Empires Apart (75 page)

Corporations in America have long provoked controversy. The first major scandal of the twenty-first century was Enron, where hundreds of millions of dollars of phoney profits were manufactured in a series of fraudulent accounting transactions, leading to lengthy prison sentences for a few corrupt oligarchs and penury for thousands of honest investors. What was remarkable about this scandal, apart from its sheer scale, was its insight into the tightening grip of corporatism on the levers of American democracy. No corporation in America's history had spent so much on political lobbying in so short a time: Bush II himself is on public record as having received $572,000. It was shocking for everyone, both inside and outside government, when Enron's leadership was ultimately revealed as corrupt. Governments around the world were ‘encouraged' to privatise public utilities and sell them to Enron, both in America's traditional fiefdoms, for example Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Panama and the Philippines, and further abroad – in Argentina, India and Mozambique. Financing for these deals was provided directly by the US government (over $3bn) or indirectly by the World Bank. $23bn of overseas revenues flowed into Enron's coffers.

Scandals like Enron are the froth on the surface of the everyday world of corporatist politics in the United States. In the ten years before the
Enron scandal corporations legitimately donated $1.08bn in campaign contributions. (By way of comparison, the World Bank listed twenty-seven countries that had a GDP of less than this amount.)

At the same time that Putin was reining back the power of Russia's oligarchs the US Supreme Court was moving the other way. In 2006 it ruled as unconstitutional Vermont state legislation that attempted to limit the power of money to influence elections. The Constitution, it declared, prohibited any attempt to limit the amount of money candidates could spend on their election campaigns: an assertion that would undoubtedly have shocked many of the Founding Fathers, whose idea of democracy was formed in simpler times.

American corporations clothe oligarchy in the robes of democracy. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the Political Action Committees created by major corporations to fund political campaigns. Managers are instructed to persuade their staff to donate (after setting good examples themselves) in highly public gestures of apparent support for the political agenda of top management – for the other feature of this exercise in ‘democracy' is the complete absence of any internal democracy. Although labelled committees, they are run entirely by senior management.

There is sometimes a fine line between corporate lobbying and corruption, but many countries have cases of corruption on a far larger scale than the United States. In Russia the Muscovite system of civil servants feeding off the rest of the population, kormlenie, which would now be regarded as blatant corruption, was for many years the bedrock on which effective government was built, and it has left its mark on Russian political culture to this day. Lying politicians are everywhere, and often the lies are blatant: the British general election of 1924 was determined in large part by the fears of Bolshevik revolution, stirred up by publication of an inflammatory letter from the Russian official Zinoviev, a letter later shown to be a forgery.

What has characterised American politics since the 1830s, and what differentiates it from politics in, for example, much of north-west Europe, is not that lies and corruption exist but the more or less resigned acceptance of their existence. The total corruption of political life in
many large cities, starting with the control of New York's Tammany Hall by the Irish mafia, continued well into the twentieth century, with the election of John Kennedy in 1960 being aided by the manipulative skills of Richard Daley's Chicago political machine. Although there is no question of corruption or malpractice President Bush's opponents have alleged that his election in 2000 was similarly indebted to the Florida machine of his brother Jeb and that, as in Kennedy's case, partisan control of the judiciary made it impossible for the losers to successfully contest the result. His supporters would, of course, hotly deny this.

In Britain, campaigns based on deliberate fabrication by politicians are rare (the Zinoviev letter was a media scare almost certainly initiated by rogue officers in the security services, albeit soon exploited by politicians for their own ends). In the United States, on the other hand, since Andrew Jackson there has been a widespread assumption that politicians cannot be trusted (or perhaps more accurately a belief that whether politicians are honest or dishonest is not critically important), and a willingness of many in political circles to do far more than elaborate on the truth. Recent revelations that almost all the details of the Whitewater property scandal, in which President Clinton was supposedly implicated, had simply been made up by his opponents have gone almost unnoticed in the United States. It is unfair to push the argument too far; the morality of political life in the US today is not significantly better or worse than in, for example, Italy. The difference is that Italy does not purport to be leading a moral crusade to bring freedom and democracy to the rest of the globe.

Outright corruption is probably less prevalent in the United States than in many other parts of the western world, and where bribery is found it is usually rooted out. FBI director Robert Mueller reported in 2006 that around 500 government employees per year were convicted of corruption. Nevertheless the principles of the spoils system remain central to American political thinking. Leading supporters are often rewarded with ambassadorships and other public appointments. Legislators also reward themselves: congressional election results show that an amazing 97 per cent of those sitting members who stand for
re-election are successful. This success rate is not because of the popularity of contemporary politicians but because of an eighteenth-century Massachusetts governor named Eldridge Gerry. Gerry was no friend of democracy. At the 1787 convention that drafted the US Constitution he opposed popular elections, declaring that ‘the evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy'. (More wittily he opposed the creation of a large peacetime army by comparing a standing army to a man's standing member, ‘an excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure'.) He soon found ways of avoiding the evils of excess democracy by skilfully drawing constituency boundaries to his own advantage, in one case producing a constituency that resembled nothing as much as a salamander or, as it was dubbed, a gerrymander. Gerrymandering is now a fundamental part of US politics. In 2003 the Republican-controlled legislature in Texas redrew constituency boundaries to give itself six extra seats in the US Congress. When Democrats took this gerrymandering to court the response of Texan Republicans, supported by the Bush administration, was not to deny gerrymandering but rather to argue that there was nothing unconstitutional about redrawing boundaries for pure partisan advantage. To the victor belongs the spoils. It is assumed to be natural that those with power will use it for their own benefit. This applies as much to the law as it does to politics.

The assertion that American government is uniquely just rests on the impartiality of its judicial process. The US is famed for the way that nothing appears to be incapable of legal redress. Justice may sometimes seem absent but the law is omnipresent; legality is the benchmark against which all actions can be measured. The rule of law is fundamental to the way the United States functions as a nation. It is, however, largely irrelevant to the way it functions as an empire.

An example of this double standard emerged in investigations into the Iran Contra affair, in which the CIA funded the Contra terrorists
in Nicaragua not only with funds from the Shah of Iran but with the proceeds of cocaine smuggling. Despite the near-universal illegality of drug smuggling, it emerged that the CIA had sought and received prior authority from the US attorney general: imperial adventures in Central America were deemed more important than obeying other people's laws, even when those laws were identical to America's own.

Throughout the nineteenth century the United States fought war after war to extend its frontiers, culminating in the Spanish American War of 1898 which brought with it 45 square miles of foreign soil that the US decided to hang on to: an enclave where, it is alleged, international law and human rights have no place – Guantanamo Bay.

Whether or not people were tortured at Guantanamo Bay is hotly debated, but the subject of torture itself gave rise to a particularly tortuous demonstrations of US legal reasoning. On 11 October 2002 the US army declared that the 1984 Convention on Torture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights – all international conventions banning torture and signed up to by the United States – did not apply to the US military. US forces could carry on torturing people at Guantanamo because they were governed only by US domestic law. As leading international lawyer Philippe Sands puts it, ‘Can you imagine how the US would react if another country tortured an American and defended it by saying “Oh, terribly sorry, but the international treaty we signed up to which prohibits torture isn't enforceable in our domestic law, so we don't have to apply it”?'

In 2006 the Associated Press news agency used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain 5,000 pages of transcript of military court hearings at the Guantanamo Bay prison. In one exchange a British prisoner quotes international law to demand the right to hear the evidence against him (a right that, incidentally, is normally present under American law); a US Air Force colonel angrily responds with the words, ‘I do not care about international law. I do not want to hear the words international law. We are not concerned about international law.'The comments of one rogue officer do not constitute official policy, but they do illustrate an
important strand of American imperial thought: international standards are for governing the rest of the world; they do not apply to the imperial power itself.

Sands catalogues a long list of international conventions and treaties that the United States has flouted or opted out of. Many examples are famous – the Kyoto Accord, the treaty to eliminate landmines, the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention – but there are far more of interest only to specialists. A typical example concerns a protocol attached to the 1963 Vienna Convention on the arcane subject of consular access to foreign prisoners. The US was a leading advocate of the protocol and was one of the first to benefit when it successfully sued the Iranian government over access to the Americans held hostage in Tehran in 1979. In 2004, however, it was the United States that was successfully sued, by Mexico. To avoid the same thing happening again the US simply withdrew from the treaty.

The United States is not unique in this regard. Soviet Russia set a precedent in 1930 when an international arbitration tribunal awarded the British company Lena Goldfields £13m plus interest after the Soviet government revoked its concession to mine gold in the Urals and Siberia. Stalin simply abandoned the arbitration and refused to accept the award.

It is not merely that the US opts out of commitments when its interests are threatened but that it rejects the principle that it should ever be subject to enforceable internationally accepted standards. The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child is a statement of principle that in the fifteen years after its establishment was ratified by 192 countries. Only two refused to do so: Somalia and the US.

Dissident academic Noam Chomsky argues in
Failed States
that the US follows a principle of ‘self-exemption' from international legal standards. He cites the Geneva Convention as an example of a standard that the US expects others to follow but from which it exempts itself, as its seizure of Fallujah General Hospital showed. He quotes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's assertion that international judicial processes have ‘proven inappropriate for the United States' and that generally the
US is not to be subject to ‘international laws and norms'. Some care needs to be taken not to pursue this argument too far. Polls have shown that a large majority of Americans favoured signing the Kyoto Accord and accepting the International Criminal Court; Chomsky argues that the refusal to accept international legal standards reflects political and business interests rather than the popular will. Nevertheless there is a popular assumption that Americans warrant a different legal standard.

In January 2006 American newspapers reported the trial of Lewis Welshofer Jr, who had killed a man by stuffing him head-first into a sleeping bag and then sitting on him. There were interviews with Welshofer's anguished wife pleading on behalf of their three children that he not be sent to prison. Her pleas were heard:Welshofer was merely fined $6,000. By American standards such a sentence was extraordinarily lenient, but this was no ordinary murder. Welshofer was an army officer serving in Iraq, and his victim was an Iraqi army general. There were no interviews with the victim's anguished family.

American law is intended primarily to protect Americans and their interests. Commercial law works to protect American commercial interests. This was perfectly illustrated in the case of the Vietnamese catfish, reported in the
Financial Times
in 2007. Lawyers acting for US fish farmers successfully argued that Vietnamese catfish, although genetically very close, were in fact a totally different fish to American catfish and therefore could not be sold in the US as catfish. The Vietnamese responded by adopting a new name (catfish in Vietnamese), and successfully resumed exports. US producers then used the same lawyers to successfully argue the exact reverse of what they had claimed before, namely that the two sorts of catfish were really just the same, and import tariffs should therefore be levied to avoid ‘unfair' price competition.