Rick Perlstein | The Nation
Rand Paul's Detroit Shock Doctrine
Detroit. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Detroit has now declared bankruptcy. A judge has ruled the act illegal—a decision that may or may not stand. Naturally, New York’s fiscal crisis thirty-eight years ago comes to mind, though in many respects the differences are more important than the similarities: New York was one of the world’s financial and cultural capitals, its private economy largely thriving; as such, the news of government’s bare coffers was shocking, a revelation, something the world at first had a very hard time getting their mind around. While what’s happening to Detroit, no one’s idea of an economic capital, isn’t surprising at all.
But note a striking similarity: reaction of those on the right.
To wit: here comes Senator Rand Paul, saying nothing would be more splendid than to let a major city go bankrupt—because with bankruptcy, you get “new management, better management, and by getting rid of contracts, contracts that give you where [sic] public employees are getting paid twice what private employees are and things come back more to normal.” No matter that so far the White House says only that it’s “monitoring” the situation, though former Obama auto czar Steve Ratner says he hopes Obama will pump federal money into the city. That is what Paul distorted into his claim that “apparently” the president is “making indications that Detroit can be expected to be bailed out.” And that, he says, will happen only “over his dead body.” Because municipal bankruptcy would give Paul the chance to do what right-wingers like him always do, starting with New York in 1975: make excuses for slashing the public sector.
Shock doctrine stuff, in other words. The unwinding of what’s left of the welfare state, by whatever means at your disposal. Same story, then and now. In 1975, its most prominent voice was William Simon, President Ford’s Treasury secretary, who leveraged his work as the butcher of New York to become a major conservative movement leader.
The roots of the Great New York City Fiscal Crisis lay in the recession of 1974–75, which hit the Northeast with a speed and force all out of proportion to the rest of the country. New York had always supported a program of middle-class entitlement unlike anywhere else, a sort of socialism in one city: subsidized housing and daycare centers; free college at the world-class City University of New York; free museum admission; nineteen municipal hospital, many of them world-class; free directory assistance—amenities that seemed only natural for a metropolis transforming itself, in the boom years after World War II, into the greatest city in the world.
It worked, until it didn’t. The city’s manufacturing base declined, and the unemployment rate, under 5 percent in 1970, hovered above 12 percent—shades, but only shades, of Detroit. White middle-class New Yorkers, fearing crime, fled to the suburbs—definite shades of Detroit there. Federal and state aid leveled off; expectations that Richard Nixon’s national health insurance bill would relieve the city of its massive outlays for Medicaid came a cropper when Congress voted it down (conservatives because it was too generous, liberals because it was not generous enough). Bills came due that this newly atrophied level of revenue simply could not cover: by the the end of 1974, the city’s debt was $11 billion, a third of that in short-term notes soon to come due, and over 11 percent of the city’s spending went to interest payments on that debt—to banks, suddenly reconsidering their lending practices in a recession. Other tax shelters started looking more attractive, So did other customers—for instance, some resource-rich Third World nations. So it was that banks started to asking for some of that money back, and started charging more interest to let them rent more.
In December of 1974 Mayor Abraham Beame made a pilgrimage to Washington, DC, to meet with Treasury Secretary Simon. Beame explained the actions he had already taken to correct the city’s fiscal imbalances, freezing most city hiring and merit pay increases; he then argued that, given that America’s greatest international city unfairly had to pay higher interest rates than any municipality in the country, it would be in the national interest for the Treasury Department to loan New York the money it needed by buying municipal paper directly.
The Treasury Secretary flipped.
“Mayor,” he said, “if we did that, the taxpayers would end up financing the campaign promises of every profligate local politician in the country.”
There was something disingenuous in that reaction. Bill Simon had formerly been senior partner in charge of government and municipal bonds at Salomon Brothers—one of the people in charge of lending the money hand over fist during the time when much of this debt was being incurred. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Simon had even served on a debt advisory committee set up by Beame back when he had been New York’s comptroller under the previous mayor, John Lindsay. If New York had been borrowing beyond its means, William Simon was one of the people personally responsible.
He would later complain that he had been gulled—that the city’s “Byzantine accounts” and “tortuous accounting practices” had been willfully devised to forestall just the kind of fiscal reckoning he now insisted the city so desperately required, and that “even the most sophisticated financiers and the Treasury Department itself were totally unprepared” for such a violation of “the basic legal and ethical pact between the city and its debtors.” And surely, within City Hall, there was plenty of blame to go around—just like in Detroit. But other motives, other assumptions, lay beyond Bill Simon’s recalcitrance as well. These were ideological.
As he wrote in a book modestly entitled A Time for Truth, which spent some twenty weeks on the bestseller list three years later: “The philosophy that had ruled our nation for over forty years had emerged in large measure from that very city which was America’s intellectual headquarters, and inevitably, it was carried to its fullest expression in that city. In the collapse of New York those who choose to understand it could see a terrifying dress rehearsal of the state that lies ahead for this country if it continues to be guided by the same philosophy of government…. Nothing has destroyed New York’s finances but the liberal political formula…. Liberal politics, endlessly glorifying its own ‘humanism,’ has in fact been annihilating the very conditions for human survival.”
He spoke for his class. As a staffer wrote in a memo proposing language for First National City Bank’s president to use in discussion for the mayor, the crisis was an opportunity: “many things”—he cited higher subway fares, cutbacks in the city workforce and budget cuts generally—“can be done even if they are not technically possible.” Technically possible, he meant, if interest groups like the municipal unions, the board of education or municipal hospital administrators were afforded their traditional political deference. Well, they had had been deferred to long enough. Now it was time for the capitalists. “The time,” the staffer insisted, “is now:” investment bankers and the the mayor’s Council of Business and Economic Advisors should “work in concert…to prepare a unified analysis which would clearly demonstrate the absolute inviability of the City if it continued on its present course.” (I got this part of the story from the outstanding historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s contribution to The Nation’s recent special issue on New York.)
How to get it done? Like Paul, with his absurd made-up notion of public employee workers making twice what equivalent public sector workers make, they lie—about what Simon called overpaid, “parasitical” municipal workers, separate from the “productive population,” drawing “appalling” pensions.
For what it was worth, the pension of the average retiring New York City policeman—$9,000—was $3,000 less than in Chicago, $8,000 less than Detroit and less than half that in Los Angeles and San Francisco; city teachers and firemen also earned less than in all those cities, with a considerably higher cost of living. The city had fewer citizens per capita public assistance than Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago (an oft-repeated claim that the city spent the most on welfare in the country ignored the fact that expenses covered almost elsewhere by state and county governments were borne by city governments in New York State); among the private corporations that paid their workers out more in pensions than New York City were General Motors and First National City Bank (later known as CitiBank, the financial institution most aggressive in pushing Beame’s austerity budget, whose chairman Walter Wriston, municipal labor leaders never tired of pointing, earned $425,000 a year). Mayor Beame, for his part, never tired of pointing out all the other cities facing similar balance sheet woes—among them Grand Rapids, Michigan, the president’s hometown.
But soon, Simon won the president to his side.
In January of 1975, the city’s comptroller canceled a planned sale of municipal notes; in February, a second sale was canceled. The city’s Urban Development Corporation became the first major government agency to go into default since the 1930s. Two weeks later, on March 6, the city offered another note on the market—and didn’t receive a single underwriting bid. By May, the city’s debt was $12.3 billion, the word had gone forth from the great investment banks that such debt was unmarketable at just about any interest rate, and officials predicted the city would default by June. The mayor made another ill-fated trip to Washington, this time for an audience with the president, Governor Hugh Carey and representatives from Chase Manhattan, First National City Bank and Mortgage Guarantee Trust in tow; a federal loan guarantee, Ford told them, would “merely pospone the city’s coming to grips with its fiscal problems through needed budget slashing.” On May 29 Beame complied, announcing an austerity budget calling for the immediate elimination of 38,000 jobs, over 12 percent of all city employment, a four-day work week, and reductions in CUNY admissions, library and health center closures. He reaped the whirlwind: cops blocking the Brooklyn Bridge, garagemen pledging a pestilence of rats (oh, for the days of labor militancy!)—and no more money forthcoming from banks. On June 10 the state legislature in Albany authorized the Municipal Assistance Corporation, an authority with the power to borrow up to $3 billion in bonds to if city default appeared imminent—with the caveat that they didn’t have to lend money at all if the city did not squeeze its budget according to its specified terms, of which Felix Rohatyn became the most prominent member.
It wasn’t working.
By the middle of October Governor Carey had laid out an austerity plan he said went “to the limits of what we can apply to the city in terms of economies.” And President Ford considered backtracking: he hadn’t entertained the idea of a bailout. But now top advisers proposed he sign a package of loans for the city working its way through Congress. “Hell, no!” a right-wing chief staffer, whose name was Donald Rumsfeld, bellowed. He spoke for the mood of the room.
On October 29, at high noon, the president made a luncheon address at the National Press Club, carried live on all three networks. He outlined Mayor Beame’s argument that “unless the the federal government intervenes, New York City within a short time will no longer be able to pay its bills.” And he responded with the argument of William Simon: it was all New York City’s fault, for giving candy away it could not afford. (Which also, as it happened, was the argument of Ronald Reagan, who once said in a speech, “I include in my prayers every day that the federal government will not bail out New York.”)
And Ford said he wouldn’t stand for it.
“I can tell you, and tell you now, that I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bailout of New York City to prevent default…. If they can scare the whole country into providing that alternative…it would promise immediate rewards and eventual rescue to every other city that follows the tragic example of our largest city.” He proposed bankruptcy proceedings in federal court instead. “Other cities,” he concluded, “other States, as well as the Federal Government, are not immune to the insidious disease from which New York City is suffering. This sickness is brought on by years and years of higher spending, higher deficits, more inflation, and more borrowing to pay for higher spending, higher deficits, and so on, and so on, and so on. It is a progressive disease, and there is no painless cure…. If we go on spending more than we have, providing more benefits and services than we can pay for, then a day of reckoning will come to Washington and the whole country just as it has to New York.”
ford to city: drop dead ran the headline in the New York Daily News the next morning—the day before Halloween. Newsweek’s cover starred Abe Beame, swaddled like a baby, Gerald Ford spanking him over his knee.
Rand Paul must have been reading Jerry’s speeches. If Detroit is bailed out, he’s said, ““Those who don’t have their house in order, who are teetering on disaster, will continue to make bad decisions…. You don’t set up an implicit promise from the federal government that everybody is getting bailed out…. It’s sort of like too big to fail for banks. If you have too big to fail for cities or for states and they believe they’ll be bailed out they’ll continue to make unwise decisions.
So you have to, in the words of Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon in the 1920s—charming guys, those Republican Treasury secretaries—“purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” Or in Rand Paul–ese, a more polite argot, “You need to make these decisions and the sooner you make them the better. If you wait to make them, it’s even harder on people.”
But apparently, stealing people’s pensions isn’t hard on them at all. And plainly that’s what the likes of Paul have in mind—and coming soon to a city near you. “I mean the statistics in California are staggering,” he says. “I think there’s over 100,000 people there getting over $100,000 a year in retirement. You got police chiefs in medium-sized cities getting $350,000 a year for a salary. It’s become untenable. But the main thing is we cannot send a signal from the federal government that cities and states are going to be too big to fail…. Bankruptcy in Detroit is going to much harder than if ten years ago, they had started downsizing and making their pensions and salaries more commensurate with the private sector.”
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Right. And if Rand Paul thinks the sole source of Detroit’s fiscal troubles is public salaries and pensions—not, say, the flight of the single industry in a single-industry town, or white flight, or the federal abandonment of urban policy tout court—I have an island to sell him.
John Nichols on why banks get bailed out, but Detroit does not.
The Eye on the Pyramids (Part 3: MLMs and the Conservative Republican Infrastructure)
(Courtesy of Flickr user Michael Coghlan)
Robert FitzPatrick calls it the “Pyramid Lobby”: a massive outlay of money and muscle from the multi-level marketing (MLM) industry, working “not just to curry favoritism or receive income at the public trough, but to prevent its extinction. This requires thwarting law enforcement and foiling consumer protection.” That is because MLM companies are effectively frauds: their main economic activity is recruiting “distributors,” who do not make profits by selling products but recruiting new distributors, and each new distributor the further down the chain has less of a chance—much of the time, less than a 1 percent of a chance—of making money. “Only the tobacco industry has as much at stake in its political lobbying and its public marketing campaign,” he writes.
And the targets for that campaign are almost exclusively Republicans. For MLM fraudsters are a huge part of the conservative infrastructure.
Of course, in the case of the mighty DeVos family in Michigan, the conservative infrastructure and the MLM industry almost entirely overlap. Richard DeVos Sr. number sixty on Forbes’s 2012 list of wealthiest Americans, with an estimated net worth of $5 billion made ripping Americans off, founded Amway—short for “American Way”—in 1959. In 1979, the company was forced by the Federal Trade Commission to tell distributors that over half its distributors do not make money, and that the average distributor made less than $100 month—a stricture they promptly violated. None of that kept the DeVos family from rising in Republican and conservative politics. After all, between 1991 and 1997, Common Cause documented, Amway affiliated companies gave $4.4 million in soft money to the Republican National Committee, DeVos and his wife giving $1 million in April of 1997 alone. In 2000 Amway gave $1.385 million in soft money to the RNC (just $500 less than Enron), and DeVos hosted a party starring Colin Powell on his private yacht at the Republican National Convention. In 2004 DeVos and his cofounder Jay Van Andel gave $2 million each to the right with “Progress for America” 527, and in 2006 his son tried and failed to win the Michigan governorship. Meanwhile I’ll never forget the time—it must have been about ten years ago—when I visited the Heritage Foundation to interview their fellow Lee Edwards for research on my book Nixonland. When we were done, he was kind enough to walk me to the office at Heritage of former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese. On the way, we passed an entire room at Heritage devoted to Amway, including a surreal display of Amway products—like, soap and shampoo. At the time, I was baffled; I had no idea what I was seeing. Now, it makes more sense. Heritage is among the conservative think tanks—others included the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Acton Institute; get the full list here—to which the Richard and Helen Devos Foundation provides massive, sustaining support.
Where does the business end and the conservative politicking begin? You tell me. Among the prominent Republicans to speak for big bucks at Amway events include both Presidents Bush, Ronald Reagan, Ollie North, Ralph Reed and Newt Gingrich (who put a tax break worth $283 million benefitting only Amway in a tax bill when he was speaker of the House). The towering tribune of morality Rick Santorum, FitzPatrick writes, “was a favored speaker at large meetings held by Amway ‘kingpin’ Fred Harteis, and received financial support from the Harteis family, their recruits and other kingpins.” (Santorum never did understand the difference between freedom and exploitation anyway).
And that, says FitzPatrick, “readily answers the question of why the FTC, under President Bush’s appointee, Timothy Muris, undertook a policy of protecting illegal business practices. The answer is plain and simple.”
That’s how it works at the federal level. At least we have state attorney generals to save us. Right?
I’m sure you can guess the answer: it depends on what party your attorney general belongs to. Let’s say you are a citizen of Utah—where one can find more MLM companies per capita than anywhere else (“MLM,” Utahans joke, stands for “Mormons Losing Money”). According to reporter Jeff Ernsthausen of Harper’s, Utah’s last attorney general, Mark Shurtleff, got $475,000 from members of the Direct Selling Association since 1999, or 14 percent of his campaign funding from sources other than the state Republican Party. In 2004 he spoke to distributors for an MLM called USANA Health Sciences. “If you work hard, you can realize the dream of financial wealth and success,” he told them. “There is no greater way to do that than through…multilevel marketing programs.” He should know. Half of USANA’s political contributions went to the campaigns of Shurtleff and his successor as Utah attorney general (because, the company said, of their “strong consumer advocacy policies”).
In 2006, Shurtleff testified to the state assembly that they really ought to pass the Direct Selling Association–written amendment to the state’s anti-fraud law that according to FitzPatrick “exempts multi-level marketing schemes.” Texas passed a similar law. (In 2003 the Direct Selling Association wrote a similar bill that a group of Republicans cosponsors introduced in the US House of Representatives.)
The next Utah attorney, John Swallow, also a Republican, got about 17 percent of the first $680,000 he raised for his election from DSA members. “In a moment of candor with a potential donor this spring,” Harper’s Ernsthausen wrote—the donor is an accused telemarketing scammer named Aaron Christner, although also goes under the pseudonym Vince Scarpuzzi—Swallow was taped boasting of his intention to bring the Utah commerce department’s division of consumer protection under his own, rather than the governor’s office.
A similar pattern obtains in North Carolina, where a telecommunications MLM called ACN spent 85 percent of its political money on the Republican attorney general candidate; Idaho, their AG’s biggest donor was an Idaho-based MLM, Melaleuca, which left town ahead of the law (in 1991 it was issued a cease-and-desist order by Michigan’s attorney general); and, of course, Michigan itself, where Ernsthausen discovered “families controlling the Amway fortune have given more than $145,000 to attorney general campaigns in Michigan since 1996, including $87,500 to current AG Bill Schuette.”
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Let’s reiterate just who it is these Republican tribunes of the common man are in bed with. FitzPatrick writes of how in the early 1980s Wisconsin’s Democratic assistant attorney general “obtained and reviewed the tax returns of all of Amway’s active distributors in Wisconsin. The losses…were shocking even to the prosecutors…. Average net income of minus $900. Those nearing a net profit were far less than 1 percent of the total consumer participants.” (The company “stated or implied” to recruits that they were likely to make $12,000 in a year.) “The actual odds of winning are significantly better at a Las Vegas craps table than joining the end of an MLM recruitment chain,” FitzPatrick concludes; it all is enough to make one’s head’s spin.
But here is the thing. It’s easy to picture this as knowing hucksters fleecing innocent rubes. Would that it were so simple. Five members of the House Republican caucus are also Amway distributors. So is, for example, Douglas Wead, frequently described as George W. Bush’s “spiritual adviser,” who was an aide in George H.W. Bush’s White House and is the man credited with coining the phrase Compassionate Conservatism. We’re talking about more than rich people cynically buying influence here, and politicians cynically selling it. For there is also the issue of belief. The fact is that the culture of MLM marketing is deeply interwoven with conservative political culture—and evangelical, and Mormon, religious culture. It is deeply interwoven with conservative and religious-right ideology. It is interwoven in ways that speak the pathologies of all these worlds. I will turn to that complexity in my last and final post in this series. It’s about their vision of the American way .
Read parts one and two of Rick’s series on multi-level marketing and the right.
The Eye on the Pyramids (Part 2: Bushed)
Timothy J. Muris (left), accompanied by former Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles S. Abell. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
A few months back I opened up a series on a ghastly hustle, which saturates the culture of the right: “multi-level marketing” (MLM)—pyramid schemes, if you will. To review:
• When the industry emerged in the mid-1960s, schemes in which original investors, and the companies themselves, thrived even as almost all new recruits further down the chain made nothing, were considered to be frauds, plain and simple. They were thus widely prosecuted.
• The burgeoning “industry,” led by the DeVos family’s Amway, adjusted via clever lawyering—successfully reframing pyramid schemes as “direct selling,” each new “distributor” was now induced to purchase goods each month as part of their “investment”—only under such staggering prices that it’s almost impossible for the distributor to make money. The lawyers in a case against one such MLM company, Trek Alliance, which “sold” (not many) water filters, cleaning products, nutritional supplements and “beauty aids,” did an analysis in which they concluded that of their distributors “98.8 to 99.6 percent fail to achieve any earnings,” and “in all likelihood more than 96 percent…experienced business failures.”
• As noted in a report called “The Main Street Bubble: A Whistleblower’s Guide to Business Opportunity Fraud—How the FTC Ignored and Now Protects It” by Robert L. FitzPatrick, author of False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes and an expert witness or consultant in more MLM cases than any other private citizen, such massive failure rates “are intrinsic to the design. 99 percent of consumer/investors must lose for a tiny group at the pyramid’s peak to gain…. The system is closed. Value is not exchanged. Money is merely transferred.”
• These hustlers also have to grow or die—expanding the scheme to new marks is key to their business model. Writes FitzPatrick, they “churn through 50-80 percent of victims annually, replacing them with new ones.”
I concluded that opening post, “Under the Clinton administration, regulatory efforts were stepped up.” The Federal Trade Commission’s senior economist was an expert on MLM, and devised a test that determined what percentage of purchases by “distributors” would have to be resold to actual retail customers (instead of future “distributors” down the chain) for the “distributor” to actually make money without recruiting further marks—70 percent, the FTC concluded, which virtually no one ever achieved. “His schema made it easier to prosecute and protect the victims. The prosecutions began.”
Which brings us to the chapter of the story when the prosecutions stopped. According to “The Main Street Bubble,” the Federal Trade Commission has direct regulatory oversight over multi-level marketing. This oversight was effectively abandoned in 2001 following President George W. Bush’s appointment of Timothy Muris to chair the FTC. At that time, Muris was an anti-trust lawyer whose largest client was… Amway.”
I shit you not.
Muris promptly halted the investigation and prosecution of MLMs and failed to monitor enforcement orders against companies already prosecuted (many companies, FitzPatrick writes, “are blatantly violating these orders”), Additionally, he “issued a widely circulated letter that obscured and appeared to permit practices—paying rewards for ‘endless chain recruiting’ without retail sales as a revenue source—that the courts, and 30 years of earlier FTC policy have declared are illegal. The letter was used by MLM companies to persuade millions of consumers that previous FTC policies and court actions that defined pyramid selling fraud were no longer valid.”
And that’s not all.
Muris also ignored consumer requests for action on frauds from which they suffered. When a proposed FTC rule on “business opportunity” frauds that was years in making—what Doug Brooks, an attorney who’s brought ten class-action suits against MLM over the last twenty years, told me was “a very modest pre-sale disclosure regulation”—approached fruition, his staff rejected the approaches of whistleblowers, instead meeting with MLM lobbyists seeking to exempt their industry. (Which, it turned out, they were, making the new rule virtually moot.) The revolving door started spinning: Muris going to work as an MLM lobbyist, to influence the agency he had only just left—a Bush director of consumer protection went to work for Amway. Under Bush, FitzPatrick told me, the FTC “effectively legalized this form of Main Street business fraud”—as Business Week has documented in 2010. “It was only this past January,” Brooks says, “that the Federal Trade Commission announced its first prosecution of a multilevel marketing scheme in six years.”
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Amway: it’s the Republican way. The GOP and MLM, it turns out, go together like tea and toast. Or maybe like fossil fuels and SUVs: the first fuels the second, and everyone loses. That’s the story we’ll turn to next time.
Don Rose: For Sixty Years, Chicago's Warrior for Justice
March on Washington. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Whilst my anatomy of Chicago activism in the present reposes on newsstands, let’s turn our attention today to Chicago activism past. Every month I interview an author or activist onstage at the Seminary Co-op bookstore on the University of Chicago campus. Last month my guest was Don Rose, a legendary political consultant who, as I said when I introduced him, has been fighting for democracy in the Second City for literally sixty years. (Another sixty years, I joked, and maybe democracy in Chicago will finally arrive.) It was a pleasure to bring old Don out of the shadows, for he’s always been a back-room guy—but what back rooms!
He’s also a certified original bohemian. Born in 1930 to Jewish parents (his dad managed a shoe store), Don took up trumpet in sixth grade at the end of the swing era, heard Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, “and had a musical epiphany.” (At the Seminary Co-op, he told the story of the time Charlie Parker came to the Beehive on 55th Street near his apartment in Hyde Park. He repaired to the men’s room. “Next thing I know I’m taking a joint leak with the man we thought might be God on earth. Max Roach taxes this tremendous drum break, and the first word Bird says to me is: Max! I named my kid Max.”) He found his way to Paris, ran into a “young bug-eyed African-American writer who I knew from his essays, but he had just published Go Tell Him On the Mountain.” “Jimmy” Baldwin took him to meet Richard Wright, who was by then a little bit nuts: “When we take over,” he said, “you guys”—he waved to the white hipsters in the room—“we’ll save you.” He didn’t meet Samuel Beckett. “That was the one that got away.”
When he returned to Chicago the Trumbull Park Homes riots broke out. It was 1953. A light-skinned black woman was renting a home in a “white” housing project, accidentally. Her family was attacked. Months later, Chicago’s liberal housing commissioner Elizabeth Wood tried to move ten more black families in—and bloody-minded neighborhood whites rioted for days on end. A thousand uniformed police in four shifts patrolled around the clock. High-minded Hyde Park white liberals like Don (“foolish us!”) sallied forth, and “handed out beautifully written pamphlets about brotherhood. Little realizing that we were taking our lives in our hands. because if there was anything worse than a ‘Negro,’ it was a”—he pauses, not pronouncing the word—“______ lover.” And, since it was all but official city policy to ban the papers from printing news about racial strife in Chicago, they worked to get word of the riots into the press. They failed.
Don did, however, have the last laugh. The riots had been all but organized by the top aide to the powerful neighborhood alderman, Emil Pacini. Ten years later, Don was among the organizers for the reform alderman, John Buchanan, who defeated him.
By then, Chicago’s civil rights forces were massing, and Don was at the center of it. A new school commissioner had been hired, Benjamin Willis, with the task of keeping Chicago schools segregated. Which, considering that the black schools were massively overcrowded and the white schools underused, proved difficult. Willis, though, arrived at a solution: turning trailers set up in playgrounds and parking lots into classrooms. An activist with Saul Alinsky who later became a famous journalist—Nicholas von Hoffman—came up with the term “Willis Wagons.” A phrase to organize with. And by the 1963–64 school year, Chicago’s umbrella civil rights group the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations came up with the idea of boycotting all the schools with Willis Wagons. It was Don Rose who came up with a better idea: “I said, ‘Hell, why do that? Why not call a city-wide boycott?’” He was always coming up with crazy ideas like that. “And it worked pretty well.” Every black school in Chicago was about 98 percent empty. The idea spread to other cities: Cincinnati, New York, Boston, Philadelphia.
(Last night the fabulous activists documentarians at Chicago’s Kartemquin Films, the producers of Hoop Dreams, previewed their documentary on the 1963 boycott as part of the Free Minds, Free People conference this weekend convened by the Education for Liberation Network, which is also doing fantastic things, for instance organizing against Teach for America as a vector for the corporatization of public education. If you’re in Chicago, check it out.)
By then Don Rose had already met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For the previous summer, the black labor organizer A. Phillip Randolph had come up with an idea. For a march. On Washington. For jobs and freedom. Which the respectable black leaders in Chicago thought was pretty dumb. “The heads of these groups like the Urban League and the NAACP were pretty much in Richard J. Daley’s pocket. And they weren’t really sure that this ‘March on Washington’ was going to work, and there might be violence, and they didn’t want to be associated with it, so they fobbed off the job of chairman”—to Timuel Black, now, like Don, another living legend, but then a decidedly second-tier figure, head of the Chicago branch of the Negro American Labor Council.
Last laugh once more: Tim Black and Don Rose marshaled two “freedom trains,” several airplanes, and a massive, enthusiastic Chicago contingent to the March on Washington. “And of course Dr. King delivered that great speech, and we were all basking in the light of it.”
Two years later, CCCO was still fighting to get rid of Willis, organizing a protest march of seven or eight thousand people from the South Loop to City Hall. In a harbinger of the 1968 Democratic convention, there were mass arrests in front of the Hilton Hotel on Balbo. Don relates what happened next: “Up pops Dick Gregory—who was never much for organizational discipline! He jumps up in front of the cameras and says, ‘We’re going to march every day until Willis is gone!’”
At the Seminary Co-op, the audience burst into laughter. Don continued: “We didn’t want to show disunity in the movement! So we started daily marches!”
Mike Royko wrote about those marches in his Daley biography, Boss. After they paraded in front of the mayor’s house in the Bridgeport neighborhood, little girls started a new jumprope chant, to the tune of the Oscar Meyer jingle: “Oh, I wish I were an Alabama trooper/ That is what I’d really like to be/ For if I was an Alabama trooper/ Then I could kill a nigger legally.” Chicago, circa 1965.
Dr. King, around then, had announced he would open a Northern front in his freedom movement. All and sundry presumed he would choose Harlem—New York, of course, being the center of the universe. But King found Harlem’s civil rights leadership a nest of competing intriguers. Don helped organize a weekend visit for King to Chicago; one thing that impressed him was the smooth functioning of Chicago’s activist community. It was those daily Dick Gregory marches: “The one good thing about this is that we learned a lot about organizing!”
King came to Chicago. Don Rose was his press secretary. I tell the story of what happened next in Nixonland:
Chicago had an open-housing ordinance, passed in 1963—that was what let Mayor Daley say there was no segregation in Chicago. So married black couples began visiting real estate offices in bucolic white neighborhoods asking to be shown a home They would be told there were none available. A similarly situated white couple would make the same request and would be given the red-carpet treatment. On July 8 alone, in the neighborhood of Gage Park, the testers recorded thirty prima facie violations of the law. Chicago’s power structure wasn’t about to do anything about that. Doing something about it would be to torch the entire moral economy of the city as Mayor Daley and his core constituency understood it.
One day King’s activist army held a vigil at one of the real estate offices upholding segregation—and were set upon by a mob. What to do next? They decided to march through the neighborhoods where blacks were being refused housing. Take a torch, in other words, to the entire moral economy of the city as Mayor Daley and his core constituency understood it—staging the famous confrontation where Martin Luther King was hit in the head by a rock, responding, “I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”
That idea to march was Don Rose’s. Though, at this point in the interview, the back-room guy grows bashful. “Someone wrote a book called The Great I. That’s what I feel like now. It’s a shame all these people are dead so they can’t call me a liar!”
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Don went on to do more, so much more: a leadership role in planning the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention (he couldn’t be a Chicago 8 defendant because “I technically did not cross state lines,” he told me), consultant for a dozen or more of Chicago’s most important anti-machine reform election campaigns, manager of Jane Byrne’s reform campaign for mayor in 1979. That last one turned out to be pretty crushing. He had also laid out a careful, day-by-day strategy for when she took office to break the back of the Great Chicago Machine once and for all. Which, promptly upon assuming office, Mayor Byrne turned her back on. (You can read about that amazing story in this classic of Chicago history.)
Which is the sort of thing with which warriors for justice are so, so familiar: the bitter defeats, setbacks, crushing blows—including, in fact, the result of King’s efforts in Chicago in 1966: an ineffectual “summit agreement” with city fathers that accomplished nothing; followed by the failure on Capitol Hill of the 1966 open housing bill. The two steps backward for every one step in advance. That was my final question to Don in other interviews—“a broader, existential question,” as I put it:
You and your comrades keep on sort of pushing the next frontier of justice and getting it pushed back—taking another bite of the apple and getting your ass kicked; getting rocks thrown at you; having a summit that isn’t really a summit; getting tear-gassed; getting people elected and then seeing them thrown out; again and again and again, one step forward, and one step back, and here we are in Chicago and they’re hording $500 million in TIF money and giving it to rich developers and throwing kids out of their schools—how do you keep going? How do you conceptualize the grand sweep of what you’re trying to do? And how do you cope psychologically with all this frustration, and how do those of us who are fighting for social change make sense of the bitterness we feel in the face of so much wickedness?”
It was a question the premise of which Don adamantly refused. You have to see, he said, how it all added up.
“We had little victories.” He reeled them off, remembering each indelibly: the time, in 1969, when they elected a slate of progressives to a convention to rewrite the Illinois state Constitution; the election of the first reform alderman on the North Side, Dick Simpson, in 1971; the time in 1972 they beat the machine’s states attorney Edward Hanrahan, the man responsible for the raid that murdered Black Panther leader Fred Hampton (with exquisite karmic justice, that’s the only thing history remembers him for); the time they saved the Congressional seat of Ralph Metcalf, the former machine stooge who broke with Mayor Daley over the issue of police brutality (“It’s never too late to go black,” he said), upon which “Daley put up a stooge against him”—and, in 1980, the time “we elected two independent congressmen,” including “a fella named Harold Washington.”
“Very very significant changes took place over this time without you feeling it…. Someone compared it to a Tsunami that might begin as a ripple in the ocean twenty or twenty years ago…. I think, had we had a continual string of losses I might have dropped out, others might have dropped out. But there were enough of these victories over the years that we could see our way clear.”
A word to the wise, from a very wise man: so, frustrated activist, can you. Pile up those little victories. Some day, your tsunami will come. And you may, like Don, see your way clear.
Comey's Crickets
James Comey. (AP Photo)
Some of us have been shouting from mountaintops, others from molehills: James Comey, currently sailing smoothly through Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for confirmation as chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was:
(a) in charge, and proudly so, of a “terrorism” case that began with a detention without charges, continued with made-up and spurious charges, and ended with a conviction won against an American whose treatment during confinement (on the American mainland) turned his brain to jello;
(b) general counsel for a defense contractor while it was busy hushing up a whistleblower who exposed $24 billion contract that they were building vessels for the Coast Guard, on a $24 billion contract, that buckled and leaked on the high seas;
(c) as of three months ago on the board of a bank, in charge of cleaning up their reputation after it paid a $1.92 billion fine for laundering drug money from Mexico; and
(d) the man who, as former FBI agent Colleen Rowley pointed out this morning in The New York Times, “sign[ed] off on most of the worst of the Bush administration’s legal abuses and questionable interpretations of federal and international law. He ultimately approved the C.I.A.’s list of “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including waterboarding, which experts on international law consider a form of torture.
Lots of shouting going on. But not much listening.
I maintain an active salon of sorts on my Facebook page, welcoming anyone who wants to join the ride (Hop aboard!). It’s my own little online magazine, with upwards of 3,600 subscribers, and I love them all. (Hi, guys!) When I post something political that tickles their fancy, it’s not unusual for me to get upward of a hundred “likes.” Yesterday, though, I reposted there my June 24 Nation anatomy of Comey’s sins and got four “likes.” (The next thing I posted, Nick Turse’s outstanding dispatch on the secrecy surrounding the America military’s activities in Africa, a crucial subject but not one three and a half times more important than confirming a new Justice Department chief law enforcement officer who’s on the record defiling the Constitution, got fourteen.) I noted, this morning, “When you’re a writer you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it’s best not to care too much. But I’m dismayed at the chirping of crickets that has greeted my work on our next FBI chief as a torture enabler. How deadened have our civic muscles become?” Then I posted the former FBI agent Colleen Rowley’s mighty evisceration in the Times—and that got three “likes.” Come on, guys!
And so you know this is not just about me and my purple prose: The Washington Post live-blogged the hearings this morning; that’s earned eighteen Facebook “likes.” Talking Points Memo, my go-to site for all things Capitol Hill—I love them, and so hate to single them out, but…—cover the event. Comey, it seems, is not a story even to those who generally give a shit.
It’s not like we’re totally dead to civil liberties, and the FBI’s violation of same; I have reason to know that for a fact. Compare to my piece from last month on Comey, which was tweeted out forty-three times, a piece I wrote last year on the FBI’s abuse of infiltrators and entrapment techniques in “terror” cases, which was tweeted 1,865 times. Now, that’s an important subject, also—one that senators should, but won’t, grill Comey on, too. But it’s not 433 times more important!
I asked a friend why she thought the entrapment piece caught on, and the Comey exposé hasn’t. I noted that the earlier piece focused on the infiltration and arrest of Occupiers. She replied, “I think that’s it. Occupy = nice white kids. Torture/surveillance = scary brown muslims.”
Is that it? Has our dull civic deadness come to that? We’re exhausted, that’s for sure. Notes one of my Facebook friends, “When our civic values are attacked from a few sides, some people are capable of outrage and will fight back. When they are attacked from all sides, over and over again, over a prolonged period of time, people lose the ability to react.”
“Eventually some administration will nominate John Yoo Attorney General and nobody will even deeply sigh.”
“Comatose, Mr. Perlstein, because we have come to accept that what we think no longer matters.”
Which brings us to the problem of Barack Obama:
“None of the Republicans he’s nominated seems to have extraordinary qualifications for their posts other than the R next to their names which makes confirmation easier.”
“At one time, the nomination of someone who had defend torture would have been a salient event, one that stood out for its very outrageousness. it would surely have led to a campaign to prevent the nomination. Now, however, we are faced every week, almost every day[,] with an array of events that are all equally abhorrent. They are far more that we can deal with; and we have been taught that protest is futile. I mean, really—is Obama going to back down on this nomination because we of the non-right object to it? Not hardly.”
(A useful point: even George Bush backed down on a nominee because we of the non-right objected to it: Michael Baroody, nominated to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission after making his living lobbying against consumer product safety.)
Obama’s “hope and change,” we must now accept, is a fetish; one as strange as getting turned on by popping balloons, or dressing like a cuddly stuffed animal. Only this one is far more harmful, even when practiced among consenting adults. Our president’s kink is “bipartisanship”: acting really nice toward Republicans, even if, or even especially, they act really mean toward you. You know: an S&M kind of thing.
And his “change,” in turn, changes us: it wears us down, with the learned helplessness of too many promises betrayed—renders us the opposite of citizens. Which is curious, because most of us thought that if “change” meant anything, after George W. Bush, it meant a reanimation of our civic engagement, a renewed passion for political engagement—a citizenship jamboree. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”: didn’t someone say that once upon a time?
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I once had an idea for a book: an encyclopedia to catalogue the outrages and absurdities of the “War on Terror” under Bush: “Asymmetrical Warfare,” suicide as… “Gonzales, Alberto,” hospital visit to John Ashcroft of… “Mushroom Cloud,” smoking gun could be… “USA Patriot Act,” seizing of library records under Section 215 of… “Yoo, John,” government can crush suspected terrorists’ children’s testicles to obtain information… ”
It would have to be a different book now: an encyclopedia of the outrages and absurdities of the “War on Terror” under Bush and Obama. Only problem for my career would be: no commercial publisher would touch it. It could never sell enough copies to pay.
While Congress may be eager to confirm James Comey, Rick Perlstein has some questions.
How the Powerful Derail Accountability: The Case of Intelligence Reform (Part II)
The lobby of the CIA Headquarters Building in McLean, Virginia, August 14, 2008. (Reuters/Larry Downing)
Yesterday we learned how in 1975 the media, CIA apostate Philip Agee, the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House revealed the American intelligence community to be a violent, thuggish and ineffectual embarrassment to the Constitution of the United States—and not very intelligent to boot. And what happened next, in 1976?
Pretty much nothing. The establishment’s distraction campaigns proved too powerful.
Begin the melodrama around Christmastime 1975, with Agee, author of the devastating expose Inside the Company: A CIA Diary. He had by then, from his hideout in Communist Cuba, joined a movement to actively sabotage American intelligence, centered in the organization the Fifth Estate and its magazine Counterspy (whose founders and funders included the novelist Norman Mailer). “The most effective and important systematic effort to counter the CIA that can be undertaken right now,” Agee wrote in the winter 1975 issue, was “the identification, exposure, and neutralization of its people working abroad.” One of the people Agee’s article thus named was named Richard Welch, whom he identified as the station chief in Lima, Peru.
By then, however, Welch was not in Lima. He was the station chief in Athens—where, two days before Christmas, he was ambushed and assassinated by masked men outside his home.
Agee’s article was merely coincidental to the attack—and in Athens, Welch’s cover had already, independently, been blown (as, in fact, it had been in Lima), not least because he lived in a house whose CIA identity was a matter of wide public knowledge. The work being done by the House and Senate select committees on intelligence had even less to do with it. No matter: here was the perfect fodder for a perfect disinformation campaign. Presidential press secretary Ron Nessen insinuated that the intelligence committees’ carelessness was responsible for the tragedy. The plane bearing Welch’s coffin was timed to touch down at Andrews Air Force Base for live coverage on the morning news, greeted by an Air Force honor guard. (It circled for fifteen minutes to get the timing just right.) Time had already eulogized Welch as a “scholar, wit, athlete, spy”—a gentleman James Bond. “Never before,” Daniel Schorr announced on the CBS News on December 30, “had a fallen secret agent come home as such a public hero,” and the lionization was only beginning: over the protests of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Welch’s burial broke military protocol by taking place at Arlington Cemetery, starring more honor guards, dozens of flags, the flower of the American defense establishment and the very same horse-drawn caisson from the interment of President Kennedy bearing the coffin; President Ford escorted the veiled widow.
Soon, hundreds of telegrams and letters—some with just the single word “Murderer!”—flooded the Church Committee’s transom, from angry citizens’ alerts to the administration’s insinuations that it all must have been congressional investigators’ faults. A supposedly adversarial press piled on, especially The Washington Post. In 1974 it brought down a president; now, it ran thirteen stories in the week after Welch’s death following the administration line, an editorial labeling it the “entirely predictable result of the disclosure tactics chosen by certain American critics of the agency.” Wrote the Post’s admirably independent ombudsmen Charles Seib, “The press was used to publicize what in its broad effect was an attack on itself.” That is, when the press bothered to cover intelligence reform at all, now that a weary press public’s attentions had turned elsewhere—to the hydra-headed 1976 Democratic presidential field, to the showdown between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, to the impending bicentennial celebrations.
And it all happened just as the two select committees on intelligence were drawing up their final reports and investigations for intelligence reform—terrified, now, that any more disclosure of any secret would discredit the entirety of their work.
That was no accident. It was an orchestrated campaign—one taking advantage, not of the committees’ recklessness (in fact they were remarkably free from leaks) but of their very deliberateness, the months of quiet investigation and backroom executive sessions that provided an opening for propaganda to blindside reform. A high-ranking CIA official named David Atlee Phillips quit from the Company to organize retirees into an apparently independent lobby. Though in the shadowlands of espionage, nothing could be so straightforward. They actually worked in harness with a president who used words like “crippling” and “dismantling” in his every reference to the intelligence investigations. And by the time the White House began dancing on Richard Welch’s grave, Atlee’s 600-member Association of Retired Intelligence Officers were ready to wave the bloody shirt on the president’s behalf—in speeches, letters to the editor and canned op-eds from a forty-eight-page guide, all pressing the message that the expansion of the nation’s suspicious circles into the sacred precincts of intelligence was putting her heroes in danger. Until, hardly three weeks after Welch’s death, the momentum for reigning in the intelligence community was at all but a standstill—just as planned. “Revamping the CIA: Easier Said Than Done,” as The New York Times headlined on January 18.
And then—that same week, in fact—came the saga of the Pike Committee’s final report.
Historian Kathryn Olmsted, in her definitive Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI, from which much of this material derives, has written how the Pike Report, drafted by a veteran of the Senate Watergate investigation, was, for a government document, a model of literary grace, and hard-hitting as hell: it opened with a seventy-page savaging of the Ford administration’s lack of cooperation with their work. It continued, much more aggressively than the public hearings—which had been plenty aggressive themselves—by documenting the CIA’s wasteful spending (where it could figure out what it spent), its bald failures at producing useful predictions, its abuses of basic civil liberties and its indifference that any of this might be a problem. It singled out Henry Kissinger, still the establishment’s darling: he had a “passion for secrecy” and his statements were “at variance with facts.” It detailed failed and embarrassing covert actions—not naming country names, but with enough identifying contextual details to make things obvious enough for those who cared to guess. For instance, how the Nixon administration encouraged the Kurdish minority to revolt, then abandoned them when the Shah of Iran objected, of which caper the Pike Report concluded, “Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical exercise”—and, given later developments, a portentous one as well.
And when the “intelligence community” began scanning the drafts, they reacted, as Tom Wicker wrote in On Press, a fine little 1978 book about the politics of the media that deserves to be rediscovered in these days of David Gregory and Edward Snowden, “as if to a rattlesnake and in the finest bureaucratic tradition—with outrage and charges that the report was biased and distorted, inaccurate, and seriously threatened—you guessed it—the national security.”
The report was scheduled to be published at the end of January. And as the intelligence agencies negotiated with Pike Committee staff about its supposed grave threats to the safety and security of Grandma in her kitchen, Daniel Schorr of CBS got leaked a copy and reported on its contents. So did The New York Times, which revealed stuff like how an Italian neofascist general got paid $800,000 from the CIA—a revelation that had nothing to do with violating national security, but everything to do exposing incompetence and immorality.
Be that as it may, the very fact of “unauthorized leaks” provided an opening. Ron Nessen said they raised “serious questions about how classified material can be be handled by Congress when national security is at stake.” The CIA said genial, bow-tied Otis Pike would soon be responsible for the blood of more Richard Welch’s. A congressman asked Pike to find out who passed on the copies to the press. Pike replied, “What do you recommend, precisely? Lie detector tests members of Congress?”
An absurd notion—back then. Who knows how close we may be to that now?
Pike proved more stalwart than his congressional colleagues—who soon started voting to neuter themselves. First the Rules Committee voted to suppress release unless President Ford approved its contents. The entire House would have to vote to approve or reject the Rules Committee’s recommendation. Then came the debate. Those in favor of release made arguments about the very nature of “classification” that should be resounding far and wide today: quite nearly by definition, it violates the system of checks and balances that is supposed to be the foundation of the republic. One of those moderate Republicans of blessed memory, James Paul Johnson of Colorado, pointed out that the report’s aim was to publicize “despicable, detestable” acts, but that “we are being castigated by those who perpetrate the acts and then classified them”—serving as judge and jury in their own case, precisely what the constitutional system was theoretically supposed to prevent. Pike pointed out, “A ‘secret’ is a fact or opinion to which some bureaucrat has applied a rubber stamp”—not holy writ, nor some sort of ineluctable instruction to our “enemies” about how to defeat us. A Democrat from suburban Chicago, Morgan Murphy, drove home the bottom line: “If we are not a coequal branch of this government, if we are not equal to the President and the Supreme Court, then let the CIA write this report; let the President write this report; and we ought to fold our tent and go home.”
Here was an unappreciated hinge in the constitutional history of America’s relatively new national security state—a debate over precisely that: whether the Congress in a national security state would be a co-equal branch. The House, writes Olmsted, “after spending one year and several hundred thousand” dollars on an intelligence investigation, voted more than 2 to 1”—with the preponderance of censors being conservative and Southern—“not to let the public learn what the committee had discovered.” The bloody shirt of Richard Welch proved too much the distraction. It was, after all, an election year.
The late Daniel Schorr told the next part of the story many times in his commentaries on NPR’s All Things Considered. He gave a Xerox copy of the report to his bosses at CBS news and asked if they wanted to help him turn it into a book, perhaps through a publishing subsidiary of the network: “We owe it to history to publish it,” he said. They disagreed. He went to the nonprofit organization the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to see if it could find a book publisher that was interested in publishing the book in exchange for the profits going to the group. It could not. The Village Voice did agree, however, and because the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press now controlled the document, the Voice agreed to make a contribution to the group. (The curious can download that Voice issue here.)
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The upshot: the House of Representatives having abandoned the principle of Madisonian checks and balances, the lion’s share of the nation’s media took the opportunity to abandon the Jeffersonian principle—“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”—of an adversarial press. Congress investigated him, and virtually no one defended him; The New York Times editorialized that by “making the report available for cash sale” he was guilty of “selling secrets.” CBS News suspended him; their local radio affiliates begged for CBS to fire him. The congressional investigation cost $350,000, interviewed 400 people, never found Schorr’s source and ended up with the Ethics Committee deciding by only one vote not to throw him in jail for contempt of Congress. The investigation did, however, find one of the leakers of the report—Wisconsin Congressman Les Aspin. He leaked it not to the press but to the Central Intelligence Agency itself. Was Les Aspin punished? Not hardly. Instead, he became Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense. That’s how the leaking game works: it’s a machine for selective persecution. A whore’s bath of elite manipulation. Les Aspin won, because he helped the CIA accomplish this. In Olmsted’s words:
when the Pike and Church committees finally finished their work, the passion for reform had cooled. The House overwhelmingly rejected the work of the Pike committee and voted to suppress its final report. It even refused to set up a standing intelligence committee. The Senate dealt more favorably with the Church committee, but it too came close to rejecting all of the committee’s recommendations. Only last-minute parliamentary maneuvering enabled Church to salvage one reform, the creation of a new standing committee on intelligence. The proposed charter for the intelligence community, though its various components continued to be hotly debated for several years, never came to pass.
Otis Pike, despite the many accomplishments of his committee, found his name linked with congressional sensationalism, leaks, and poor administration. Frank Church’s role in the investigation failed to boost his presidential campaign, forced him to delay his entry into the race, and, he thought, might have cost him the vice presidency.
The targets of the investigation had the last laugh on the investigators. “When all is said and done, what did it achieve?” asked Richard Helms, the former director of the CIA who was at the heart of many of the scandals unearthed by Congress and the media. “Where is the legislation, the great piece of legislation, that was going to come out of the Church committee hearings ? I haven’t seen it.” Hersh, the reporter who prompted the inquiries, was also unimpressed by the investigators’ accomplishments. “They generated a lot of new information, but ultimately they didn’t come up with much,” he said.
And now, we live with the consequences. Enjoy your Fourth of July!
In case you missed Part I of Rick Perlstein’s “How the Powerful Derail Accountability,” read it here.
How the Powerful Derail Accountability: The Case of Intelligence Reform (Part I)
The lobby of the CIA Headquarters Building in McLean, Virginia, August 14, 2008. (Reuters/Larry Downing)
Two weeks ago I reflected on how power uses distraction campaigns to do its dirtiest work—for instance, discrediting whistleblowers and dissolving investigations that threaten to upend the cozy arrangements of the powerful. I cited the way the (authentic) story of George W. Bush going absent without leave from the Texas Air National Guard was derailed by raising questions about one (inauthentic) document; and how, in 1975, the killing of a CIA station chief in Greece was deployed to dampen momentum for a thorough reform of America’s intelligence agencies. Today and tomorrow, we’ll learn more about the latter example. I fear it will become more and more relevant as the weeks to on.
Some background. Christmastime, 1974, in a massive front page New York Times article, Seymour Hersh revealed that the CIA had collected intelligence files on at least 10,000 American citizens in direct violation of its 1947 charter stipulating that it was only allowed to work overseas. It also documented “dozens of other illegal activities by members of the C.I.A in the United States, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the surreptitious inspection of mail.” Emerging but eighteen weeks after Richard Nixon’s resignation, when the momentum for deep reckoning with America’s sins had never been stronger, President Ford was forced to react. He impaneled a blue-ribbon commission to investigate the allegations—a paper-tiger panel made up of the very establishmentarians whose complicity in CIA sins should have been a subject of investigation itself. “Having the CIA investigated by such a group,” The New York Times editorialized “is like having the Mafia audited by its own accountants.” Not having any of it, both chambers of Congress impaneled their own select committees to investigate the CIA, FBI, and—later—the NSA.
Between 1947 and 1974 some four hundred bills had been introduced to improve congressional oversight over intelligence agencies. All had come a cropper—Congress generally having taken the attitude articulated by Mississippi’s Senator John Stennis, one of the tiny cadre of congressional insiders allowed “oversight” into such matters: “You make up your mind that you are going to have an intelligence agency and protect it as such, and shut your eyes some and take what is coming.” An attitude, by the way, embarrassingly redolent of Senate Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein today.
But not after Sy Hersh’s scoop. It took just two hours of debate for the Senate to authorize its select committee on intelligence, by a vote of 82 to 4; the world was different now. “In this year—so soon after Watergate—we cannot leave in doubt the operations and activities of agencies involved in such sensitive and secret endeavors,” conservative Democrat Walter Huddleston of Kentucky said. Republicans were if anything harsher. Howard Baker, who had earlier tried and failed to charter an investigation on the CIA’s role in Watergate, spoke of his “shuddering fear” the CIA was out of control. The Pennsylvania liberal Republican Richard Schweiker called it a “shadow government.” Even Barry Goldwater, the security establishment’s best friend, acceded to its investigation: “If surgery is required, let it be performed only after the most careful diagnosis.” The New York Times predicted “a thorough and potentially far-reaching review of United States intelligence practices and requirements”—“The Year of Intelligence,” as it titled a February 8, 1975, editorial.
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Simultaneously came word of a new book rolling off the presses in Great Britain: a shocking book-length exposé from an exiled former CIA agent, Philip Agee, called Inside the Company: A CIA Diary. In it, a twelve-year agency veteran working South and Central America chronicled his growing realization “that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the C.I.A. and the institutions it supports.” At the end of the book he announced that he “wrote it as a contribution to socialist revolution.” It also revealed the CIA’s hand in as many undercover operations as he could recollect, compiled with proper names, in a handy appendix. An analyst wrote in the agency’s classified review of the book that he was the CIA’s “first real defector in the class sense of the word.”
Meanwhile Congress’s two intelligence investigations started spilling forth extraordinary revelations. So did dogged media watchdogs. In February Daniel Schorr reported, “President Ford reportedly warned associates that if current investigations go too far, they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials in which the CIA was involved.” Time, in its June 2 issue, reported that in 1961 John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, enraged at the failure at the Bay of Pigs, “covertly ordered agencies of the U.S. government to find some sure means of deposing Fidel Castro, Cuba’s chief of state. Whether or not assassination attempts were authorized by the Kennedys is still unclear…. The C.I.A. did work with two U.S. Mafia leaders, Sam Giancana and John Roselli, in unsuccessful attempts to kill the Cuban leader.” And then there was the fact that in 1953 a 22-year-old Army biochemist named Frank Olson, an unwitting participant in a CIA study that spiked his drink with LSD, jumped out a window to his death.
And all this came months before the opening of the public hearings of the Church Committee (in the Senate) and the Pike Committee (in the House). That fall was when America learned, for instance, that the CIA continued to stockpile chemical weapons in defiance of the law; that the Government Accounting Office hadn’t been allowed to audit the CIA since 1962, had no idea how much the agent took in or how it was spent, and that only six employees at the Office of Management and Budget studied the foreign intelligence budget as a whole, three of them former CIA employees; and that, the day before the 1973 Yom Kippur War broke out, the CIA had told the president to expect Middle East peace. That the CIA had recruited Christian missionaries in defiance of an Eisenhower-era directive outlawing the practice. And that Big Brother had also been opening their mail—over 215,000 pieces in New York City alone between 1953 and 1973, including one, in 1968, from presidential candidate Richard Nixon to his speechwriter Ray Price. And that J. Edgar Hoover had tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide. And that John F. Kennedy had shared a mistress with the same mafioso the CIA had hired to assassinate Castro.
Back in the day, Congress had cojones.
So it was that the executive branch assiduously endeavored to chop them off. Tomorrow I’ll pick up the story at Christmastime, 1975, a year after Sy Hersh’s revelations kicked off the Year of Intelligence, when the stories of Philip Agee, Daniel Schorr and the CIA station chief in Greece converged to end the Year of Intelligence in an orgy of sheer stupidity, ensuring that no truly meaningful reform came of it at all.
Rick Perlstein writes about why Obama’s pick for FBI director is not the reformer some liberals hope he’ll be.
Molon Labe!
Protesters, some armed (L), attend a pro-gun rally as part of the National Day of Resistance at the state Capitol in Salt Lake City, Utah, February 23, 2013. (Reuters/Jim Urquhart)
I hate the idea of the “news cycle”—that notion, beloved of the Washington gossip sheet Politico, that there are properly two or three maybe five stories that everyone is or should be talking about in any given day; that is, if you know what is cool. That atrophies thought. It kills off any active attempt to grasp the multiple contexts that shape our public life. It actively turns news into gossip. Which is just the speed of the Washington political press corps. Very few of them think to scan the horizon to suss out stories and issues that might emerge. Instead, information outside the very few narratives they consider worth carrying around in their heads just gets discarded. Let me flag two stories that fell through these gargantuan cracks. They may some day turn out to have portended bigger things.
Remember Buford Rogers? Of course you don’t. The media was too busy flooding the zone last month with news on the terrorists who happened to be Muslim to give more than a drop of attention to a white Minnesota man who flew the American flag outside his mobile home upside down and, in the first week of May, was arrested in an FBI raid that uncovered a cache of pipebombs, Molotov cocktails, and firearms. “The FBI believed there was a terror attack in its planning stages,” a spokesman said. What happened next? I didn’t know—beyond a single paragraph in the National Briefing, The New York Times hasn’t mentioned the case; The Washington Post ran the same AP dispatch at six paragraphs—until I found my way to an item on the site Heavy.com—and learned that “Bucky” had started something called the “Black Snake Militia,” and said such charming things on his Facebook page as “The war is here tsa agents are doing random cheeks and shooting people for no reson,” “ever one better get your guns ready cuz there comeing FEMA,” “this is not bullshit just cuz its not in your back yard yet doesnt mean it wont b soon,” “the NWO has taken all your freedoms the right to bear arms freedom of speach freedom of the press cheek the shit out for your self this is fucking real,” “together we can fight back they wont take me down with out a fight i hope that you wont go down easy eather,” and “weve already started fighting im shure youl hear about it in a bad way.[sic]” No one yet knows whether Rogers is acting alone.
Here’s another story I’ve been watching—which, like the foiled Minnesota terror plot, I only learned about from the good folks at Talking Points Memo, who are great on this stuff: “Chaos erupted outside the New Hampshire statehouse this week when pro-gun protesters showed up at a gun control rally—and one of them ended up getting zapped with a Taser and then arrested.”
Reading that scared me. Here’s why. Back in 2010, when the nascent Tea Party began rallying in public places, a legend was frequently seen on T-shirts and signs: “Molon Labe.” That means, “Come and get them,” or, literally, “Come and take”—a reference to the words of defiance supposedly spoken by King Leonidas when the Persian Army demanded Spartans surrender at Thermopylae. In the contemporary context it refers to the paranoid fantasy of gun nuts that liberals are out to disarm them. The words curl within them an implication of violent defiance—for instance as articulated on this lovely item. Shamefully, Senator Ted Cruz sent out a dog whistle to these folks at the Republican convention, in his keynote speech’s story of the Battle for the CIty of Gonzales: “When General Santa Ana demanded that they give up their guns and the cannon that guarded the city, they responded with the immortal cry, ‘Come and take it!” “
The “Molon Labe” mini-cult is cousin to the Tea Party practice of carrying weapons to political rallies. Both symbolic acts have the savor of wish-fulfillment—a macho fantasy akin to Black Panther discourse in the 1960s, in which a willingness to face down the pigs became proof of political manhood. It recalls the far-left longing during the same period to “heighten the contradictions”—to force violence in order to impel otherwise apathetic people to chose sides in what they hope will become an apocalyptic war. Thus my fear reading that tidbit from Manchester. I wonder if the next time a cop takes a taser to a pro-gun protester, one or more of them will unholster their arms and decide it’s go time. Together we can fight back they wont take me down with out a fight i hope that you wont go down easy either.
And what will happen next? Then, and only then, these simmering issues will enter the consciousness of the “news cycle”-sniffers. As for now, the name of the tasered firearm fan who was shouting down his Republican senator for daring to vote for background checks, John Cantin, didn’t make either the Post or the Times.
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Well, here’s an early warning. On July 4, a group calling itself the “Final American Revolution” (apocalyptic enough for you?) plans to march from where gun laws are lax, across the bridge to Washington, DC, where they are strict—to heighten the contradictions: maybe, just maybe, if we’re lucky, the cops will arrest us and the Final American Revolution can begin at long last!
On Facebook, 5,983 patriots have RSVP’ed. They have 4,961 “maybes.” Pray for peace. And pray that someone in the mainstream media will start paying attention.
[Late breaking update: the march has been cancelled—moved, the organizer promises, to state capitals instead: “This revolution has been brewing in the hearts and minds of the people for many years, but this Independence Day, it shall take a new form as the American Revolutionary Army will march on each state capital to demand that the governors of these 50 states immediately initiate the process of an orderly dissolution of the federal government through secession and reclamation of federally held property.” His name is Adam Kokesh. Remember it.]
Yes, guns are a right. But do they have to be?
More Questions for James Comey
James Comey. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
So now comes James Comey, the Republican former deputy attorney general almost certain to be confirmed as Obama’s next FBI chief. Some liberals are apparently poised to celebrate. Isn’t Comney the hero who stood up to President Bush and his attorney general and insisted they stop warrantless wiretapping?
Not so simple. As my colleague George Zornick documented three weeks ago, “warrantless surveillance didn’t stop because of that episode. Bush just agreed to make an as-yet-unknown modification to warrantless surveillance, which continued.” And as Glenn Greenwald explains, NSA’s warrantless spying wouldn’t have happened in the first place but for Comey—who as deputy attorney general “approved a legal memorandum in 2004 endorsing radical executive power theories and warped statutory interpretations, concluding that the Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program was legal.”
George Z. affixes a plea: “Comey’s nomination hearings are a great venue to press the administration on its failure to hold big financial firms accountable for demonstrable misconduct leading up to the 2008 collapse.” He quotes Senator Chuck Grassley, who offered some refreshingly un-Republican concern about Comey’s stint in the banking biz: “The administration’s efforts to criminally prosecute Wall Street for its part in the economic downturn have been abysmal, and his agency would have to help build the case against some of his colleagues in this lucrative industry.” (Funny how they finally find a conscience on this stuff when the administration is Democratic).
But senators shouldn’t just ask Comey about hedge funds (he went to work for one, Bridgewater Associates, in 2010). They should also ask him about revolving doors. Barely three months ago Comey joined the board of megabank HSBC, shortly after it agreed to pay a record $1.92 billion fine for serving as a conduit for laundered drug money from Mexico, among other sins. The company announced that Comey would be helping “oversee efforts to combat financial crime.” Another Bush administration official, Juan Zarate, a former deputy national security advisor, joined HSBC to help them clean house. And before Bridgewater, he served as general counsel for Lockheed Martin. He was general counsel when Lockheed was busy building Coast Guard vessels that weren’t waterproof and whose hulls buckled in high seas, ignoring the whistleblower who pointed all of that out. Senators, please ask James Comey this: What did you know about the the “Deepwater” scandal and when did you know it? Were you involved in the false claims settlement against whistleblower Michael DeKort? And more generally, how can federal law enforcement officials make independent judgements about prosecutions against companies that once employed them?
Something else they should inquire after? In 2004, after the Washington Post revealed the infamous Department of Justice “Bybee memo” authorizing torture, Comey was the one to announce its withdrawal, and directed the Office of Legal Council to draft a replacement policy. (See the extraordinary and neglected 600-page report of the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treetment, pages 166–170, for the full story). What were the specifics of the detainee policy that replaced the one laid out in the Bybee memo, and why did its legality satisfy him when the original policy did not?
They would also be derelict not to ask Comey about torture because he bore primary responsibility for a case in which torture, arguably, occurred. As I explained in 2011:
In May 2002, a 31-year-old Muslim convert named Jose Padilla was arrested without fanfare at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on his way back from Pakistan. A month later, with the sort of fanfare worthy of P.T. Barnum, Attorney General Ashcroft introduced Padilla to the public. “We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’” Ashcroft announced. This “unfolding terrorist plot” might have caused “mass death and injury.”
Now comes the most extraordinary part of the story—the one you likely do not know about at all. It fell to an obscure Chicago investigative journalist (and, full disclosure, a friend) named Lewis Z. Koch to address some reasonable questions the rest of the media failed to: What did it take to build a “radiological dispersion device”? Could a small-time street punk like Padilla do it? How dangerous would it have been if he could?
Koch’s findings were published in the January/February 2004 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where its 10,000 or so subscribers learned that in order for Jose Padilla to do what the government claimed he and his conspirators were prepared to do, they would have had to locate and move perhaps a metric ton of spent fuel rods, encasing them in a 40-ton lead-lined shipping cask. They would have needed sophisticated remote-handling equipment to build the device. What might their labors have amounted to? If unleashed “at evening rush hour on a business day” in a crowded urban center, according to Koch’s article, the weapon would cause “no immediate fatalities and fewer than three fatalities from latent cancer.”
When FBI chief Robert Mueller was asked in December 2002 whether his agency had really thwarted any actual attacks on U.S. soil, he mentioned Padilla and his “dirty bomb.” Soon after, however, the government dropped the dirty-bomb charge—in favor of an even more ridiculous claim: that Padilla planned to blow up high-rise buildings by turning on the gas in all the stoves and then setting off explosives….
For three and a half years, at a Navy brig—not in Guantanamo, not under rendition in Syria, not at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan but in Charleston, South Carolina—Padilla had been alternately interrogated and kept in a windowless nine-by-seven-foot cell, without visitors or, for almost two years, a lawyer. A forensic scientist who testified at a pretrial hearing called what happened during those interrogations “essentially the destruction of a human being’s mind.”
That entire outrage seems to have been largely James Comey’s responsibility. In a 2004 press conference, he claimed would tell “the full story of José Padilla,” to “allow the American people to understand the threat he posed, and also understand that the president’s decision [to prosecute Padilla as an “enemy combatant”] was and continues to be essential to the protection of the American people,” he was asked by an alert reporter about how he justified picking up Padilla in 2002 without any criminal charges, and his answer was Orwellian:
QUESTION: You said that if you had picked him up under criminal charges that he would have gotten a lawyer, would have clammed up and would have walked free. But couldn’t you have done what the Justice Department does thousands of times every year and offered him a plea agreement to work with you?
COMEY: All the time we offer plea agreements and people cooperate if we have a hammer over them. The challenge of the Padilla case, for me as the United States attorney, was the absence of a hammer. If I can’t credibly threaten criminal charges, no lawyer in the world is going to tell their client to talk to me, because a good lawyer would know, what I’m sure Mr. Padilla’s lawyers knew, that if you just clam up, they can’t do anything with this.
QUESTION: So does that suggest that possibly he was picked up too soon, because you didn’t have enough on him to pick him up on charges where you could actually bring criminal charges?
COMEY: I don’t think he was picked up too soon. I think it would have been derelict to allow him to come into the country and to hope to follow him.
We have a wonderful FBI and they follow people every day, and well. But only on TV do they do it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without losing someone.
And when you’re talking about someone bent on the kind of destruction, mass murder, that we’re talking about here, you simply can’t run that risk.
QUESTION: So at this point, you have no plans to present any of this to a grand jury?
COMEY: No, we do not have any plans to present this, the information I’ve given you today, to a grand jury. I don’t believe that we could use this information in a criminal case, because we deprived him of access to his counsel and questioned him in the absence of counsel.
This was done not to make—the questioning of José Padilla, something else I should point out, was not undertaken to try and make a criminal case against José Padilla. It was done to find out the truth about what he knew about Al Qaeda and threats to the United States.
We could care less about a criminal case when right before us is the need to protect American citizens and to save lives.
We’ll figure out down the road what we do with José Padilla. What the president wanted to do and what was done was find out what he knows, figure out how it links up with other things that we know and give us a picture of what the enemy’s planning.
Listen to him admitting that criminal charges don’t matter (“we could care less”) when you arrest “the enemy”—meaning this silly, stupid gang kid from the streets of Chicago. Note that when the Justice Department finally “figured out down the road what we do with José Padilla” the solution they arrived at was to accuse him of a conspiracy to break into high-rise buildings, systematically turn on every apartment’s stove and then, um, what? Light a match? For supposedly planning this nefariously cunning scheme he is now serving a seventeen-year sentence, based on basically no evidence at all.
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As Lew Koch reported from Padiall’s trial, “Ashcroft, then Comey…have built a case on fantasy, supposition, prejudice and fear mongering.” Ladies and gentlemen, your nation’s next chief law enforcement officer. A victory for bipartisanship, I suppose. For the Constitution, not so much. Senators: do your job.
In 2007, Naomi Klein wrote about the Padilla trial and system of US psychological torture.
The War on Whistleblowers: On the Sin of Being Correct
Did you know that in 2006 after the Coast Guard budgeted $24 billion to upgrade its fleet in the largest acquisition in its history the new boats turned out not to be waterproof? Or that the hulls buckled in high seas? And that, when the project manager for Lockheed Martin tried to point all this out to superiors, he was ignored—and then dismissed? And that the only way this all ever came to the attention to the public—first through the New York Times, then via 60 Minutes, which called it a “fiasco that has set new standards for incompetence”—was after the manager, whose name is Michael DeKort—posted a video on YouTube?
Did you know that Humvees, those military patrol vehicles that were all over Iraq, were never designed to withstand impact from Improved Explosive Devices? And that, because of this fact, over 60 percent of casualties in Iraq were from IUDs? But that the military did have access to vehicles, called Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles, that could have prevented virtually all those casualties, through such simple fixes as being raised higher off the ground? A science adviser for the Marines, Franz Gayl, suggested replacing Humvees with MRAPs. After nineteen months of delays, Gayl began working his way through channels to get some action, including alerting the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Do you know what happened next? He was told by a high Pentagon official, “Absolutely not. That cannot be allowed to go forward.” So he finally contacted Sharon Weinberger of Wired’s Danger Room blog, which published documents on the scandal; from there, both Senator Biden and USA Today ran with the story and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates credited the deployment, finally, of MRAPs with saving thousands of lives.
I didn’t know any of that. Or maybe I did. So many outrages passed through during the Bush years that it was tough to remember, or even register, all of them. But I know it now. I’ve seen Robert Greenwald’s new documentary, The War on Whistleblowers, and its stories are now seared into my political brain. Not least for what happened to these guys next. You can guess: DeKort was fired. Gayl was investigated, harassed and suffered an extended suspension of his security clearances, making it impossible for him to do his work. (He only saved his job thanks to the public campaign of the Project on Government Oversight.) In one particularly chilling line in the documentary, DeKort warns other potential whistleblowers not to do it unless you’re willing to take on the worst consequences you can imagine—if you’re not willing to “go 110 percent then don’t do it at all.”
Thomas Tamm knows. He’s the Justice Department attorney who revealed to The New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau—after trying and failing to interest the Pentagon inspector general and both houses of Congress’s select committees on intelligence—that the NSA was illegally listening in on phone calls without warrants. He returned home one day from taking his son to school and saw “that there were twelve cars parked all along one side of the street, one of them was blocking my driveway”—and eighteen federal agents, some in body armor, banging on the door, yelling at his wife in her bathrobe, then posting to preassigned spots, waking up his kids, taking personal papers and searching for “secret compartments.” Thomas Drake knows: the famous NSA whistleblower charged under the Espionage Act, against whom the federal case was dismissed after The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer profiled him (“I had to meet people in unmarked hotel rooms in order to get that story. It does not feel like America, land of the free press,” she says), has nonetheless burned through half his retirement savings and had to take out a second mortgage—all for the sin of being correct.
The sin of being correct is a theme of the piece. “I have found all too frequently the government claims the publication of certain information will harm national security,” we read onscreen in an affidavit from The New York Times’s James Risen, “when in reality, the government’s real concern is about covering up its own wrongdoing.” In fact, former Times executive editor Bill Keller says, “I think these stories have helped more than they’ve hurt national security”—and the Times’ David Carr notices a correlation between how secret information is supposed to be and how bad it is for the reputations of the people involved. Or their profits: “We talk about a national security state that’s interested in security,” Seymour Hersh says, ‘but in fact it’s interested in the security of corporate interests.”
And under Obama it’s been worse. That really sinks in watching The War on Whistleblowers. “I was very optimistic about hope and change coming in 2008,” we hear Thomas Tamm say. “I thought the Obama administration would actually say that I had done the right thing, that I had followed the law, and that we would even be honored to have you come back and work for the Department of Justice. In retrospect, how stupid and naive could I be?”
The War on Whistleblowers may not be as stylish as Alex Gibney’s Wikileaks documentary We Steal Secrets, out now in theaters. It’s better, though, at conveying the full context of the chokehold our national security state is exercising on our civic life. You can get a free copy on DVD if you stop in at Greenwald’s Brave New Foundation’s site—or donate what you can. You can also sign up to host a screening.
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