Behind Washington’s political scandals
By
Fred Goldstein
Published Oct 9, 2005 11:36 PM
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.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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