By historical standards. It certainly is corrupt by the standards of western democracies and by the standards we would like to hold our politicians to, and by the standards of the system we need to address some of the most pressing issues the country and even humanity have ever faced.
But I think it's very important to look at things in historical perspective. I was reading Denise Oliver Velez's diary on OWS and the linked article by Greg Tate, and one of the takeaways from it is that one problem African Americans have with the OWS movement is that it's as though all these young, mostly white people are discovering that there is inequality in society. Tate says many people of color are asking, well where were you when inequality was concentrated in our communities? Why wasn't it a pressing issue then?
Same with corruption. Abramoff ripped off Native American communities for years. In a similar vein, I'd like people to reflect on how corrupt the U.S. political system has always been. There is part of me that reads these "shocked, shocked I say!" diaries and thinks, where have you been the last several decades -- or in terms of your reading about history, centuries? Many urban city governments in the U.S. have floated in a sea of corruption that involves not just real estate interests and banks pushing communities of color out, but the equally corrupt prison industrial complex which wears the populist face of police officers and prison guards (yea! jobs for depressed upstate communities!). Welcome to the new reality. Corruption isn't working for as many people as it used to.
The system is actually less corrupt than it used to be. I'm not saying it isn't awful, but I think it's instructive to think about this in the context of American political history.
From the founding up until around Watergate, there was very little stopping businesses and wealthy people from simply bribing legislators.
Keep in mind that for most of our history, most law that was relevant to people's lives was state law. State legislatures were notoriously corrupt. Legislators literally could accept bags of cash. Also most state legislator jobs were part time. Most state legislators had full time jobs as "lawyers" representing "clients" -- clients who were deeply concerned about state law. So a big corporations would "retain" a lawyer-state legislator as a lawyer and then get him to introduce or modify legislation when the lawyer wore his state legislator hat. State legislators were literally on retainers of corporations.
Overthrowing the corruption of state legislatures was intimately tied to the struggle for civil rights of African Americans in the south. Not only were state legislatures corrupt, but they were gerrymandered so that rural areas with few people and extremely influential plantation owners who held life and death power over poor blacks -- and poor whites -- could dominate politics at the county and state level. This was a problem in both the north and the south. In some states, one rural district with 165 people had the same voting power as a district with 32,000 people, and in California, Los Angeles, with 6 million people had the same voting power as one rural country with 14,000 people. The Supreme Court under Earl Warren was beautifully plain spoken when it wrote the major civil rights decisions of the 1960s, and one of the best passages was written by an exasperated Chief Justice Earl Warren in Reynolds v. Sims, a case about inequality in voting power in Alabama, in response to some legal and political arguments that it was important for property to be represented. Chief Justice Warren wrote:
"Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests."
In the late 1800s, the "gilded age," the power of massive new corporations dwarfed the power of even today's multinationals and banks in their hold over politicians. The owners and managers of the new railroads, steel companies and oil companies, the likes of which America had never seen and barely understood and didn't regulate, literally gave away stock in the companies to politicians, making them partners and facilitating the payment of bribes through "dividends." It was during this era that the Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment, which on its face, seems to be designed to provide constitutional rights to freed slaves, actually was designed to protect corporations from regulation and was not intended to guarantee equality to African Americans beyond "separate but equal."
Up until the 1970s, there were state legislators and congresspeople who literally represented just one or two corporations.
I am reminded of this because I was just watching "All the President's Men," over the weekend, a film about the Watergate scandal, and how the Washington Post's Woodward and Bernstein broke the story. But there is also all this amazing background in the movie about how politics worked in the 1960s and 1970s -- with rich people and corporations giving checks and bags of cash to the Nixon White House for its re-election campaign and expecting favors in return-- and that's how not just the Nixon White House, but federal politics in general worked.
Abramoff is nothing new. What's new is that because of campaign finance "reform" after Watergate, bribery has had to be disguised. It has gone from bags of cash and bundles of checks made out to "CASH," to "campaign donations" and the promise of future jobs. It has become even more dishonest by being semi-hidden.
Why are we outraged now?
What has happened is our standards have increased dramatically since Watergate, the problems we face are exponentially more difficult and the corporate sector has become more rapacious, such that corporations bribe legislators not to create a "business friendly" environment, but to facilitate simple looting. Ironically, our miserably inadequate campaign finance laws make the corruption more deceitful because it has to be disguised as "campaign contributions" and jobs for staffers. A lot of that is siphoned off by the brain dead media in the form of idiotic campaign commercials. It would be cheaper and more honest to just structure Congress as a sort of cattle auction house and let corporations openly bid on Congresspersons who could stand on a sort of auction block. Then bribes wouldn't also have to subsidize Fox News or Leslie Stahl (shocked! angry!) and the like for failing to do their jobs, reporting what everyone knows.
Also, politicians seem to have lost all sight of how to balance their corrupt side and their public service side. One of the greatest books you could read about this -- and I highly recommend everyone read it -- was by an incredibly corrupt New York City politician of the late 1800s named George Washington Plunkett, a member of the fantastically corrupt New York machine called Tamany Hall, run by "Boss Tweed." Plunkett actually didn't think taking bribes and graft were wrong, so he sat down and dictated his political philosophy to a reporter and that book became, "Plunkett of Tamany Hall."
Plunkett made the most famous distinction about corruption perhaps in American history by starting out his book by arguing that there's a difference between honest graft and dishonest graft. It actually isn't as crazy as it sounds, but he was arguing that taking or giving bribes to get a park built for poor people is different from taking or giving bribes just to get rich. Plunkett believed that graft and corruption were essential tools in carrying out the monumental tasks facing municipal government in the late 1800s, as the city faced huge tasks of modernization -- graft was needed to build schools and orphanages, to build the subways and the street grid, to provide food and rent money to the poor and unemployed. He said there was no reason for a politician to outright steal, when he could get rich doing the people's work. Plunkett's second most famous quote in the book was "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."
Today's politicians don't even know the difference between honest graft and dishonest graft. Especially the Republicans. That's because they don't believe that government should do anything constructive. They have no concept of doing the people’s work and therefore they have no concept of Plunkett's "honest graft." Today's politicians take graft in the form of "campaign contributions" primarily to prevent anything constructive from getting done, from benefiting middle class and poor people, or even providing a business friendly environment to business in general rather than their particular looters. As the Abramoff case showed, today graft is primarily simply to facilitate corporate looting.
The United States political system needs to grow up and become more like European countries where in many countries the people finally said enough is enough and instituted publicly funded campaigns. Also Abramoff's suggestion is a good one -- going into public service should make a person ineligible to lobby forever, not just for one year or two years or whatever it is now.
We can no longer afford honest graft, let alone, dishonest graft.