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
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Copyright 2015 Rebecca Gordon
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
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