"Leadership PACs" - Political Action Committees...
... are the subject of Ken Silverstein's "Beltway Bacchanal: Congress Lives High On The Contributor's Dime" in the March issue of Harper's. The "Leadership" prefix refers to PACs that belong to individual senators and representatives, as opposed to "issue" PACs like AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "Issue" PACs raise money for causes and special interests and distribute contributions to friendly politicians, but "leadership" PACs exist solely to allow politicians to fund their own (and colleagues') campaign expenses. "Campaign," as Silverstein shows, is very loosely defined:
According to the Center for Responsive Politics (which helpfully provided much of the data for this article), at least eight House members spent more than $10,000 in campaign funds on food, travel, and fund-raising in the eight weeks between Election Day 2006 and New Year's Eve - not exactly a peak campaigning period.
That is, after the election was over. The amounts involved are stupendous: one back-bench Republican Congressman from Louisiana spent $18,000 per month on food, drinks, catering, and hotels over a three year period. A slew of high-priced steak houses in Washington depend on high-rolling politicians and their lobbyist friends (some are even owned by lobbyists) for their business (in the last two years, House members spent some $5.4 million "at just ten of Washington's priciest restaurants"). And much of the money stays "in the family," according to Silverstein:
Numerous lawmakers view their political funds as job programs for friends and family members, thus offering yet another means of enhancing their incomes and lifestyles. The wife and daughter of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay were paid several hundred thousand dollars to serve as his PAC's fund-raising and political consultants.
Okay, you say, what's new? Precisely - nothing is new. Congress has passed umpteen "reforms" to reign in on lobbying and largess, but there are handy loopholes: all of the dirty detail in Silverstein's and the CRP's data is on members of the House of Representatives; US Senators are exempt from electronic filing.
American Corruption Is "Clean"(i.e. Legal) - Foreign Corruption Is "Dirty" (Like in the Movies)
So why should you care? Only if you think that there might be a link between special interests funding campaigns and lavish lifestyles AND those same Congressional beneficiaries repaying the kindness through favorable legislation. In other countries, the United States labels such activity "corruption." In the US, it's called K Street (the Washington D.C. artery that houses lobbyists - or, as veteran influence-tracker Jeffrey Birnbaum called them in his book of the same title - The Money Men).
Some of these Money Men have actually been sent abroad to represent American presidents as US Ambassadors (not "goodwill" ambassadors on a UNICEF Christmas card mission, but the kind that represent the US among our most important allies - see ex-diplomat Pat Kushlis' excellent "Outsourcing US Ambassadorships" in her blog, Whirled View). How ironic, then, that the US spends lots of money through USAID, the World Bank, OECD, and other institutions to fight corruption in developing nations. Speaking of the World Bank, remember when ex-Bush Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had the temerity to push "anti-corruption" programs at the World Bank while his girlfriend got massive salary increases outside the usual procedures?
In development consulting circles, there's scads of money thrown at fighting corruption in countries where it's in-your-face (in Nigeria, the first thing that new arrivals see at the airport are posters proclaiming "Corruption Is The Death Of A Nation," an attempt to put travelers on their guard in a country that is often at the top - or is it the bottom? - of places where corruption is endemic). Just conjure up a picture of your typical film villain, holding out a greasy palm to allow the hero (probably American) to cross that foreign border post to freedom.
Ultimate irony: in 2000, the US Congress passed the "International Anti-Corruption And Good Governance Act." Stress should be placed on the operative word - "international." I guess that's a bit like the US condemnation of Iranian interference in Iraq (issued from the Green Zone headquarters of the US occupation forces?). Or US preaching to the world every year in its Human Rights Reports, where every country, including Sweden (but not the US), is critiqued for its treatment of prisoners...
To paraphrase the great Joseph Welch when he shamed Senator Joseph McCarthy, the world might ask the United States, "Have you no sense of irony?"