A Window into the Last Stages of Rome

by emptywheel

Lots of people are pointing to the juicy bits of Vanity Fair's huge profile of the burgeoning SoCal bribery scandal. I'd like to return to a point I've made before--the connection between Republican corruption and our (in)ability to defend the United States. The Vanity Fair article portrays the Armed Forces and Appropriations Committees as a fraternity, a team that cooperates closely, down to its own private pimps.

On trips to Washington, Casey recalls, Wilkes was able to usher him into the presence of important members of the armed-services and appropriations committees, including, most notably, Lowery and Lowery's closest friend on the latter, fellow California Republican Jerry Lewis, now 71. The genteel Lewis and the earthy Lowery reportedly loved to dine and even vacation together. "Everyone on the defense committee always works cooperatively," says Casey, who realized pretty quickly that no money came his way without their support. "It was team play, and they emphasized that to me constantly."

And that fraternity works to enrich itself, effectively holding defense and intelligence appropriations decisions hostage to the pet projects of members of the fraternity.

"The enabler in this story is the Pentagon," explains someone familiar with the investigation. "To get what it wants—the F-22, say, or better intelligence—it goes along and funds the shoddy stuff Cunningham and [Wilkes] want. It's thinking, 'Cunningham will fund the Taj Mahal of intelligence for us as long as we take care of his friends.'"

Consider that--to get what it needs, the Pentagon has to take care of the fraternity. As one anonymous source says:

"People are missing the completeness of the corruption: It wasn't 'Get me a hooker and I'll get you a defense contract from the appropriations committee,'" he says. "It's 'I will take care of you and meet your every wish, need, and fantasy, and in exchange you are going to take care of me!'

And this scamming fraternity has gravitated to the areas of the government where they can do the most damage, both in terms of their own enrichment, because they're the areas with the least oversight. Defense:

"Many felonies went undetected because in the Defense Department a lot goes on in secret, and these crimes grew in the shadow of both 9/11 and one-party rule—with little scrutiny. So what you're looking at is a world where money, secrecy, sex, and indulgence were all in play. Where everyone is guilty of something."

And intelligence:

Like Congress, the C.I.A. is used to doling out huge sums, often with little or no oversight. "Look, the agency guys live in a culture where there's tons of money and a lot of it is cash," explains one intelligence source, "where you say, How much cash are we giving that guy, that asset, and what suitcase was it in? The American Tourister?"

And in terms of the damage they do to our country's security. We've got a bunch of boys who haven't matured beyond their college fraternity days holding our nations' security hostage to their own self-interest. Remind me again why Republicans are supposed to better on security?

The whores and the poker parties and the fancy French antiques are all really seamy. But they have direct consequences for the security of this country.

Comments

[Redshift]

Whenever they they steer a contract to their friends instead of the best qualified company, they are selling out their country for personal gain. Whenever they get a contract that nobody actually doing the work thinks is necessary, they're spending your tax dollars for their personal benefit.

There's more than one kind of war profiteer, but they're all equally immoral. We must never forget that.

[mk]

As much like a steamy novel as the whole hookers-and-poker-and-antiques thing is, the real story is how contracting is done in the Bush administration and in this Republican Congress. Even without any of the immoral or fattening stuff, contracts are still be awarded on good-old-boy connections, not on merit. You have to be a part of the great GOP country club, or you can forget about playing -- and there's a lot of quid being thrown at the quo. It's easy to get mesmerized by the trashy setting of some of the transactions -- but the truly horrifying and destructive part of this story, as you point out, is that our tax dollars are being given in secret, with virtually no oversight, to companies whose chief appeal is their political connection. It isn't the republic I grew up in-- but very like the military-industrial complex that Ike foretold. And that's the story of Abramoff as well as Cunningham. Heck, you can throw in Enron too.
Thanks for your work -- and your analysis.

[freepatriot]

Uhm, ew, in Rome, the Republic was just the first act

so are you saying that we just skip the whole empire thingy, and fall apart from here ???

or can we expect an American Cesear to appear soon

[emptywheel]

It's a quote from the article, freepatriot, leading up the first quote in my post:

"What these revelations provide is a window into Babylon or the last stages of Rome," explains a source with knowledge of the multiple ongoing investigations.

More a reference to the way our corruption will bring our end than a reference to empire. But I think we're pretty close to being an empire, albeit in a newfangled 21st century form largely carried off through "free trade" and dollar reserve policies.

[emptywheel]

Oops, sorry, the quote leads into my fourth quote. This cut and paste stuff is remarkable, huh?

[Kagro X]

Republican greed kills troops.

[TCinLA]

My old friend the late David Hackworth didn't call OberKommandoderWehrmacht (formerly the Pentagon) "Versailles-On-The-Potomac" for nothing.

[John Casper]

OfT MSNBC and CSPAN will carry the Lamont Lieberman debate at 7 EST.

[Jim Hill]

As good a post as this - and it is - and as much as I agree that we might be living in the last days of the Republic - if it deserves an upper-case "R" at this point - I have to suggest that we all go back and reread "Charlie Wilson's War" and contemplate the damage done to the Republic and the world by the corrupt but well-meaning Democratic congressman from Texas who happened to run the House Appropriations Committee and wanted to see the Soviets get a real beating in Afghanistan, and was in a position to make it happen.

And they did. The damage done, in retrospect, was far greater and reaches further than anything this collection of pissants are doing now, and it still both haunts and shapes events across Asia and Europe, Africa, and even South America.

[Katie Jensen]

Hey there Jim...only problem with your post is that you are speaking as if your statements are facts and they are not facts. You cannot know the future. You have no way of predicting the damage in years to come by this administration. We'll have to wait and see. The discussion was theoretical. We theorize about the level of corruption, the deterioration of our democracy and the blatant disrespect this president has exhibited about our constitution. In my opinion, the difference is that Bush has cracked the very foundation of our democracy while this other Texan lost a few shingles. But that's a theory of mine...not a fact.

Katie

[Jim Hill]

To elaborate a bit:

The petty corruption has always been there. Anyplace there's money, you'll find men of power and their whores, financial, political, and sexual. And we should always root that stuff out.

But it's not the petty corruption that does the damage. It's the idea that we have to conquer the world, that we and only we are ideal and moral and right and the OTHERS have to be crushed and broken. All else is unimportant.

If corruption is the only club we have to drive these people out, then we'll use it. But remember how the real damage gets done and why we opposed them in the first place.

Charlie Wilson's war in Afghanistan, and our subsequent utter, callous abandonment of that country once the Soviets went home set the stage for bin Laden and al Qaeda. We watched with utter disinterest, as if ants were at war with one another, while the warlords, once united against Soviet tanks, used the weapons and tactics we had provided them to fight each other and destroy the country to take it over. "None of our affair." Nobody in this country, not the neocons, not the left, not me, lifted much more than a finger to stop it or fix it. Used it up, threw it away like a kleenex tissue.

And al Qaeda is the new Soviet Union, the pretext for perpetual war, for fear, suspicion and de facto suspension of the constitution. Through the resistance in Iraq, al Qaeda slowly and steadily is extended to include all Muslims in a part of the world we just happen to want to conquer anyway.

[emptywheel]

Jim

I'm actually glad you brought Charlie Wilson up, I was thinking about him when I wrote this.

See, Charlie is one of the few people who has admitted to attending these poker and whore parties. He is very much a part of this fraternity. And while I was writing this, I was trying to think whether Charlie's single-handedly arranging for the mujahadeen to get Stinger missiles is now a net good or bad for the US. I think it's a close call. It made a critical difference in the Afghans getting rid of the Soviets. But it also made a critical difference solidifying thes strength of the mujahadeen. Though I don't think Charlie can be held responsible for us abandoning the country. Mostly the Stinger missiles.

But it's the same problem--Charlie and these Republicans (though few of the Republicans seem to have the naive sense of mission that Wilson did). You can't have an individual--Democrat or Republican--making policy by himself. You can't have that kind of independent operator. And you sure as hell can't have them when their goal appears to be no more than self-enrichment.

[Katie Jensen]

I guess that's my point. So we are in agreement here. The corruption is a symptom. It's not the problem. In my opinion, money is running the show. The world market, just a little too much money on the line, just a little too tempting. The carrot of those global investments has our current cabal willingly stepping all over the prinicples of our democracy. I mean, if our elections cannot be trusted...and at the very least we can say that this is questionable. My absolute biggest concern...is the fact that our elections may not have been the product of democracy but of a "controlled" effort to undermine the will of the people.

To me, this is bigger than any other news story out there. This is the big punch as far as I am concerned. I am stunned that this is not more of a focus and that investigations are not of central concern. There is no doubt that questions still exist about honest fair elections in AMERCIA!!! I am not saying that voter fraud occurred for sure...but I am blown away by the denial on this topic.

There was a great article about 6 months before the 2004 elections in discover magazine about the technical vulnerablities of the voting machines. It layed out the ease of which the system could be hacked. It also layed out the money trail. Bush co had stock in diebold years ago according to this article. I never saw that article referred to by anyone, but I know I read it and that I was extremely worried about the validity of the elections before we ever voted. Without free elections...we do not have democracy. I cannot believe that there is any issue more important than this one.

[Katie Jensen]

After re-reading my last post I realized that I misspelled AMERICA...but somehow it seems fitting in a post about tainted elections in the USA.

[Neal Deesit]

The Discover article, "The Cryptography of . . . Voting Machines: Hacking the Ballot Box" appeared in Vol. 25 No. 05, May 2004, and is available on line here.