Research By Holly

   

Corruption in American Politics: Are there any Honest Politicians Left?  

by Holly Wilcox  

“. . .power reveals the latent corruption within the person” Ian Heath  

www.discover-your-mind.co.uk/  

To say that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, is an over-simplification, because the two more often operate in tandem with money.  

Each of us has issues, which most of us can act-out in small ways that are harmful only to ourselves and perhaps a small sphere of intimates.  

To become extremely powerful in a world of nearly 7 billion people requires a certain amount of ruthlessness, egoism, and obsessive focus on a particular goal. For some this can work out well enough, for instance Bill Gates, while for others it is a catastrophic world disaster, such as Hitler. There is the Dalai Lama and then there is the Pope, and then there are the likes of Jim Jones, and many others of his ilk who become cult leaders, and there are political leaders including Osama Bin Laden.  

In answer to the title’s question, well of course there’s an honest politician left, but that’s only because he probably has not been approached by big money interests, or doesn’t belong to the right groups. And I say he purposely, because the majority of these personalities are men.  

What causes corruption in Washington isn’t so much power as it is money. What’s the difference, you ask?  

It’s more about money than power, because money is power, and the place to make the big money today, the world-class money is Washington D.C., where money literally is the  lingua franca spoken by Lobbyists, Corporations, and PAC’s, such as The Tea Party.  

C. Wright Mills understood this clearly way back in 1956: 

“When decisions and values are given over to corporate and military rule, and a small percentage controls most of the economy, and money becomes THE defining measure of success in life, then those people who own and control these few corporations also control the social fabric of the country, including its political structure. (emphasis added) (C. Wright Mills: 1956, “The Power Elite”)  

Fitzsimons reports that “according to Mills, the governing elite in the US primarily draws its members from three areas: (i) the highest political leaders (including the president) and a handful of key cabinet members and close advisers; (ii) major corporate owners and directors; and (iii) high ranking military officers. The elite occupies what Mills terms the top command posts of society.^[6]  

“Such positions give their holders enormous authority over governmental, financial, educational, social, civic, and cultural institutions. A small group is thus able to make decisions and take actions that touch everyone.” (James Cook University   “The Politics of Corruption in the 21^st Century”patrick.fitzsimons@jcu.edu.au http://globalization.icaap.org/content/v2.1/07_fitzsimons.html#N1)  

   

For more on the power elite see: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Book_Excerpts/PowerElite.html  

   

The power elite hold the control over how decisions are made in this country. This paper will give you some facts about money transactions and how that affects what happens in this country at the level of a citizen of any kind.  

Here are my choices for the top five money facilitators which allow this system to operate:  

Swiss Bank Accounts  

Washington D.C. Culture  

The Industrial-Military Complex  

The Stock Market  

Lobbyists  

Swiss Bank Accounts, Globalization, and corruption:  

“Globalization allows money to travel instantly and anonymously around the world into offshore and Swiss bank accounts. “One Swiss banking source has estimated that more than US $420 billion is held in that country’s banks by African heads of state alone. ^21” (Fitzsimons) This connects all criminals and the amounts of money in play are staggering. Such large amounts of money in the financial systems end up as part of the working funds of banks and governments, and in the end, they cannot operate without them anymore.” (James Cook University   “The Politics of Corruption in the 21^st Century”
patrick.fitzsimons@jcu.edu.au    http://globalization.icaap.org/content/v2.1/07_fitzsimons.html#N1)  

These criminals, swoop into countries, in the market for women and girls and other humans to sell in the market for human trade going on in the world, and making lots of money. They also traffic in nuclear weapons, and organ transplants, (Fitzsimons).  

In The following segment Fitzsimons explains how criminal money held in secret accounts affects the global economy. There is more than this. He explains in pages of excrutiating detail how it all takes place. 

“Grand corruption has been defined as ‘the misuse of public power by beads of state, ministers and senior officials for private pecuniary gain’. ¹⁹ With grand corruption we are dealing with highly placed individuals who exploit their position to extract large bribes from representatives of transnational corporations (TNCs); arms dealers, drug barons and the like, who appropriate significant pay-offs from contract scams, or who simply transfer large sums of money from the public treasury into private (usually overseas) bank accounts. Examples of grand corruption in recent years have become all too familiar: the late Felix Houphouet-Boigny’s boast that he had ‘billions abroad’, ‘Citoyen’ Mobuto Sese Seko’s reputed US$5 billion in overseas bank accounts, the alleged £3 billion – a conservative estimate – siphoned out of Pakistan by the family of former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and the billions accumulated by ‘Suharto Inc’, the vast business empire controlled by the former Indonesian president’s family and cronies – are but the tip of the iceberg.” ²⁰ Economic crimes deserving attention fall into two categories: first, are those that harm large numbers by enforcing an economic policy that serves the global elite, as with Camdessus’ ‘structural adjustment’ programs for poor countries. A second form of crime is large-scale theft, as in the case of Mobutu, the Western imposed looter in Zaire, and Suharto in Indonesia. One Swiss banking source has estimated that more then US$420 billion is held in that country’s banks by African heads of state alone. ²¹ Cronyism, a term habitually associated with the Third World, is clearly pervasive among political and business elites in the north. In his masterly account of ‘how Washington works’, Smith has catalogued the multifarious exchanges—federal employment, access to key figures and information, free flights on private jets, holidays overseas, tickets for major sporting events, invitations to dinner with ‘big shots’ and so on—which constitute the core of ‘the power game’ in the United States. ²² 

“Crime has become one of the most flourishing economic activities, run by professionals who have taken on board all the rules of modern management. Castells describes a global criminal economy as ‘the networking of powerful organizations, and their associates, in shared activities throughout the planet . . . (as) a new phenomenon that profoundly affects international and national economies, politics, security, and, ultimately, societies at large’. ²³ These global criminals are active in such things as trafficking in weapons, nuclear materials, illegal immigrants, body parts, women and children, and money laundering. A country where the gap between rich and poor and social disparities are so great that the most wretched have only their bodies to sell is swooped upon by networks of traffickers doing a most profitable trade in human beings, be they women, children, workers or sources of organs for transplant. In his opinion, this economy disrupts the ‘official’ one because the criminal activity has now become ‘a significant and troubling component of global financial flows and stock markets’ ²⁴ . Even more troubling is what he sees as the ‘thin line between criminal traffic and government inspired trade’ ²⁵ .”  (James Cook University   “The Politics of Corruption in the 21^st Century”patrick.fitzsimons@jcu.edu.au    http://globalization.icaap.org/content/v2.1/07_fitzsimons.html#N1)http://globalization.icaap.org/content/v2.1/07_fitzsimons.html  

Without offshore accounts such as Swiss Bank Accounts, Banks in Portugal, and Lloyd’s TSB on the isle of Jersey in the Channel Islands these kinds of internet money transactions, and the nebulous activities they fund, could not operate at such super-inflated profits. 

Washington D. C. Culture:

 When did it all begin to come apart at the seams? Can you say PAC’s? or Tea Party?  

Even with someone such as an Obama showing up in his frame of mind where change can happen, his frame of mind has by now been overtaken, even stolen, perhaps, by the existing money structures in place, which control power in Washington D.C., and  ultimately over all of us.  

I don’t believe these positions of power have changed much, if at all, in recent years, and thus that they remain in place, directing the flow of the financial river of money flowing through Washington DC.  It’s easy to see this is the case when you read the following quote from Elizabeth Drew which is over 10 years old:  

“Indisputably, the greatest change in Washington over the last twenty-five years-in its culture, in the way it does business, and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here-has been in the preoccupation with money.  

“There was a time when people came to Washington out of a spirit of public service and idealism. Engendering this spirit was one of John F. Kennedy’s most important contributions. Then Richard Nixon, picking up from George Wallace, and then Ronald Reagan, in particular, derided “federal bureaucrats.” The spirit of public service was stepped on, but not entirely extinguished.”(Drew)  

But more than ever, Washington has become a place where people come or remain in order to benefit financially from their government service…” ( Drew)   

Ann Wexler as quoted in Drew, below:

“This whole thing blew apart in the eighties, when congressmen could raise all this money,” Wexler told me. “Before, they’d attend twenty-five-dollar barbecues.

“It was the development of PACs in the eighties-when people figured out that if they gave money through the PACs they could get access, they could get their phone calls returned. Just as the unions used dues for political activity, businesses began to use salary deductions for PACs. [Wexler's firm, like similar lobbying and law firms around town, has its own PAC.] The Hill figured it out. If you’re a committee chairman, you could raise fifty thousand even one hundred thousand dollars. Then they started leadership PACs-that’s another extortion. Then the leader uses the money to try to gain higher office.”(Elizabeth Drew, 1999)The Money Culture, excerpted from the book: The Corruption of American Politics by Elizabeth Drew: The Overlook Press, 1999 Find excerpt at: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Political_Corruption/Money_Culture_CAP.html

   

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!  

Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17.
Scottish author & novelist (1771 – 1832)

And in order to deceive to the full extent people cover for each other. In reality, what is going on in Washington is known facts:  

The following excerpt is from “Making A Killing. An 11-part series on PublicIntegrity.org By Phillip van Niekerk and Laura Peterson”:  

“The strong links between the U.S. government and many of the private military companies that contract with them has presented questions regarding the revolving door between government and the private sector. In 1992, the Pentagon, then headed by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney,   

   

paid Brown & Root Services $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave Brown & Root an additional $5 million to update the report. Brown & Root (now called Kellogg Brown & Root, or KBR) is a subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation, which Cheney, the U.S. vice president, headed as CEO from 1995 to 1999.(emphasis added).  Brown & Root was also awarded contracts in 1995 and 1997 to provide logistical support in the Balkans, where the U.S. military has been enforcing the 1995 Dayton Peace accord that ended the war in former Yugoslavia. Those contracts mushroomed to $2.2 billion worth of payments over five years, according to the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.”  

By Laura Peterson in Privatizing Combat, the New World Order Making a Killing From Making A Killing on PublicIntegrity.org in Greasing the Skids of Corruption  

 As VP, Dick Cheney enjoyed a minimum  of eight powerful years directing money through the means of war towards the military industrialization complex in which he holds a tremendous  interest.  

In order to give the reader a sense of the magnitude of the money changing hands between government and private sector companies I have included a long section from “Making a Killing” here:  

“The Signature Bonus”

The oil industry became almost synonymous with bribery in 1973 when Gulf Oil admitted funneling more than $10 million to U.S. and foreign politicians over several years. When the Securities and Exchange Commission responded with a questionnaire asking American corporations if they paid bribes, more than 400 corporations – including major oil companies like Exxon – acknowledged making questionable payments to foreign government officials, politicians and political parties. The result was the passage in 1977 of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – the world’s first, and toughest, anti-bribery legislation. 

Andre Tarallo in court(Reuters)

U.S. businesses complained The FCPA does contain some significant loopholes, such as the exemption for “facilitating payments,” defined as “payments to facilitate or expedite performance of routine governmental actions.” These actions include processing of permits, licenses or visas, but “do not include any decision by a foreign official to award new business.” Yet, according to Phillip Urofsky, an attorney at the U.S. Justice Department – the agency charged with criminal enforcement of the act – the exemption also covers one of the most nebulous transactions in the oil business, the signature bonus.  

Signature bonuses are lump sums companies pay foreign governments upon signing a contract licensing them to explore and pump oil from a specified area, or “block.” The amount of the bonus varies according to the block’s size and prospective wealth. In recent years, the size of signature bonuses has skyrocketed in hot markets such as Angola. The $870 million bonus paid by BP-Amoco, TotalFinaElf and Exxon for the ultra-deepwater blocks 31, 32 and 33 in 1999 set an industry record, and the $300 million signature bonus paid by four partner companies for block 34 kept the bar high. Among the largest transfers into Sonangol’s Jersey island accounts during the third quarter of 2000 was the $13.7 million from Marathon Oil – just one-third of the signature bonus the company had agreed to pay for the opportunity to share in Angola’s oil wealth.  

The amount of the bonuses are set in a two-tiered bidding process: all of the companies selected by the host government to share ownership of the block submit a “base bid,” the amount of which is widely known within the industry. Companies then submit a second bid to determine the size of their share, an amount that is tightly guarded. “It’s far from bribery – it’s a very normal practice around the world,” said Knud Schlosser, vice president of Norsk Hydro, which holds shares in four Angolan blocks. “It’s a very clean business.”  

In his testimony before the French magistrates, however, Elf’s Tarallo used another term for the practice. “All international oil companies have used kickbacks since the first oil shock of the 1970s to guarantee the companies’ access to oil,” Tarallo said, according to news reports at the time. “You have official ‘bonuses’ as part of a contract: the company seeking to exploit an oil field commits itself to building a school, a hospital or a road. Then you have ‘parallel bonuses,’ which can be paid to increase the likelihood of obtaining the contract.”  

 As long as oil companies keep the size of the signature bonuses they pay a secret, the potential for diversion from Angola’s budget is huge. Only half of the $870 million signature bonus for blocks 31-33 appeared on government ledgers, and Angola’s former Foreign Minister Venancio de Moura acknowledged in December 1998 that the funds were earmarked for the “war effort.” Some economic reports have estimated the amount of oil revenue missing from Angola’s 2000 budget at $1 billion – a sobering figure considering that the bulk of Angola’s budget is funded by oil and that the country is expected to receive some $23 billion worth of investment in its oil and natural gas sectors by 2007.  

Transparency advocates such as Global Witness say oil companies must assume responsibility for their contribution to corruption by releasing details of their payments to foreign governments to the public. Such challenges, combined with public relations debacles such as that of Shell in Nigeria, have resulted in projects like the United Nations’ Global Compact, in which several oil and mining companies, including British Petroleum (BP) and Shell, agreed to a set of principles intended to safeguard human rights while protecting employees and property in remote parts of the world. Chevron, Shell, Texaco, U.S. company Occidental Petroleum and Norway’s Statoil have all signed the Sullivan Principles, based on a 1977 code of conduct authored by American minister and activist Leon Sullivan for companies operating in South Africa, which declare signatories’ intent to “not offer, pay or accept bribes.”  

Yet adopting a code of ethics doesn’t guarantee it will be followed. “Let us be realistic,” Ho Wang Kim, the Angola officer at Energy Africa, told ICIJ when asked whether his company followed a code of ethics. “No oil company seeking ventures in Africa practices a noble and transparent code of ethics and principles [in order] to have a competitive edge over its competitors.” By Laura Peterson in Privatizing Combat, the New World Order Making a Killing From Making A Killing on PublicIntegrity.org in Greasing the Skids of Corruption  

The Stock Market & The Industrial Military Complex  

 WANT TO KNOW WHERE TO PUT YOUR INVESTMENT MONEY?  

 In Cashing In on Terror by Robert Scheer says:  

“Lockheed Martin, the nation’s top weapons manufacturer, reaped a 22 percent increase in profits, while rivals for the defense buck, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, increased profits by 62 percent and 22 percent, respectively. Boeing’s profits jumped 61 percent, spiked this quarter by its commercial division, but Boeing’s military division, like the others, have been doing very well indeed since the terrorist attacks. As Newsweek International put in August:  

“Since 9/11 and the U.S.-led wars that followed, shares in American defense companies have outperformed both the Nasdaq and Standard & Poor’s stock indices by some 40 percent. Prior to the recent cascade of stock prices worldwide, Boeing’s share prices had tripled over the past five years while Raytheon’s had doubled.”(www.truthdig.com.   October 30, 2007)  

   

And There’s More:  

 “In 2008, according to an authoritative report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), $55.2 billion in weapons deals were concluded worldwide. Of that total, the United States was responsible for $37.8 billion in weapons sales agreements, or 68.4% of the total “trade.” Some of these agreements were long-term ones and did not result in 2008 deliveries of weapons systems, but these latest figures are a good gauge of the global appetite for weapons. It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to recognize that, when one nation accounts for nearly 70% of weapons sales, the term “global arms trade” doesn’t quite cut it.  

Weapons Sales are Red Hot

Vice Admiral Jeffrey www.reuters.com

“What’s Hot?” is the title of Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieranga’s blog entry for January 4, 2010. Wieranga is the Director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which is charged with overseeing weapons exports, and such pillow talk is evidently more than acceptable — at least when it’s about weapons sales. In fact, Wieranga could barely restrain himself that day, adding: “Afghanistan is really HOT!” Admittedly, on that day the temperature in Kabul was just above freezing, but not at the Pentagon, where arms sales to Afghanistan evidently create a lot of heat.” (America’s Global Weapons Monopoly by Frida Berrigan, TomDispatch www.informationclearinghouse.info/  February 17, 2010)  

   

The revolving door between the federal govt. and wall street financial mega-financiers. We do remember Alan Greenspan? Just in case you forgot here’s his resume.  

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Alan Greenspan http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/why-we-were-greenspans-economic-model/2007/09/18/1189881511

“Alan Greenspan  

(born March 6, 1926) is an American economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He currently works as a private advisor and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006 after the second-longest tenure in the position.” (Wikipedia.com)  

   

So what was Mr. Greenspan doing for the country during this infernal economic crash?  

He was busy becoming #2 on  “America’s Ten Most Corrupt Capitalists”  

A list compiled by Zach Carter, in which he writes:  

“By the time Greenspan left office in 2006, the derivatives market had ballooned into a multi-trillion dollar casino, and Greenspan wanted his cut. He took a job with bond kings PIMCO and then with the hedge fund Paulson & Co.—yeah, that Paulson and Co., the one that colluded with Goldman Sachs to sabotage the company’s own clients with unregulated derivatives. ((informationclearinghouse.info http://http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25461.htm)  

Before that, he hung out with Keating and the Savings and Loan crowd. Remember them? This man controlled our money system for 17 of the last 25 years. And then he took a huge pay-off.  

Where is the money these days?  

According to Bill Quigley, “There are now 35 registered lobbyists in Washington DC for every single member of the Senate and House of Representatives, at last count 13,739 in 2009. There are eight lobbyists for every member of Congress working on the health care fiasco alone.  

Jack Abramoff Convicted Lobbyist : http://www.beforeitslive.com/

“At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that corporations now have a constitutional right to interfere with elections by pouring money into races.  

“In conclusion it would seem that it is not so much that power leads to corruption, but that money leads to corruption, and both politics and corporations have become the place to make big money, and in the process, become corrupt. Politicians write their own rules, and the corporation pay lobbyists to get laws passed in their favor.” ( By Bill Quigley Time for a U.S. Revolution – Fifteen Reasons http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24935.htmhttp://)  

Siv O’Neal makes a particularly cogent comment about the end result of this system of politics “With the effect that people are now generally convinced that money is value in itself, an end rather than a means.” http://www.countercurrents.org/oneall190809.htm  par. 6  

Value in Itself 

When the money itself becomes the value, then the people in the system have lost all sense of what is real, and what is a mirage. People live on the wistfulness of how life might be if only we had more than enough money. How much is enough for one person, for some people, or in the case of The Money Party that has taken control of our political system how much is enough for you?  Each citizen is without doubt only concerned with their own personal gain. It may extend out to family, and a few friends, but that is as far as it goes for us as well as the average bad bear on Wall Street or savvy politician in Washington D.C.  

 

In conclusion, is it that honest people are corrupted into taking the money, or does taking the money make you corrupt or does it even matter? In every transaction discussed in this report, the participants knew the moral vicissitudes of their actions. Once the money is at play, whether it’s weapons or human bodies, the profits seem to outweigh any sense of humanity.   

REFERENCES:

Berrigan, Frida (America’s Global Weapons Monopoly by Frida Berrigan, TomDispatch www.informationclearinghouse.info/  February 17, 2010)

 C. Wright Mills: 1956, “The Power Elite”)  

Carter, Zach ((informationclearinghouse.info http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25461.htm)  

               

Drew     Elizabeth, 1999)The Money Culture, excerpted from the book: The Corruption of American Politics by Elizabeth Drew: The Overlook Press, 1999 Find excerpt at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Political_Corruption/Money_Culture_CAP.html

   

           Fitzsimons, Patrick “The Politics of Corruption in the 21^st Century”

patrick.fitzsimons@jcu.edu.au  http://globalization.icaap.org/content/v2.1/07_fitzsimons.html#N1)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Book_Excerpts/PowerElite.html  

          Heath, Ian www.discover-your-mind.co.uk/  

O’Niel, Siv http://www.countercurrents.org/oneall190809.htm  par. 6  

Peterson, Laura   Making A Killing. An 11-part series on  

PublicIntegrity.org By Phillip van Niekerk and Laura Peterson  

Scheer Robert Cashing In on Terror by Robert Scheer www.truthdig.com   October 30, 2007)  

Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17.
Scottish author & novelist (1771 – 1832)  

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Book_Excerpts/PowerElite.html  

   

   

Quigley, Bill Time for a U.S. Revolution – Fifteen Reasons http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24935.htm  

   

Wikipedia.com