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Hypocrisy ... as a habit

Thursday, May 20, 2010

“WELL, WE ALL KNOW they lie, don’t we?”  That common, cynical and exasperated judgment on our political leaders lay at back of this week’s anti-incumbent upsurge by voters, in a primaries show-down that punished both major parties.

In some measure it formed a repeat of Britain’s general election, in which (as THE MEDIA BEAT and many others anticipated) incumbency was the biggest single handicap for any contestant – almost regardless of party. I don't often quote Fox News, but I thought its summary of the Kentucky-Pennsylvania-Arkansas upsets was very apt: “One by one, the incumbents or establishment-backed candidates in Tuesday's slate of high-stake contests fell or fell short”.

In Britain, the scandal and widespread disgust over Members of Parliament abusing their taxpayer-funded expense accounts counted as much, I feel, as economic anxiety over the global financial crisis.  (The Philippines election too, demonstrated revulsion for the incumbent party and its dyed-in-the-wool corruption. But at least the Filipino electorate, unlike the Brits with their “a plague on all your houses” dismissal, came up with a decisive choice for a new leader, Benigno Aquino.)

Many strands of discontent will come together on voting days, of course, and here in the US financial shenanigans among the ruling class have been inescapably playing their part. It will have come as no surprise to the electorates of the mid-west and the south that truth-hiding hypocrisy has been the hallmark of current efforts in Congress to reform the financial industries.

Prompted by the recent scandalous history of politician-buying that’s laid out so compellingly in the documentary film “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” - previewed here a month ago - I highlighted the number of finance industry lobbyists (an estimated 1500) now hard at work in Washington to influence members of Congress into diluting President Barack Obama’s legislative measures to curb Wall Street's excesses.

 

Representative and Senators have inevitably been vocal in their condemnation of those excesses, and vaguely intimated their desire to rein in the under-regulated power and influence of Big Business – but at the same time those same lawmakers are enjoying lavish fundraisers being held for them by the financial industry, at the rate this month of almost one every business day.  To take just one example, Representative John Adler, a New Jersey Democrat, angrily demanded greater accountability from Wall Street in a drum-beating April 29 statement. But this week he’s holding a “financial services dinner” in Washington with a minimum contribution of $1,000 per head.

 

He’s far from alone. Congressional calendars are a wonderful journalistic resource, and for May they reveal that more than 20 House and Senate members have scheduled fundraisers that similarly target the finance industry, and are often actually hosted by lobbyists who work for the big banks, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

 

It takes some flexibility – you might say even bipolarity – for an elected representative to tell the public it wants reforms imposed on Wall Street, and then go asking Wall Street for money.

    

 

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HAPPENING TO ARRIVE ALONGSIDE all the media bloviation over election results, some incisive commentary appeared on what might appear to be a different story altogether. But it says something powerful, I believe, about the roots of the repugnance that’s coursing through this nation for its leaders.

The apparently different story is that of a US Senate hopeful, Attorney-General Richard Blumenthal (above left) of Connecticut who has been exposed (on The New York Times’ front page no less) as having misrepresented his military career. Rather than purely amounting, as it did, to what the Times called a “safe harbor” in the Marine Reserve, stationed comfortably Stateside, that career has been promoted as including combat in Vietnam – according to Blumenthal because he “mis-spoke” ... and according to others because he lied and/or exaggerated.

The commentary came (in the following day’s Times) from someone who did serve in Vietnam, former US Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota (above right).

 

But he doesn’t employ an ounce of “holier-than-thou” superiority. Pressler does, however (and I say this not merely because he’s a friend of mine) deconstruct accurately and with heartfelt passion the hypocrisy which lies behind cases like Blumenthal’s - and which has conditioned a whole generation of leaders “to evade basic responsibilities, cloaking their actions in idealism”.

He claims: “It’s a way of thinking that scars us to this day” and in his analysis it began with those young men (they were all men then, after all) who found ways to get out of serving in the military; they wanted to get on in life safely, but many would proclaim their reason was opposition to the war. This “habit of saying one thing and believing another” (which Pressler says simply “couldn’t stop”) percolated through their lives as the youngsters mounted the ladders of ambition - in time turning, for instance, to “playing with derivatives, or to short-changing shareholders”.  

And, I would add, to railing one minute against financial fat-cats, and the next minute accepting their largesse - along with the accompanying murky obligations it brings.

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