Corruption. Here, there, everywhere.

20230105

Corruption in Ukraine, and in general

I have written about the Americans who are somehow rooting for the Russians in this war.  Among their justifications are that Ukraine is corrupt.  There is truth to this.  There is also corruption in the United States.  There is massive corruption in Russia, without which they would have won this war nine months ago and I would not be writing about it.

I have led a charmed life, being relatively easily able to dodge when people wanted to compromise me. I wrote a couple of days ago about my experiences in military procurement. I’ll offer some more examples in a piece I’m preparing on how to talk to Eddie about the realities of the world.

With regard to corruption in general, Senator Gary Hart’s biography includes accounts of the many ways in which a young politician is corrupted. Joe Biden’s career demonstrates that allowing yourself to be corrupted can be quite rewarding. Donald Trump’s career shows that resisting corruption can be hard to do. Even his case is questionable.  Whitney Webb writes that Roy Cohn, right-hand man to the notorious Sen. Joe McCarthy, was Trump’s mentor in the 1970s.  To succeed in New York real estate you had to be corrupt, or at least well aware of the corruption all around you. Trump’s genius may be in his ability to avoid doing anything that would land him in prison.  The left’s incessant persecution of Trump was probably due to his simply not being predictably, controllably corrupt.

You can either have integrity or influence, but not both. Yannis Varufakis in “Adults in the Room” quotes Larry Summers:

There are two kinds of politicians,’ he said: ‘insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.’ With that Summers arrived at his question. ‘So, Yanis,’ he said, ‘which of the two are you?’

Many (seemingly, Elizabeth Warren and Ben Sasse)  go to Washington with stars in their eyes, aiming to clean the place up. None have every managed it. In my lifetime Truman had it both ways. Although himself a product of the corrupt Pendergast gang in Kansas City, made his reputation fighting corruption in military procurement. He lived modestly in retirement – a good testimony to his fundamental honesty.

Pres. Eisenhower had to be aware of the corruption in the FBI under J Edgar Hoover and the CIA under Allen Dulles. He warned about it in his farewell address. John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert were concerned enough to do something. They were both assassinated. Sixty years later our long-standing suspicions are being confirmed – the CIA was behind it. And by the way, it is generally conceded that corruption in Mayor Daley’s Cook County machine in Chicago gave Kennedy the White House.

Pres. Johnson was a schemer, wheeler dealer from the get go. If I knew the open secret that the CIA was making money smuggling heroin out of the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia, one can assume that the President knew it also. Nixon was not called Tricky Dick for nothing. His downfall was probably not inherent corruption, but that he got at cross purposes with the truly corrupt deep state. Lucky not to have suffered as Kennedy’s fate.

The two Boy Scouts who followed them, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, were ineffective. They didn’t play the game and they didn’t get things done.  They were followed by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, who knew enough to studiously not know what their underlings were doing. Reagan managed a plausible “who, me?” In response to the Iran-Contra scandal. Which, by the way, involved the CIA doing the same nefarious things they always did and continue doing to this day. Bush had an advantage – he had headed the CIA.

The Clintons, George W. and Obama  didn’t rock the boat.  They let the deep state lead them into wars and pass laws strengthening their hold over the country. The deep state thought Trump might rock the boat. He had to be disposed of.  And was. 

So it appears that few souls remain uncorrupted in American politics.  Ron and Rand Paul perhaps among them. They are voices in the wilderness. Respected, but not influential.

It’s the same thing in Ukraine. You cannot rise in politics unless they have Kompromat, compromising information, on you. The book How Russia Really Works describes it.  Zelensky would not have been allowed to assume the Presidency unless his godfather Kholomoisky had kompromat to control him. 

Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald appear to be among the few untainted newsmen.  I recently posted a wonderful bit by Greenwald about the absolute requirement to allow yourself to be corrupted in order to rise in the corporate world news. He absolutely knows.  The Intercept, which he founded, was forced into presstitution and he was forced out.  It is nothing new. Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken wrote about the need to appease advertisers hundred years ago. The deep state was a major advertiser on Twitter and client of Google. What could go wrong?

These gentlemen should not be shocked that there is corruption here in Ukraine.  The question is whether things are getting done.  Yes, they are.  Zelensky is a lucky choice as wartime president. 

The American press is full at this moment of news about corruption. The biggest stories are about the absolute, despicable corruption of the deep state. Taibbi this morning offers his cheat sheet, a summary of the Twitter revelations.

The right – neocons and RINOs – are thoroughly complicit, if a bit more low-key.  Factions of the alt-right, supposing themselves to be  conservative and uncorrupted, are lamenting the corruption here in Ukraine. They contend that a lot of the money being spent on Ukraine is being stolen.  Probably true, and much of it not by Ukrainians.  The key thing is that the war is being won.  I think that’s what many don’t like.

As I recently wrote, there has been corruption in every war ever fought.  The billions of dollars given to Ukraine by the west is mostly in the form of weapons.  The money flows from western treasuries to western arms manufacturers, seldom taking a detour through Ukraine itself.  Yes, much is stolen, but Cossack fingers seldom get close to the weapons money.  The more fungible funds are World Bank, ECB and other facilities.  This is corruption of very long standing.  This is how the western elites have always controlled client states like Ukraine.  It is the method China is using to take over assets in Africa.  Or so they think.  Wish them luck repossessing broken dams, rusted-out factories and weed-choked airports from angry and penniless Africans.

We need to have a more nuanced appreciation of corruption. It occurs in every society in every era. More wealth was created in the Gilded Age, between the Civil War and the end of the 19th century in America, than in any comparable society and epoch in history. It was thoroughly corrupt. Tammany Hall ran New York. The muckrakers had a heyday exposing the meatpacking industry, unsafe consumer products, insurance fraud, child labor and the like.

Nevertheless, a vast number of new industries and businesses sprang up. Electric power. Telephones. Steel. Home entertainment. Somehow, despite the corruption, people were able to get things done. I will say the same for today’s Ukraine. It may be corrupt, but I have witnessed the birth of some major companies such as Nova Poshta, the UPS equivalent, Rozetka, the online shopping behemoth, and a huge number of IT companies serving foreign clients.

I recently read the opinion that America’s success came with the transition from status at birth to merit as a basis for success. When universities and corporations started to recognize talent instead of the social class into which you were born, we thrived. Now that innate characteristics, race, sex and gender, and adherence to political dogma are being used to choose society’s winners and allocate its resources, we are back where we began. Success depends on who you are, not what you can do.

Edward Dutton writes that woke corruption is driving productive people out of the University and the workplace. White men, who made the country, are eternally out-of-favor. We are the last to be hired, the first to be fired. God help us if we so much as look cross-eyed at some member of a protected class or utter an ill-chosen word such as water buffalo or niggardly.

Ejecting such people from the workplace stifles productivity merely by their absence. But it goes beyond that. It is profoundly dispiriting. Young white men see that the game is rigged and spend their time playing video games, pursuing extreme sports and taking recreational drugs rather than even attempting to succeed. It is a replay of the deadening effect of communism in the former Soviet Union. Since hard work was not rewarded, a great many people didn’t try. Entrepreneurism is more rare in Ukraine than it was in America in my youth. I am happy to say that the situation is reversing. Ukraine is starting to reward ingenuity and ambition, just as the United States is penalizing it.

Medical corruption has been killing us for years. The most obvious cases are medical errors – said to be the third leading cause of death after cancer and heart disease. Medicine kills us in other ways. Prescription medicines damage our health, opening the way for opportunistic diseases. Without a doubt some of the heart disease and cancers are really attributable to medications.  Doctors have tried to push proton pump inhibitors and blood thinners on me.  I’m sure that had I croaked it would not have been attributed to the meds. We become addicted to prescription painkillers. It’s becoming clear that childhood vaccines kill some children and damage the lives of many more. The so called vaccines trotted out for Covid are directly killing large numbers of people.

Science has been corrupted so corporations can panic the population about phantom dangers such as swine flu, global warming, cholesterol and such  to fatten the pocketbooks of plutocrats peddling patented solutions. This is more deleterious than our simple old-fashioned Ukrainian corruption, which just involves stealing money.

Our Ukrainian electric company is owned oligarch Akhmetov. Mobile phones, Internet service and drug stores are owned by oligarchs. Nonetheless, my electric bill runs about $100 a month. It would cost five times that the heat and equivalent house in the United States. Mobile phone and Internet service cost me about $20 a month combined. Drugs and medical care are fairly cheap. Corruption or not, in my view this society works.

Corruption goes down through generations, except that the corrupt get stupider.  Al Gore and George W Bush were not as sharp as their parents.  They don’t let the world know how they did in college.   Chelsea and Hunter are dumb besides being corrupt to the bone. 

To return to the thought that prompted my writing this piece, many on the right accuse our President Zelensky of corruption.  He could not have ascended to the presidency unless our oligarchs thought he was corruptible.  Exactly the same as Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and most other contemporary leaders.  We have to judge him by how well he is serving Ukraine’s interests, which in my opinion is quite well. You might want to bookmark this blog, to share when the subject comes up.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man and the good looking woman do not have consciences troubled by corruption.  Also not any surfeit of money.  Seems to go together.  Our challenge is to raise the kids to be like us. 

Graham