We, the People, call Sarah Chayes to testify about “On Corruption in America. And What Is At Stake”
[note: following are samples from Chayes’ book, “On Corruption in America. Serious American patriots will also see: for an intro summary: “The United States Has a Dirty-Money Problem” [Anne Applebaum; The Atlantic; Jan-Feb, 2022]; “How Kleptocracy Came to America” [Franklin Foer; The Atlantic; Mar, 2019]; “Kleptopia. How Dirty Money is Conquering the World” [ Tom Burgis ]; “American Kleptocracy. How the United states Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History” [ Casey Michel ]; “Corruption in America” [ Zephyr Teachout ]
Chayes: “For the United states, two books..”Dark Money,” by ..Jane Mayer, and “Democracy in Chains,” by..Nancy MacLean, are must-reads for any American citizen. Through pains-taking, even dangerous sleuthing, the authors chart..development of a U.S. integrated kleptocratic network like..ones that dominate..many developing countries. It is the most sophisticated, powerful, and threatening such organism to anchor itself in the United States since the Gilded Age.”
“..its hydra ..[contains].. captains of the most lucrative industries in the country – fossil fuels, private investment firms..the tobacco industry, and such trademarks as Amway, Home Depot, and Coors..At its center..the multi-billionaire energy, mining, and chemical mogul Charles Koch.”…
Koch and his network allies..financed programs or whole schools within leading universities..Mercatus Center..Hoover Institute..the group has seated thousands of public officials, from state legislators and members of Congress..judges..bureaucrats who do most of the work in federal, state, and local agencies.”
Chayes: “Career paths of network members snake through..different entities and sectors, knitting them together. The aim is “to get top operatives exposed to..different elements,” MacLean told me. “People shuttle from one to another: the corporate side, various nonprofit advocacy groups, the leading academic centers, and government itself.” The result, boasts an operative quoted by Mayer, is “a fully integrated network.”
“..on former insider [on] what this hydra wants..there is independence, but they have a “common cause. And it is frightening. They want private, not democratic, control of the country’s resources.”
“MacLean pits it this way: “They want to protect their infinite wealth-accumulation from democracy. they want permanent, radical rules changes that would shackle the majority’s ability to chart our collective future. Up to and including changing the Constitution.”
Chayes: “I’ve heard that for years,’ confirms the insider. “They are pushing for a Constitutional convention so they can rewrite the Commerce Clause, to make federal labor laws like child protections or the minimum wage impossible.” The aim, writes MacLean, is to lock in “the kind of political economy that prevailed in America in the opening of the 20th century” – ..the Gilded Age.”
“This network operates on the terrain of ideas..plays a long game. Capitalizing for calls for civics education in high school..members are moving to reorient the nation’s moral compass. “They want to imbue kids with market-based morality,’ says the former insider..the notion..everything is worth, in moral terms, the price it can fetch – that there is no such thing as a sacred value.”
Chayes: “Every kleptocratic network I have examined..has included a skein of outright criminals. Drug traffickers sit down with..brothers or sons of presidents..and strike business deals. Smugglers move taxed consumer goods, uncounted and unweighed, across borders for a network that may include the head of customs enforcement. Or they move guns or sex workers.”
Chayes; “..kleptocratic networks want the power..to write the rules of the collective game..in many U.S. states, congressional elections are rigged..Republican strategist Karl Rove..broadcast the principle in a 2010 Wall Street Journal op-ed..”He Who Controls Redistricting Can Control Congress”. [note: for perspective, think on this: “It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.” – Joseph Stalin ]
Chayes: “..kleptocratic networks..disguise their members and activities..They distract and disorganize potential grassroots opposition. In an examination of seven anticorruption insurrections on five continents, the tactic I found most common – and most effective – was to deliberately enflame identity-based divisions that could pit groups..against one another.” [note: for perspective, see right-wing tactics in America since l968]
Chayes: “..when practices that benefit kleptocratic networks are mainstreamed, those networks take it as an invitation to keep pushing..Once one set of values and advantages has been normalized, they seek more. The 1994 Gingrich revolution can be seen in this light..the bipartisan plunge into naked influence peddling since 1990, the breathtaking absence of prosecutions after the 2008 financial disaster, and..amid the Trump administration’s open marriage of public and private criminal sectors in an astonishing replication of third-world kleptocracies, the astronomical handout to networked insiders delivered by coronavirus emergency measures on his watch.”
Chayes: “..[the] most consequential event of [1990s] was the collapse of the Soviet Union..[which]..helped launch the resurgence of kleptocracy around the world. First, they unleashed a powerful, ruthless, and adaptive new type of network..criminals forged alliances with managers of state-owned factories…[third]..was a budding business sector..Quoting Jon Winer..”seamless webs..between criminals..and political and bureaucratic elites..out of these seamless webs has emerged a triangle of crime, business and politics [that is] extremely strong and resilient.”
“So was born the type of dynamic, multitalented, shape-shifting hydra that now sits atop kleptocracies the world over.”
Chayes: “Limiting money in politics must be citizens’ top priority. the power of campaign donations to determine political outcomes is the primary factor allowing kleptocratic networks to dominate us.” [note: please see U.S. “supreme court” decisions on “Buckley,” “Bellotti,” “Citizens United”. which give corporations ability to buy elections with legally laundered money]
Chayes: Dismissing corruption: June 27, 2016…”McDonnell v. United States”…”Thus did the unanimous Supreme Court transform a broad, commonsense definition of bribery into something narrow and technical…Never mind the false equivalency. Never mind..most “citizens with legitimate concerns’ do not dispose of tens of thousands of dollars or Ferraris they can loan to help focus officials’ attention on those concerns. Never mind..it is hard to describe ramming an obviously questionable drug through clinical trials as a “legitimate” concern. Letting the McDonnell conviction stand opined the justices would mean criminalizing politics – at least politics as currently practiced.”
“..another false equivalency. The panelists are lumping McDonnell and high rollers of his stripe together with the destitute or disadvantaged people arrested every day..”
Chayes: “..McDonnell was changing law.. Prosecutors scrambled to amend indictments they had filed..convictions of two powerful politicians on both sides of New York stste’s notorious political machinery – for crimes including bribery, extortion, conspiracy, money laundering – were reversed because of McDonnell..”
“..bribery convictions fell by nearly one-third between 2014 and 2018..”An overall change in the atmosphere leaves a lot more behavior free of prosecution now..”
“Master is pointing to what may be the most damaging effect of decisions like McDonnell: the implicit blessing they bestow on a whole range of practices.”
Chayes: “Perhaps the most extreme example of McDonnell logic was the argument..by Alan Dershowitz..representing President Trump at his impeachment trial..A quid quo pro [the essence of bribery] could not be impeachable..if the official believed..the item of value he was receiving for an official act he performed would benefit the national interest as well as himself…the post-McDonnell narrowing of the concept of corruption took another step…On May 7, 2020, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned convictions in the notorious “Bridgegate” case..The admitted objective was to push the mayor of a town on the New Jersey end of the bridge for failing to endorse Governor Christie’s re-election bid.”
Chayes: “In the United States, serious and damaging public corruption is not getting punished. That means, by default, that we deem it to be just fine.”
Chayes: “Chief Justice John Roberts..in McDonnell..: “There is no doubt..this case is distasteful. But our concern is..with the broader legal implications of the Government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute.”…
“This is how corruption gets overlooked in the United States. This is how the wealthier and better educated Americans downplay it. They cast it as an embarrassing aberration, a scandal beneath mention, shrugged off with a roll of the eyes.”
“But to regard corruption this way is to dangerously underestimate its significance. Corruption is not an isolated scandal or even a whole stack of them. Corruption is better understood as the deliberate mode of functioning – the operating system..- of sophisticated, and astonishingly successful networks.””
Chayes: “What makes these networks so effective is their ability to weave across what most people think of as separate, even antagonistic segments of society: job creators and regulators, law-enforcement professionals and the out-and-out criminals they are sworn to combat. These apparent foes in fact work arm in arm within the powerful webs that promote corrupt practices. That integration across boundaries is the most fundamental pattern I observed in foreign countries.”
“By including members from all these walks of life. corrupt networks can command a vast array of talents, tools and resources in pursuit of their single-minded objective: making money for their members, no matter the cost to other people or things.”..
Chayes: “For Justice Roberts and his seven colleagues..manifestations of this phenomenon in the United States are beneath their concern. In their view, the American system is threatened not by corruption but – incredibly – by efforts to FIGHT corruption..the Justice Department’s “boundless interpretation” of bribery laws..”
“They could not have been more wrong. At the very moment they were dismissing corruption..corruption was poised to upend the U.S. presidential contest.”..
Chayes: “..Trump’s drain-the-swamp administration proceeded to crystallize and put into practice – in barefaced ways unseen in the United States for a century – exactly the type of systematic corruption Americans decry..using their privileged positions to gain advantage for the businesses they continued to run..”
“Meanwhile, the big business strand of America’s emerging kleptocratic network was awarded control of the agencies whose job is to protect the public from the worst effects of those businesses’ profit-seeking practices..executives and lobbyists-turned-government officials went straight to work rewriting the rules in ways designed to maximize the gush of money into their collective coffers..”
Chayes: “McDonnell..didn’t just happen. It came at the end of a series of cases….McNally v. United States [1987]..the defendants were convicted…affirmed on appeal, for violating federal mail-and-wire fraud statutes…the Supreme Court..overturn[ed]..7-2…”Defraud, they decreed, could only mean “obtain money or property” by fraud, nothing other. The American people were stripped of their actionable right to the basic integrity of their public servants.”..
[note: now – go back and reread – slowly – virtually every paragraph. Chayes is telling YOU the corruption she witnessed in other nations has come to America – and that “the hydra” is a cancer that will kill American democracy unless YOU and loyalAmericans like YOU decide to DO SOMETHING – like vote out the crooks passing corrupt laws. Notice WHO we’re talking about: the Rich and the Corporations !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The 20th century was about creating a true democracy in America. The threats to this democracy – the Rich and their Corporations want to take YOU back to 1865-1901, “the Gilded Age.” Chayes and other investigators have told YOU all YOU need to know. The question is this: do YOU care???? Do YOU care what happens to YOUR kids and YOUR grandchildren???? ] 0
With Justice For All 