Biped hogs

The news that another member of our bloated City Council has been indicted on corruption charges will elicit a ho-hum from anyone over 8 years of age, especially those inclined to think that ‘politics’ is nothing more than organized pilfering and that all ‘politicians’ are crooks and thieves. (This appellation for some reason is never applied to unelected heads of state like kings and military dictators . . . but I digress.)

The incident raises a chronic inquiry of mine especially as I am running through Season 6 of The Sopranos on DVD and observing the fascinating putrefaction of that gaggle of social parasites as they prepare to consume each others’ rotting flesh in the last few episodes. But taken as a clan, they seem just slightly more unsavory than the cabals running most countries most of the time. What makes them criminals and the usual party stalwarts guarantors of democracy especially given how closely they seem to work together?

We have a double standard about the whole notion of ‘corruption’ just as we do with things like ‘government spending’, wherein dubious acts whose benefits that trickle down directly to us are considered more or less forgivable while those that don’t are labeled ‘stealing’. Electoral politics, after all, is a way to organize competing social interests so that there is some orderly procedure involved in divvying up the goods and spreading the benefits around enough to keep the peace.

Some operators within any political system will be cleverer than others at shepherding the collective resources towards their clan and, depending on the extant rules, may even avoid prison. If so, they get their names on public property from post offices to trash cans and can retire from their elective office to take up ‘consulting’, another form of legalized payoffs.

When the local rainmaker gets sent up for pocketing cash—such as this typical Queens pol/graft recipient—loyalists are inevitably quick to point out all the good things he brought to the community, along with his prison record. Not long ago, liberal Connecticut reelected the loathsome Joe Lieberman based on his skill at hauling military weapons contracts back from Washington to the state, yet another example of how the buttering of the bread trumps other niceties.

All the fawning over the late Congressman John Murtha from Pennsylvania—who dared call for the Iraq war to end—has studiously avoided reference to his deep immersion in the dubious waters of Washington influence-peddling and his extremely close call with an Abscam indictment in the 1980s after he refused a bribe ‘for now’. Murtha argued that he was just trying to bring job-creating investment to his district, and the FBI entrapment scheme illustrated how hard it is to delineate between honest deal-making and payoffs, fair contract bidding and scales-tipping graft.

The Russians and Chinese have devised a particularly insidious form of pyramidal capitalism that protects the powerful by making bribery and tax evasion essential for getting anything at all done, then holding the ‘illegal’ acts over the heads of those who fail to do the bidding of the top guys. For example, China is now prosecuting executives from the Australia-based Rio Tino Zinc company for some alleged naughtiness in the midst of ‘heated’ negotiations over raw materials contracts. Tony S would approve.

It all leaves the question of how to organize the use of our collective wealth in such a way as to benefit the majority instead of a few sharpies. On that score, none of our sophisticated systems have discovered how to overcome biped greed and the limitless perversity that it awakens.