law.
What country is this? Could it be Nigeria or some other kleptocratic developing
state? Or post-invasion Afghanistan where Ahmed Wali Karzai, CIA asset and
brother of the U.S.-installed president Hamid Karzai, made many millions on the
opium trade (which the U.S. was ostensibly trying to suppress), while his
brother Mahmoud raked in millions more from the fraud-ridden Bank of Kabul? Or
could it be Mexico, where the actions of both the government and drug cartels
have created perhaps the world's first narco-terrorist state?
In fact, everything in this list happened (and much of it is still
happening) in the United States, the world leader -- or so we like to think
-- in clean government. These days, however, according to the Corruption
Perception Index of Transparency International (TI), our country comes in only
17th in the least-corrupt sweepstakes, trailing European and Scandinavian
countries as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In fact, TI considers
us on a par with Caribbean island nations like Barbados and the Bahamas. In the
U.S., TI says, "from fraud and embezzlement charges to the failure to uphold
ethical standards, there are multiple cases of corruption at the federal, state
and local level."
And here's a reasonable bet: it's not going to get better any time soon and it
could get a lot worse. When it comes to the growth of American corruption, one
of TI's key concerns is the how the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United
decision opened the pay-to-play floodgates of the political system, allowing
Super PACs to pour billions of private and corporate money into it, sometimes
in complete secrecy. Citizens United undammed the wealth of the super-rich and
their enablers, allowing big donors like casino capitalist -- a description
that couldn't be more literal -- Sheldon Adelson to use their millions to
influence government policy.
Kleptocracy USA?
Every now and then, a book changes the way you see the world. It's like shaking
a kaleidoscope and suddenly all the bits and pieces fall into a new pattern.
Sarah Chayes's Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security shook
my kaleidoscope. Chayes traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 as a reporter for NPR.
Moved by the land and people, she soon gave up reporting to devote herself to
working with non-governmental organizations helping "Afghans rebuild their
shattered but extraordinary country."
In the process, she came to understand the central role government corruption
plays in the collapse of nations and the rise of fundamentalist organizations
like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State. She also discovered just how
unable (and often unwilling) American military and civilian officials were to
put a stop to the thievery that characterized Afghanistan's government at every
level -- from the skimming of billions in reconstruction funds at the top to
the daily drumbeat of demands for bribes and "fees" from ordinary citizens
seeking any kind of government service further down the chain of organized
corruption. In general, writes Chayes, kleptocratic countries operate very much
as pyramid schemes, with people at one level paying those at the next for the
privilege of extracting money from those below.
Chayes suggests that "acute government corruption" may be a major factor "at
the root" of the violent extremism now spreading across the Greater Middle East
and Africa. When government robs ordinary people blind, in what she calls a
"vertically integrated criminal enterprise," the victims tend to look for
justice elsewhere. When officials treat the law with criminal contempt, or when
the law explicitly permits government extortion, they turn to what seem like
uncorrupted systems of reprisal and redemption outside those laws.
Increasingly, they look to God or God's laws and, of course, to God's
self-proclaimed representatives. The result can be dangerously violent
explosions of anger and retribution. Eruptions can take the form of the Puritan
iconoclasm that rocked Catholic Europe in the sixteenth century or present-day
attempts by the Taliban or the Islamic State to implement a harsh, even
vindictive version of Islamic Sharia law, while attacking "unbelievers" in the
territory they control.
Reading Thieves of State, it didn't take long for my mind to wander from Kabul
to Washington, from a place where American-funded corruption was an open secret
to a place where few would think it applicable. Why was it, I began to wonder,
that in our country "corruption" never came up in relation to bankers the
government allowed to sell mortgages to people who couldn't repay them, then
slicing and dicing their debt into investment "securities"
that brought on the worst recession since the 1930s? (Neil Barofsky, who took
on the thankless role of inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Fund,
tells the grim tale of how the government was "captured by the banks" in his
2012 book Bailout.) Chayes made me wander ever deeper into the recent history
of Washington's wheeling and dealing, including, for instance, the story of the
National Energy Policy Development Group, which Vice President Dick Cheney
convened in the first weeks of George W. Bush's presidency. Its charge was to
develop a national energy policy for the country and its deliberations --
attended by top executives of all the major oil companies (some of whom then
denied before Congress that they had been present) -- were held in complete
secrecy. Cheney even refused to surrender the list of attendees when the
Government Accountability Office sued him, a suit eventually dropped after
Congress cut that agency's budget. If the goal was to create a policy that
would suit the oil companies, Cheney was the perfect man to chair the
enterprise.
In 2001, having suggested himself as the only reasonable running mate for Bush,
Cheney left his post as CEO at oilfield services corporation Halliburton. "Big
changes are coming to Washington," he told ABC News, "and I want to be a part
of them." And so he was, including launching a disastrous war on Iraq, foreseen
and planned for in those energy policy meetings. Indeed, documents shaken loose
in a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by Judicial Watch and the Sierra
Club showed that in March 2001
-- months before the 9/11 attacks -- energy task force members were already
salivating over taking possession of those Iraqi oil fields. Nor did Cheney
forget his friends at Halliburton. Their spin-off company, KBR, would receive a
better-than-1,000-to-1 return on their investment in the vice president (who'd
gotten a $34 million severance package from them), reaping
$39.5 billion in government contracts in Iraq. And yet when did anyone mention
"corruption" in connection with any of this?
Chayes's book made me think in a new way about the long-term effects of the
revolving door between the Capitol -- supposedly occupied by the people's
representatives -- and the K Street suites of Washington's myriad lobbyists.
It also brought to mind all those former members of Congress, generals, and
national security state officials who parachute directly out of government
service and onto the boards of defense-oriented companies or into cushy
consultancies catering to that same security state.
It also made me think in a new way about the ever-lower turnouts for our
elections. There are good reasons why so many Americans -- especially those
living in poverty and in communities of color -- don't vote. It's not that they
don't know their forebears died for that right. It's not that they don't object
when their votes are suppressed. It's that, like many other Americans, they
clearly believe their government to be so corrupt that voting is pointless.
Are We in Ferguson -- or Kabul?
What surprises me most, however, isn't the corruption at the top, but the ways
in which lives at the bottom are affected by it. Reading Thieves of State set
me thinking about how regularly money in this country now flows from the bottom
up that pyramid. If you head down, you no longer find yourself on Main Street,
U.S.A., but in a place that seems uncomfortably like Kabul; in other words, a
Ponzi-scheme world of the first order.
Consider, for instance, the Justice Department's 2015 report on the police in
Ferguson, Missouri, about whom we've learned so much since Michael Brown, an
unarmed black teenager, was shot to death on August 9, 2014. As it happens,
the dangers for Ferguson's residents hardly ended with police misconduct.
"Ferguson's law enforcement practices are shaped by the city's focus on revenue
rather than by public safety needs," Justice Department investigators found:
"This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of
Ferguson's police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional
policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that
raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the
Ferguson community."
The report then recounted in excruciating detail the extent to which the police
were a plague on the city's largely black population. Ferguson was -- make no
mistake about it -- distinctly Kabul, U.S.A. The police, for instance,
regularly accosted residents for what might be termed "sitting in a car while
Black," and then charged them with bogus "crimes" like failing to wear a seat
belt in a parked car or "making a false declaration" that, say, one's name was
"Mike," not "Michael." While these arrests didn't make money directly for the
police force, officers interested in promotion were told to keep in mind that
their tally of "self-initiated activities"
(tickets and traffic stops) would have a significant effect on their future
success on the force. Meanwhile, those charged often lost their jobs and
livelihoods amid a welter of court appearances.
Ferguson's municipal court played its own grim role in this ugly scheme. As
Justice Department investigators discovered, it did not "act as a neutral
arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct." Instead, it used
its judicial authority "as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees
that advance[d] the city's financial interests."
By issuing repeated arrest warrants when people missed court appearances or
were unable to pay fines, it managed to regularly pile one fine on top of
another and then often refused to accept partial payments for the sums owed.
Under Missouri state law, moving traffic violations, for instance,
automatically required the temporary suspension of a driver's license.
Ferguson residents couldn't get their licenses back until -- you guessed it
-- they paid their fines in full, often for charges that were manufactured in
the first place.
As if in Kabul, people then had to weigh the risk of driving license-less (and
getting arrested) against losing their jobs or -- without a car -- not making
it to court. With no community service option available, many found themselves
spending time in jail. From the police to the courts to city hall, what had
been organized was, in short, an everyday money-raising racket of the first
order.
And all of this was linked to the police department, which actually ran the
municipal court. As the Justice Department report put it, that court "operates
as part of the police department... is supervised by the Ferguson chief of
police, is considered part of the police department for city organizational
purposes, and is physically located within the police station. Court staff
report directly to the chief of police." He, in turn, ran the show, doing
everything from collecting fines to determining bail amounts.
The Harvard Law Review reported that, in 2013, Ferguson had a population of
22,000. That same year, "its municipal court issued 32,975 arrest warrants for
nonviolent offenses," or almost one-and-a-half arrests per inhabitant.
The report continued:
"In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don't appear in court
after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the
courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session
is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along
with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police
drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can't pay their fines or post
bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is
imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month).
Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail."
Whether in Kabul or Ferguson, this kind of daily oppression wears people down.
It's no surprise that long before the police shot Michael Brown, the citizens
of Ferguson had little trust or respect for them.
Privatizing Official Corruption
But might Ferguson not have been an outlier, a unique Kabul-in-America case of
a rogue city government bent on extracting every penny from its poorest
residents? Consider, then, the town of Pagedale, Missouri, which came up with a
hardly less kleptocratic way of squeezing money out of its citizens.
Instead of focusing on driving and parking, Pagedale routinely hit homeowners
with fines for "offenses" like failing to have blinds and "matching curtains"
on their windows or "unsightly lawns." Pagedale is a small town, with 3,300
residents. In 2013, the city's general revenues totaled $2 million, 17% percent
from such fines and fees.
Might such kleptocratic local revenue-extraction systems, however, be limited
to just one Midwestern state? Consider then the cozy relationship that Augusta,
capital of Georgia, has with Sentinel Offender Services, LLC.
That company makes electronic monitoring equipment used by state and local
government agencies, ranging from the Los Angeles County Probation Department
to the Massachusetts Office of the Commissioner of Probation. Its website touts
the benefits to municipalities of what it calls "offender-funded programs" in
which the person on probation pays the company directly for his or her own
monitoring, saving the courts the cost of administering a probation system. In
return, the company sets its own fees at whatever level it chooses. "By
individually assessing each participant a fee based on income," says Sentinel,
"our sliding-fee scale approach has shifted the financial burden to the
participant, allowing program growth and size to be a function of correctional
need rather than budget availability."
"Profiting from Probation," a 2014 Human Rights Watch report, offers a typical
tale of an Augusta resident named Michael Barrett. Arrested for shoplifting a
can of beer, he entered a local court system that was focused on revenue
extraction via a kind of official extortion, which is the definition of
corruption. Even to step into a courtroom to deal with his "case," he had to
hand over an $80 fee for a court-appointed defense lawyer.
Then, convicted, he would be sentenced to a $200 fine and probation. Because
the charge was "alcohol-related," the court required Barrett to wear an
electronic bracelet that would monitor his alcohol consumption, even though his
sentence placed no restrictions on his drinking. For that Sentinel bracelet,
there was a $50 startup fee, a $39 monthly "service" charge, and a
$12 "daily usage" fee. In total, he was forced to pay about $400 a month to
monitor something he was legally allowed to do. Since Barrett couldn't even pay
the startup fee, he was promptly thrown in jail for a month until a friend lent
him the money.
Such systems of privatized "justice" that bleed the poor are now spreading
across the U.S., a country officially without debtor's prisons. According to
the Harvard Law Review article, some cities charge a "fee" to everyone they
arrest, whether or not they're ever convicted of an offense. In Washington,
D.C., on the other hand, for "certain traffic and a number of lower level
criminal offenses," you can simply pay your arresting officer "to end a case on
the spot," avoiding lengthy and expensive court costs. Other jurisdictions
charge people who are arrested for the costs of police investigations,
prosecution, public defender services, a jury trial ("sometimes with different
fees depending on how many jurors a defendant requests"), and incarceration.
Watch Your Ass(ets)
Even Machiavelli, who counseled princes seizing new territory to commit all
their crimes at once because human beings have such short memories, warned that
people will accept pretty much any kind of oppression unless "you prey on the
possessions or the women of your subjects." So many centuries later, while we
women now tend to believe we belong to ourselves, civil asset forfeiture is
still a part of American life. Unlike criminal asset forfeiture, which permits
the government to seize a person's assets after conviction of a crime, civil
forfeiture allows local, state, or federal law enforcement to seize and keep
someone's money or other property even if he or she is never charged. If, say,
you are suspected of involvement with drugs or terrorism, the police can seize
all the money you have on you on the spot, even if they don't arrest you -- and
you have to go to court to get it back.
Federal asset forfeiture collections have risen from around $800 million in
2002 to almost $4.5 billion in 2014, according to the Institute for Justice
(IJ). Governments defend the practice as a means of preventing suspected
criminals -- especially high-level drug dealers -- from using their money to
commit more crimes. But all too often, it's poor people whose money is
"forfeited," even when they've committed no crime. The Pennsylvania ACLU
reported that police take around a million dollars from Philadelphians each
year in 6,000 separate cases -- and not from drug lords either. More than half
the cases involve seizures of less than $192, and in a city that's only 43%
black, 71% of those seizures from people charged with no crimes come from
African Americans. If your property is seized, you can try to go to court to
get it back but, says the ACLU, you should expect to make an average of four
court appearances. Most people just give up.
Reading Thieves of State reminded me that we're not living in the country many
of us imagine, but in something like an American klepto-state.
Corruption, it turns out, doesn't just devour the lives of people in far-off
nations. Right now, it's busy shoving what's left of our own democracy down our
throats.
Chayes documents how such corruption can lead to violent explosions in other
countries. Indeed, it was a final kleptocratic insult -- a police woman's slap
in the face after he refused to pay a bribe to retrieve his confiscated
vegetable cart -- that led Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi to burn himself to death
and touch off the Arab Spring. As Machiavelli wrote so long ago, people will
put up with a lot -- torture, mass surveillance, even a car full of clowns
masquerading as candidates for president -- but they don't like being robbed by
their own government. Sooner or later, they will rebel.
Let's hope, when that happens, that we don't end up under the rule of our own
American Taliban or some billionaire reality TV star.
Rebecca Gordon is a TomDispatch regular. She teaches at the University of San
Francisco and is the author of Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the
Post-9/11 United States and the forthcoming American Nuremberg: The Officials
Who Should Stand Trial for Post 9/11 War Crimes (Hot Books, 2016).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret
Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower
World.
Copyright 2015 Rebecca Gordon
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176073
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A.
By Rebecca Gordon
Posted on November 24, 2015, Printed on November 24, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176073/
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: There will be no Thursday post this week. The
next TD post will be on Sunday, November 29th. And a good Thanksgiving to you
all! Tom] I recently took a little trip into the past and deep into America's
distant war zones to write a piece I called "It's a $cam." It was, for me, an
eye-opening journey into those long-gone years of American "nation-building"
and "reconstruction" in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mind you, I still remembered some
of what had been reported at the time like the "urine-soaked" police academy
built in Baghdad by an American private contractor with taxpayer dollars. But
it was the cumulative effect of it all that now struck me -- one damning report
after another that made it clear Washington was incapable of building or
rebuilding anything whatsoever. There were all those poorly constructed or
unfinished military barracks, police stations, and outposts for the new
national security forces the U.S. military was so eagerly "standing up" in both
countries. There were the unfinished or miserably constructed schools, training
centers, and "roads to nowhere." There were those local militaries and police
forces whose ranks were heavily populated by "ghost soldiers." There was that
shiny new U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan that cost $25 million and
no one wanted or would ever use. It was, in short, a litany of fiascoes and
disasters that never seemed to end.
Financially, Washington had invested sums in both countries that far exceeded
the Marshall Plan, which so successfully put Western Europe back on its feet
after World War II. Yet Iraq and Afghanistan were left on their knees amid a
carnival of corruption and misspent taxpayer money. What made revisiting this
spectacle so stunning wasn't just the inability of the U.S.
military, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Agency for International
Development, and a crew of crony warrior corporations raking in the big bucks
to do anything right, but that this was the United States of America.
It was the country I -- and I was hardly alone in this -- had grown up thinking
of as the globe's master builder. In the 1950s and early 1960s, my childhood
years, it seemed as if there was nothing Americans couldn't build successfully
from an unparalleled highway system to rockets that were moonward bound.
Half a century later, it's clear that, at least in our war zones, there's
nothing we've been capable of building right, no matter the dollars available.
And that, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon suggests today in an
eye-opening piece, is just the beginning of our new American reality. Tom Home,
Sweet Kleptocracy Kabul in America By Rebecca Gordon A top government official
with energy industry holdings huddles in secret with oil company executives to
work out the details of a potentially lucrative "national energy policy."
Later, that same official steers billions of government dollars to his former
oil-field services company.
Well-paid elected representatives act with impunity, routinely trading
government contracts and other favors for millions of dollars. Meanwhile,
ordinary citizens live in fear of venal police forces that suck them dry by
charging fees for services, throwing them in jail when they can't pay arbitrary
fines or selling their court "debts" to private companies.
Sometimes the police just take people's life savings leaving them with no
recourse whatsoever. Sometimes they steal and deal drugs on the side.
Meanwhile, the country's infrastructure crumbles. Bridges collapse, or take a
quarter-century to fix after a natural disaster, or (despite millions
spent) turn out not to be fixed at all. Many citizens regard their government
at all levels with a weary combination of cynicism and contempt.
Fundamentalist groups respond by calling for a return to religious values and
the imposition of religious law.
What country is this? Could it be Nigeria or some other kleptocratic developing
state? Or post-invasion Afghanistan where Ahmed Wali Karzai, CIA asset and
brother of the U.S.-installed president Hamid Karzai, made many millions on the
opium trade (which the U.S. was ostensibly trying to suppress), while his
brother Mahmoud raked in millions more from the fraud-ridden Bank of Kabul? Or
could it be Mexico, where the actions of both the government and drug cartels
have created perhaps the world's first narco-terrorist state?
In fact, everything in this list happened (and much of it is still
happening) in the United States, the world leader -- or so we like to think
-- in clean government. These days, however, according to the Corruption
Perception Index of Transparency International (TI), our country comes in only
17th in the least-corrupt sweepstakes, trailing European and Scandinavian
countries as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In fact, TI considers
us on a par with Caribbean island nations like Barbados and the Bahamas. In the
U.S., TI says, "from fraud and embezzlement charges to the failure to uphold
ethical standards, there are multiple cases of corruption at the federal, state
and local level."
And here's a reasonable bet: it's not going to get better any time soon and it
could get a lot worse. When it comes to the growth of American corruption, one
of TI's key concerns is the how the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United
decision opened the pay-to-play floodgates of the political system, allowing
Super PACs to pour billions of private and corporate money into it, sometimes
in complete secrecy. Citizens United undammed the wealth of the super-rich and
their enablers, allowing big donors like casino capitalist -- a description
that couldn't be more literal -- Sheldon Adelson to use their millions to
influence government policy.
Kleptocracy USA?
Every now and then, a book changes the way you see the world. It's like shaking
a kaleidoscope and suddenly all the bits and pieces fall into a new pattern.
Sarah Chayes's Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security shook
my kaleidoscope. Chayes traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 as a reporter for NPR.
Moved by the land and people, she soon gave up reporting to devote herself to
working with non-governmental organizations helping "Afghans rebuild their
shattered but extraordinary country."
In the process, she came to understand the central role government corruption
plays in the collapse of nations and the rise of fundamentalist organizations
like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State. She also discovered just how
unable (and often unwilling) American military and civilian officials were to
put a stop to the thievery that characterized Afghanistan's government at every
level -- from the skimming of billions in reconstruction funds at the top to
the daily drumbeat of demands for bribes and "fees" from ordinary citizens
seeking any kind of government service further down the chain of organized
corruption. In general, writes Chayes, kleptocratic countries operate very much
as pyramid schemes, with people at one level paying those at the next for the
privilege of extracting money from those below.
Chayes suggests that "acute government corruption" may be a major factor "at
the root" of the violent extremism now spreading across the Greater Middle East
and Africa. When government robs ordinary people blind, in what she calls a
"vertically integrated criminal enterprise," the victims tend to look for
justice elsewhere. When officials treat the law with criminal contempt, or when
the law explicitly permits government extortion, they turn to what seem like
uncorrupted systems of reprisal and redemption outside those laws.
Increasingly, they look to God or God's laws and, of course, to God's
self-proclaimed representatives. The result can be dangerously violent
explosions of anger and retribution. Eruptions can take the form of the Puritan
iconoclasm that rocked Catholic Europe in the sixteenth century or present-day
attempts by the Taliban or the Islamic State to implement a harsh, even
vindictive version of Islamic Sharia law, while attacking "unbelievers" in the
territory they control.
Reading Thieves of State, it didn't take long for my mind to wander from Kabul
to Washington, from a place where American-funded corruption was an open secret
to a place where few would think it applicable. Why was it, I began to wonder,
that in our country "corruption" never came up in relation to bankers the
government allowed to sell mortgages to people who couldn't repay them, then
slicing and dicing their debt into investment "securities"
that brought on the worst recession since the 1930s? (Neil Barofsky, who took
on the thankless role of inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Fund,
tells the grim tale of how the government was "captured by the banks" in his
2012 book Bailout.) Chayes made me wander ever deeper into the recent history
of Washington's wheeling and dealing, including, for instance, the story of the
National Energy Policy Development Group, which Vice President Dick Cheney
convened in the first weeks of George W. Bush's presidency. Its charge was to
develop a national energy policy for the country and its deliberations --
attended by top executives of all the major oil companies (some of whom then
denied before Congress that they had been present) -- were held in complete
secrecy. Cheney even refused to surrender the list of attendees when the
Government Accountability Office sued him, a suit eventually dropped after
Congress cut that agency's budget. If the goal was to create a policy that
would suit the oil companies, Cheney was the perfect man to chair the
enterprise.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199336431/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199336431/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20In 2001,
having suggested himself as the only reasonable running mate for Bush, Cheney
left his post as CEO at oilfield services corporation Halliburton.
"Big changes are coming to Washington," he told ABC News, "and I want to be a
part of them." And so he was, including launching a disastrous war on Iraq,
foreseen and planned for in those energy policy meetings. Indeed, documents
shaken loose in a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by Judicial Watch and
the Sierra Club showed that in March 2001 -- months before the 9/11 attacks --
energy task force members were already salivating over taking possession of
those Iraqi oil fields. Nor did Cheney forget his friends at Halliburton. Their
spin-off company, KBR, would receive a
better-than-1,000-to-1 return on their investment in the vice president (who'd
gotten a $34 million severance package from them), reaping $39.5 billion in
government contracts in Iraq. And yet when did anyone mention "corruption" in
connection with any of this?
Chayes's book made me think in a new way about the long-term effects of the
revolving door between the Capitol -- supposedly occupied by the people's
representatives -- and the K Street suites of Washington's myriad lobbyists.
It also brought to mind all those former members of Congress, generals, and
national security state officials who parachute directly out of government
service and onto the boards of defense-oriented companies or into cushy
consultancies catering to that same security state.
It also made me think in a new way about the ever-lower turnouts for our
elections. There are good reasons why so many Americans -- especially those
living in poverty and in communities of color -- don't vote. It's not that they
don't know their forebears died for that right. It's not that they don't object
when their votes are suppressed. It's that, like many other Americans, they
clearly believe their government to be so corrupt that voting is pointless.
Are We in Ferguson -- or Kabul?
What surprises me most, however, isn't the corruption at the top, but the ways
in which lives at the bottom are affected by it. Reading Thieves of State set
me thinking about how regularly money in this country now flows from the bottom
up that pyramid. If you head down, you no longer find yourself on Main Street,
U.S.A., but in a place that seems uncomfortably like Kabul; in other words, a
Ponzi-scheme world of the first order.
Consider, for instance, the Justice Department's 2015 report on the police in
Ferguson, Missouri, about whom we've learned so much since Michael Brown, an
unarmed black teenager, was shot to death on August 9, 2014. As it happens, the
dangers for Ferguson's residents hardly ended with police misconduct.
"Ferguson's law enforcement practices are shaped by the city's focus on revenue
rather than by public safety needs," Justice Department investigators found:
"This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of
Ferguson's police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional
policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that
raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the
Ferguson community."
The report then recounted in excruciating detail the extent to which the police
were a plague on the city's largely black population. Ferguson was -- make no
mistake about it -- distinctly Kabul, U.S.A. The police, for instance,
regularly accosted residents for what might be termed "sitting in a car while
Black," and then charged them with bogus "crimes" like failing to wear a seat
belt in a parked car or "making a false declaration" that, say, one's name was
"Mike," not "Michael." While these arrests didn't make money directly for the
police force, officers interested in promotion were told to keep in mind that
their tally of "self-initiated activities"
(tickets and traffic stops) would have a significant effect on their future
success on the force. Meanwhile, those charged often lost their jobs and
livelihoods amid a welter of court appearances.
Ferguson's municipal court played its own grim role in this ugly scheme. As
Justice Department investigators discovered, it did not "act as a neutral
arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct." Instead, it used its
judicial authority "as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that
advance[d] the city's financial interests."
By issuing repeated arrest warrants when people missed court appearances or
were unable to pay fines, it managed to regularly pile one fine on top of
another and then often refused to accept partial payments for the sums owed.
Under Missouri state law, moving traffic violations, for instance,
automatically required the temporary suspension of a driver's license.
Ferguson residents couldn't get their licenses back until -- you guessed it
-- they paid their fines in full, often for charges that were manufactured in
the first place.
As if in Kabul, people then had to weigh the risk of driving license-less (and
getting arrested) against losing their jobs or -- without a car -- not making
it to court. With no community service option available, many found themselves
spending time in jail. From the police to the courts to city hall, what had
been organized was, in short, an everyday money-raising racket of the first
order.
And all of this was linked to the police department, which actually ran the
municipal court. As the Justice Department report put it, that court "operates
as part of the police department... is supervised by the Ferguson chief of
police, is considered part of the police department for city organizational
purposes, and is physically located within the police station. Court staff
report directly to the chief of police." He, in turn, ran the show, doing
everything from collecting fines to determining bail amounts.
The Harvard Law Review reported that, in 2013, Ferguson had a population of
22,000. That same year, "its municipal court issued 32,975 arrest warrants for
nonviolent offenses," or almost one-and-a-half arrests per inhabitant.
The report continued:
"In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don't appear in court
after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the
courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session
is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along
with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police
drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can't pay their fines or post
bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is
imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month).
Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail."
Whether in Kabul or Ferguson, this kind of daily oppression wears people down.
It's no surprise that long before the police shot Michael Brown, the citizens
of Ferguson had little trust or respect for them.
Privatizing Official Corruption
But might Ferguson not have been an outlier, a unique Kabul-in-America case of
a rogue city government bent on extracting every penny from its poorest
residents? Consider, then, the town of Pagedale, Missouri, which came up with a
hardly less kleptocratic way of squeezing money out of its citizens.
Instead of focusing on driving and parking, Pagedale routinely hit homeowners
with fines for "offenses" like failing to have blinds and "matching curtains"
on their windows or "unsightly lawns." Pagedale is a small town, with 3,300
residents. In 2013, the city's general revenues totaled $2 million, 17% percent
from such fines and fees.
Might such kleptocratic local revenue-extraction systems, however, be limited
to just one Midwestern state? Consider then the cozy relationship that Augusta,
capital of Georgia, has with Sentinel Offender Services, LLC.
That company makes electronic monitoring equipment used by state and local
government agencies, ranging from the Los Angeles County Probation Department
to the Massachusetts Office of the Commissioner of Probation. Its website touts
the benefits to municipalities of what it calls "offender-funded programs" in
which the person on probation pays the company directly for his or her own
monitoring, saving the courts the cost of administering a probation system. In
return, the company sets its own fees at whatever level it chooses. "By
individually assessing each participant a fee based on income," says Sentinel,
"our sliding-fee scale approach has shifted the financial burden to the
participant, allowing program growth and size to be a function of correctional
need rather than budget availability."
"Profiting from Probation," a 2014 Human Rights Watch report, offers a typical
tale of an Augusta resident named Michael Barrett. Arrested for shoplifting a
can of beer, he entered a local court system that was focused on revenue
extraction via a kind of official extortion, which is the definition of
corruption. Even to step into a courtroom to deal with his "case," he had to
hand over an $80 fee for a court-appointed defense lawyer.
Then, convicted, he would be sentenced to a $200 fine and probation. Because
the charge was "alcohol-related," the court required Barrett to wear an
electronic bracelet that would monitor his alcohol consumption, even though his
sentence placed no restrictions on his drinking. For that Sentinel bracelet,
there was a $50 startup fee, a $39 monthly "service" charge, and a
$12 "daily usage" fee. In total, he was forced to pay about $400 a month to
monitor something he was legally allowed to do. Since Barrett couldn't even pay
the startup fee, he was promptly thrown in jail for a month until a friend lent
him the money.
Such systems of privatized "justice" that bleed the poor are now spreading
across the U.S., a country officially without debtor's prisons. According to
the Harvard Law Review article, some cities charge a "fee" to everyone they
arrest, whether or not they're ever convicted of an offense. In Washington,
D.C., on the other hand, for "certain traffic and a number of lower level
criminal offenses," you can simply pay your arresting officer "to end a case on
the spot," avoiding lengthy and expensive court costs. Other jurisdictions
charge people who are arrested for the costs of police investigations,
prosecution, public defender services, a jury trial ("sometimes with different
fees depending on how many jurors a defendant requests"), and incarceration.
Watch Your Ass(ets)
Even Machiavelli, who counseled princes seizing new territory to commit all
their crimes at once because human beings have such short memories, warned that
people will accept pretty much any kind of oppression unless "you prey on the
possessions or the women of your subjects." So many centuries later, while we
women now tend to believe we belong to ourselves, civil asset forfeiture is
still a part of American life. Unlike criminal asset forfeiture, which permits
the government to seize a person's assets after conviction of a crime, civil
forfeiture allows local, state, or federal law enforcement to seize and keep
someone's money or other property even if he or she is never charged. If, say,
you are suspected of involvement with drugs or terrorism, the police can seize
all the money you have on you on the spot, even if they don't arrest you -- and
you have to go to court to get it back.
Federal asset forfeiture collections have risen from around $800 million in
2002 to almost $4.5 billion in 2014, according to the Institute for Justice
(IJ). Governments defend the practice as a means of preventing suspected
criminals -- especially high-level drug dealers -- from using their money to
commit more crimes. But all too often, it's poor people whose money is
"forfeited," even when they've committed no crime. The Pennsylvania ACLU
reported that police take around a million dollars from Philadelphians each
year in 6,000 separate cases -- and not from drug lords either. More than half
the cases involve seizures of less than $192, and in a city that's only 43%
black, 71% of those seizures from people charged with no crimes come from
African Americans. If your property is seized, you can try to go to court to
get it back but, says the ACLU, you should expect to make an average of four
court appearances. Most people just give up.
Reading Thieves of State reminded me that we're not living in the country many
of us imagine, but in something like an American klepto-state.
Corruption, it turns out, doesn't just devour the lives of people in far-off
nations. Right now, it's busy shoving what's left of our own democracy down our
throats.
Chayes documents how such corruption can lead to violent explosions in other
countries. Indeed, it was a final kleptocratic insult -- a police woman's slap
in the face after he refused to pay a bribe to retrieve his confiscated
vegetable cart -- that led Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi to burn himself to death
and touch off the Arab Spring. As Machiavelli wrote so long ago, people will
put up with a lot -- torture, mass surveillance, even a car full of clowns
masquerading as candidates for president -- but they don't like being robbed by
their own government. Sooner or later, they will rebel.
Let's hope, when that happens, that we don't end up under the rule of our own
American Taliban or some billionaire reality TV star.
Rebecca Gordon is a TomDispatch regular. She teaches at the University of San
Francisco and is the author of Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the
Post-9/11 United States and the forthcoming American Nuremberg: The Officials
Who Should Stand Trial for Post 9/11 War Crimes (Hot Books, 2016).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret
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Copyright 2015 Rebecca Gordon
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
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