Behind Washington’s political scandals

Oct. 4—The flames of scandal are rapidly spreading wider within the Republican Party leadership and upward towards the White House, raising hopes and expectations that the arrogant, right-wing, reactionary regime that dominates Washington will suffer severe, if not fatal, political damage.

However far this scandal goes, it is the result of a loose and shifting coalescence of various forces within the capitalist class and the political establishment. For a variety of reasons, these forces want to open an offensive on the practices of the Bush administration and on the administration itself. It may never get there, but right now it has the flavor of the early stages of Nixon’s Watergate scandal.

Beyond the specific political forces at play, Bush and the right-wing Republicans running Congress are so drunk with power that they have begun to antagonize important sections of the corporate ruling class.

The workers and the oppressed can learn a great deal from this struggle about the lavish corruption and the underhanded methods of the capitalist politicians and the corporations behind them. It may be possible to use these exposures in the struggle against the bosses. But this struggle is within the ruling class, over the spoils of office and at the same time over the practices and character of the regime.

‘The Hammer’ falls

At present, Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, the House majority leader, has been doubly indicted for conspiracy and corruption; Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, is under investigation for insider trading; Jack Abramoff, a powerful, Republican-connected lobbyist with ties to DeLay, is under criminal investigation by a Senate committee, several government agencies and the state of Florida; David Safavian, Bush’s chief of procurement for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is under arrest for obstructing an investigation of Abramoff; and the head of the Food and Drug Administration, Lester Craw ford, has been forced to quit after two months for failing to report his wife’s sizeable holdings in pharmaceutical industry stock.

In addition, reporter Judith Miller of the New York Times has testified before a grand jury investigating the exposure of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. Plame was exposed by the Bush group in retaliation for her husband’s exposure of administration lies about weapons of mass destruction. Miller’s testimony concerned conversations with Vice President Dick Cheney’s key aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The affair raises the question of the involvement of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Cheney and possibly George W. Bush himself.

Without a doubt progressive humanity, not only in the U.S. but all over the world, is profoundly gratified to see the public exposure of the venal corruption practiced by this high and mighty group of reactionary, hypocritical moralists, who preach freedom and democracy to justify their bloody occupation of Iraq and spout “family values” from the roof tops while lying, cheating and stealing without bounds.

Corrupt redistricting in Texas

DeLay has been indicted in connection with a corrupt scheme to get Republican control of the House in 2004. A Texas law declares it illegal for corporations to donate to political candidates. In 2002 DeLay got around this by getting Texas corporations to donate to a group he set up, Texans for a Republican Majority.

He then sent $190,000 from the group to the Republican National Committee. The RNC sent checks back to candidates in Texas running for the State House. The Republicans won a majority there for the first time in 40 years, after which they carried out a redistricting of Texas so as to gain five congressional seats.

Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, a former spokesperson for DeLay, are under investigation by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, headed by Sen. John McCain, for taking $66 million in lobbying fees from various Native nations and using much of the money for projects “ranging from an Orthodox Jewish academy to an Israeli sniper school; some money went to pay off a personal debt.” (Bloomberg.com)

Abramoff’s firm and Americans for Tax Reform, founded by Grover Norquist, a national Republican strategist with close ties to the White House, gave $4 million to Ralph Reed, founder of the Christian Coalition, who managed Bush’s Southern presidential election campaign and also has close ties to the White House. The money was to start a “Christian campaign” to whip up opposition to gambling casinos that were opposed by Abramoff’s casino clients.

The McCain committee found that Abramoff and Scanlon had pocketed $6.5 million of $7.7 million given them by the Choctaw Nation in Mississippi. DeLay once called Abramoff “one of my dearest friends.” Abramoff paid for three trips that DeLay took to an exclusive golf club in Scotland.

David Safavian, who was in charge of $300 billion worth of procurement contracts for the OMB, was arrested for concealing an illegal, secret land deal that he had made with Abramoff. The deal was made in 2002 when Safavian was head of the Government Services Administration. Safavian has been a lobbying protégé of Abramoff and a partner with Norquist.

Frist’s high-profile cheating

Frist is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and a federal court for insider selling of millions of dollars of stock in HCA, the largest private hospital corporation in the U.S. His father founded the corporation and it is run by his brother. After allegedly having the stock in a “blind trust” for 11 years, he suddenly sold weeks before the company issued a bad earnings report, causing the shares to drop by 14 percent.

Frist’s high-profile cheating was so blatant that the SEC would lose all credibility if it did nothing—not to mention the anger it would face from the financial interests whose stock lost value once Frist unloaded.

The direct motives of the protagonists in this struggle are transparent. The Democrats want the Republican Party tarred with charges of being the party of corruption. McCain, a Republican who is a rival of Bush and has his own presidential ambitions, has made militarism and campaigns against corruption his political trademark. The McCain-Feingold bill was supposed to put a stop to limitless corporate spending during elections.

The Valerie Plame grand jury investigation is part of an old struggle between the multilateralists, who were opposed to going into Iraq without first building alliances with the other imperialist powers, and the “preventive war,” unilateralist, Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz forces. Joseph Wilson, who was the real target of the exposure of Valerie Plame, was a 23-year career diplomat who served in the first Bush administration and was on the National Security Council in the Clinton administration.

He was clearly acting on behalf of the multilateralist faction of the ruling class when he exposed the Bush administration’s lies about Saddam Hussein trying to get nuclear material from Africa. The investigation is scheduled to be concluded in October.

‘Lobbyists are going crazy’

Elizabeth Drew, in a major piece entitled “Selling Washington” (New York Review of Books, June 23), presents a picture that sheds important light on the complex relationships between the ruling class and the Bush administration, with its right-wing Republican political machine.

Drew discusses the new aggressiveness of the lobbyists. She quotes a friend: “There are no restraints now; business groups and lobbyists are going crazy—they’re in every room on Capitol Hill writing legislation. You can’t move on the Hill without giving money.”

She goes on to discuss the so-called K Street Project. K Street is where the lobbyists in Washington, D.C., have their offices. The K Street project is designed to drive Democrats out of the lobbying firms and replace them with Republicans, friends and former aides.

“The Republicans don’t simply want to take care of their friends and former aides by getting them high-paying jobs; they want the lobbyists they have helped place in these jobs and other corporate representatives to arrange lavish trips for themselves and their wives, to invite them to watch sports events from skyboxes; and, most important, to provide a steady flow of campaign contributions.”

Republicans want to have “like-minded people on K Street who can further the ideological goals.… When I suggested to Grover Norquist, the influential right-wing leader and the leading enforcer of the K Street Project outside Congress, that numerous Democrats on K Street were not particularly ideological and were happy to serve corporate interests, he replied, ‘We don’t want nonideological people on K Street, we want conservative activist Republicans on K Street.’”

When the Motion Picture Association of America hired Clinton’s former secretary of agriculture, Dan Glickman, as its head, after having been warned by Republicans not to hire a Democrat, the Republicans removed a $1.5 billion tax relief measure for the industry. Glickman wound up having to hire an aide to Dennis Hastert, the Republican House speaker.

The Investment Company Institute, a consortium of mutual fund companies, was told that if it fired its Democratic top lobbyist, a “pending congressional investigation of mutual fund companies ‘might ease up.’”

Drew described how “business groups are under heightened pressure to support the administration’s policies—even those that are of no particular interest to them.” She recounted a Business Week article that told of how the Business Roundtable was summoned to a meeting with a special assistant to the president, various cabinet officers and Karl Rove. The Business Roundtable is made up of the CEOs of 160 of the top corporations in the U.S. They represent a vast concentration of capital.

“They anticipated a friendly give-and-take about economic legislation, but instead they were told to get behind the President’s plan to privatize Social Secu rity. As a result, these organizations have spent millions of dollars promoting Bush’s new program, particularly through ads. Business groups have been notably reticent about criticizing administration policies—even ones they deeply dislike, such as the huge budget deficit. In the past, when they differed on tax issues, they spoke out. An adviser to business groups says, ‘They’re scared of payback, of not getting their own agenda through.’”

Forgetting who’s the master

Bush and the Republican right wing are giving the corporations huge breaks and benefits to serve their profit interests. At the same time, they are making heavy-handed demands for money and political obedience. This is something that the bourgeoisie does not take kindly to—especially from the politicians who are supposed to be their servants.

If the bosses want a Democrat on their payroll, for reasons of influence, they don’t want to be told whom to hire—not by their own servants, the very politicians they have put in office. The bosses will give money in bribes to get what they want, but when those bribes take on a flavor of extortion, then it’s a different story.

If the bosses are in a bad mood about being pushed around by the likes of DeLay, Sen. Rick Santorum—another K Street enforcer—and Norquist, that mood is made even worse when they have to put up with the kind of cronyism and incompetence that showed during the Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

The capitalist class, the oil companies, the shipping companies, agribusiness and all the industries that relied on New Orleans could care less about the fate of the African American people, the immigrants and the poor whites who suffered and are still suffering. But they do care about the blow to the process of capitalist exploitation and the profits lost during the floods and the ensuing chaos caused by disorganization.

Furthermore, the bosses have gone to great lengths to create and nurture the two-party system of capitalist politics. It gives them more options, depending on economic and social conditions. They certainly do not want to become excessively dependent on one current or grouping in any party.

The Democrats are now looking at this discontent in the establishment and are licking their lips, hoping that they can get back into a majority in 2006 and have a shot at the presidency in 2008. In other words, they can get their lobbyists back on K Street. The ruling class can go through them to get its legislation and its deals.

The real conspiracy of both parties is that carried out against the interests of the working class and the oppressed, who should oppose the corrupt right-wing reac tionaries without running into the arms of the Democrats. The latter are just more slick in the way they support capitalist exploitation.

The Democrats have to fight the Republicans on grounds of corruption because they have no political program to help the masses. They are for the occupation in Iraq: “Stay the course” is their motto. They voted for the right-wing, racist, anti-abortion, anti-worker, pro-big business John Roberts for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. They have done nothing to help the victims of Katrina and Rita. They just play politics and criticize.

Settling for a more subtle and restrained form of corruption and corporate influence under the Democrats will not serve the interests of the working class and the oppressed. Only independent political and mass organization for struggle can chart a way out of the present crisis.