Vanity Fair has an article about some of the revelations that have come out in the wake of the Duke Cunningham and Jack Abramoff scandals, and how it reveals the seedy side of Washington. The article only scratches the surface - bribes to get CIA and Pentagon contracts, free trips to lavish resorts, hookers, drugs, envelopes full of cash being handed over in broad daylight. I've been telling folks for years that if they honestly had any idea what went on in Washington, they'd be stunned. I know personally of parties with multiple members of Congress showing up with goblets full of cocaine and escorts on their arms. The guy you see on TV talking about the decline of morality in America one day may very well be holding orgies that night in one of dozens of party houses on embassy row. The Vanity Fair story doesn't even come close to the reality. But some of it is still pretty good:
In March, Cunningham was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison--the harshest sentence ever received by an ex-congressman for corruption. But the investigations are far from over, and allegations continue to surface implicating other legislators and government officials. California Republican congressman Jerry Lewis, head of the House committee on appropriations, is currently being investigated. So is Wilkes's best friend from high-school days, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who was until recently No. 3 at the C.I.A., and who is alleged to have accepted lavish favors from Wilkes--a trip to a Honolulu estate, for instance, renting for $50,000 per week--in exchange for arranging lucrative C.I.A. contracts for his friend. (Wilkes, Lewis, and Foggo have denied any wrongdoing.) Republican congresswoman and senatorial candidate Katherine Harris, of Florida, a source familiar with her activities tells me, is also being scrutinized for her dealings with Wade--in particular, for receiving $32,000 in illegal campaign donations, and for a lavish dinner she enjoyed last year for which he paid more than $3,300. (Harris says that she did not know the donations were illegal and has since given the money to charity.) In addition, Wade, who is cooperating with the authorities, has told the F.B.I. that Wilkes kept hospitality suites in the Watergate Hotel and Westin Grand in order to entertain legislators and government officials with evenings of poker, cigars, and, on occasion, for Cunningham, prostitutes.Tens of thousands of pages of congressional documents going as far back as 1997 have been demanded by the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego. The C.I.A., Pentagon, I.R.S., and F.B.I. are conducting investigations, and at least three congressional committees are cooperating in hopelessly tardy fashion. "We are scrubbing" is how a staffer on the intelligence committee puts it. Washington is unraveling.
"What these revelations provide is a window into Babylon or the last stages of Rome," explains a source with knowledge of the multiple ongoing investigations. "Many felonies went undetected because in the Defense Department a lot goes on in secret, and these crimes grew in the shadow of both 9/11 and one-party rule--with little scrutiny. So what you're looking at is a world where money, secrecy, sex, and indulgence were all in play. Where everyone is guilty of something."
The article describes a "bribe menu" that Cunningham had, similar to the one that Lyndon Johnson famously had when he was Senate Majority Leader. And all of this is inevitable as the courtiers that surround a king's palace. An appropriations committee chairman controls perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in government contracts, everything from arms to mineral rights to school lunch programs. With all of that largesse up for grabs, it is inevitable that those who profit from it will try and get and ever bigger piece of the pie - and to keep the pie growing.
And therein lies the secret to why government continually grows. It costs an average of $10 million to campaign for a seat in the Senate, over $100 million for the presidency, regardless of which party you belong to. $20 donations from dedicated followers isn't gonna get you there, but hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars funnelled through a myriad of political action committees and fake non-profit organizations will. Those who control all that money don't spend it foolishly; they expect results and they get them.
It's not a coincidence that multimillion dollar lobbying campaigns net billions in tax transfers year after year, no matter which party is in charge. That's simply a return on their investment. And if that doesn't work, a night with a hooker (or a staffer) in a "hospitality suite" with a hidden camera or two laying around can always loosen up any opposition you might run into along the way. Washington DC is imperial Rome, folks. It's not only worse than you think it is, it's worse than you can imagine it to be.
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Your tax dollars at work, so to speak. If we all agree that this is a problem, and that this is not the inevitable product of the way the system is designed, then on to the real questions:
Is there a solution? If so, what is it?
I don't think there is much of a solution. As long as there is a 2 trillion dollar prize pool essentially up for grabs to the highest bidder, they will continue to bid it up and human nature virtually guarantees that the people most likely to run for and win office are exactly the same people who will court such bids and pay them off. Depressing, I know.
Sure, stop allowing government to have that much control over society and corporations will no longer have a need to control government.
It really is a tough nut. The problem emerges from the fact that every citizen who votes is expected to educate themselves about the qualifications of the available candidates. The way most people educate themselves about political candidates is to read or watch media outlets that generally agree with their current biases (see Ed's recent post on Group-think). So candidates with lots of cash can saturate these media outlets with carefully crafted (expensive) advertisements, and thus buy the vote.
Attempts at a solution to this point have essentially been to limit contributions or spending, both of which are pretty clear speech limitations prohibited by the constitution. Besides that, there hasn't been a campaign law passed that lobbyists couldn't figure a way around.
I've often wondered if the situation couldn't be fixed by requiring voters to actually know something about the field of candidates they are voting for: I make it a point never to cast a vote unless I know the basic resume of the major-party candidates. I'm not sure how this could be done fairly on a large scale.
Just one note of complaint on your post Ed - the Washington DC you describe is NOT the city itself, but rather "official Washington," which typically comprises not only the self-aggrandizing "morality police," but also those who insist no decent person would ever spend time in Washington, as they eat up the largesse.
The DC I live in could not be further from the power corridors where this kind of sleaze exists. The real Washington DC is a city whose only contact with these "leaders" is often the traffic delays caused by their incessant motorcades.
I take exception to the image painted that a majority of Congress members are on the take, or that a majority participate in baccanalia at night while preaching puritanism by day.
There are 438 members (counting the non-voting delegages from D.C., P.R., and Guam). In my experience no more than 50 could be described as regularly partaking in illegal activities after hours, and many of the most powerful are also known as super-straight arrows. I'm not sure that the 50 is a greater percentage from the population at large.
There are good representatives. Going after the wrongdoers is noble; finding the good ones and holding them up as an example may be more difficult, and more noble.
Ed, I think you've probably got the ratios backwards.
And you left out the 100 Senators. (And the staff, and the lobbyists...)
If it's only a minority who are corrupt, perhaps metarules would work. With good science you decide before you collect the data how it will be analyzed. In government you could follow a best practice or at least a consistent practice. You state in a request for proposals or a working paper on making a decision what the relevant factors are and how they will be weighted and judged. You receive the proposals for action or for yea or nay. You use the prescribed standards for making the decision. You have agreed in advance that the top scorer will be chosen and you stick to that agreement.
For example, our provincial government wanted to download provincial highways to municipalities. They commissioned a traffic survey to see how the highways were used. The survey found that a large proportion of people used the highways for long-distance, not local, travel. In spite of the result, the highways were stripped of their designation and given to the municipalities to maintain, in spite of their being in fact provincial routes. If legislation or procedures were prepared in advance stating that the percentage of long-distance travel would indicate a highway worthy of provincial support, the highways would have remained highways.
I have often thought that a representative's salary should be a multiple of the old age pension. And the only way to raise their salary would be to raise the old age pension.