Lots of Americans believe that, ultimately, their institutions will save them from the black hole that is Donald Trump. But Anne Applebaum writes that those institutions are failing -- and, in fact, they have been failing for a long time:
Some of that institutional failure is on display at the trial of Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman. Here is a man who is alleged to have declared income as “loans,” concealed foreign bank accounts and lied about money that Ukrainian oligarchs were paying him via shell companies in Cyprus. For decades, in other words, U.S. law enforcement institutions were unable to spot the money-laundering, tax evasion and fraud that his partner Rick Gates spent several hours describing, even when carried out by a prominent person. As long ago as 1985, Manafort’s name featured in Jacob Weisberg’s still-famous New Republic cover story about Roger Stone, then his consulting partner. The headline: “The State-of-the-Art Washington Sleazeball.”
The careers of Manafort and Stone echo Donald Trump's career:
Nearly 40 years ago, in 1980, Trump employed 200 illegal Polish workers to destroy the Bonwit Teller department store, a historic building on Fifth Avenue, to make way for what would become Trump Tower. The men earned half the union wage and worked 12-hour shifts without hard hats; at one point, their contractor stopped paying them. Eventually they sued. In 1998, Trump paid $1.375 million to settle the case.
Trump broke immigration law and employment law, and he violated union rules, too. Yet neither immigration authorities nor employment regulators nor union bosses put him out of business. Why not? Why were the terms of that settlement kept confidential? Why, with his track record, was he allowed to get a casino license? Building permits? Wall Street banks did, it is true, stop lending to him. But when he began looking abroad for cash — doing extremely dodgy deals in Georgia and Azerbaijan, for example — no one stopped him. As Adam Davidson of the New Yorker has written, “So many partners of the Trump Organization have been fined, sued, or criminally investigated for financial crimes that it is hard to ascribe the pattern to coincidence, or even to shoddy due diligence.” But shoddy due diligence usually brings legal consequences. Why wasn’t the company shut down years ago?
That's a really good question. But, long ago, Trump's, Manafort's and Stone's behaviour became standard operating procedure. It seems pretty clear that when the "best people" are given free reign, the country rots -- from the top down.
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4 comments:
It would seem that far too many benefit from such corruption, Owen, which probably answers the underlying question here.
That's sounds about right, Lorne. The more people who get a piece of the action, the longer the action will survive.
Corruption in the business and political sectors has gone hand in hand almost to the beginning of the United States. By "corruption" I mean dodgy deals that these two powerful castes choose to conceal from the public, always a good idea in democracies, less urgent in autocratic states.
For Americans, the telltales are everywhere, in regulatory capture, in legislative capture (ALEC), and now judicial capture of the branches of their government. The 2014 Princeton paper by Gilens and Page is nothing so much as an inventory of the corruption of the American state arising from the insinuation of corporate influence between elected officials and those who elect them to high office.
One hallmark of the decline of Rome was the transformation of the Senate into a transactional government. You want, you pay. That put paid to "Senatus Populusque Romano."
While I have no encyclopedic knowledge of these things I find it hard to recall many instances where this sort of corruption was upended non-violently. Teddy Roosevelt was a trust buster but that problem was overt, not concealed behind any curtains.
It's facile to believe this can all be remedied by the power of the vote when you live in a two party state, both of which are enmeshed in this albeit to different degrees. Sometimes change of this magnitude can only be revolutionary which perhaps accounts for why we're today so surrounded with distractions and other devices ensuring our complacency. I know that sounds like a conspiracy theory but it sure does carry a whiff of truth.
Old Joe Kennedy knew that money bought power, Mound, and he used his money to get it -- if not for himself, then for his sons. He was playing the long game. Today's big money is playing the same long game.
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