Third World America - Arianna Huffington [55]
But there is no need to worry about familial conflicts of interest anymore because, since leaving the Senate, Tom Daschle has moved over to the influence-peddling side of the street and made a bundle working as a “special policy adviser” at Alston & Bird, a lobbying firm that makes almost 50 percent of its income from health-care clients.92 Daschle, you’ll recall, came within a few unreported chauffeur-driven rides of being Obama’s health-care reform czar.93 Very cozy.
Daschle has also bolstered his personal bottom line doing lucrative side gigs, such as serving on the advisory board of BP.94 Hopefully he wasn’t the one who advised BP CEO Tony Hayward to try to calm fears about the ecological catastrophe facing the Gulf of Mexico by saying that the spill was “relatively tiny” compared to the “very big ocean,” or who advised BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg to refer to those affected by the spill as “the small people.”95
DÉJÀ WHO?
Have you noticed how the same names keep popping up again and again? It makes it seem as if establishment Washington is the political equivalent of a small theatrical repertory company: production after production, you always see the same actors—they just keep switching parts.
Tom Daschle is a senator, then a near–cabinet member overseeing health-care reform, then a “special adviser” to companies looking to undermine health-care reform.96
Robert Rubin is co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, then secretary of the Treasury, then a senior counselor of Citigroup—pocketing more than $126 million in cash and stock during his almost ten years there.97
Dick Cheney is a congressman, then secretary of defense, then CEO of Halliburton, then the most powerful vice president in history—helping lead America into a war with Iraq that ends up netting his former company billions in sweetheart contracts.98 During the Bush-Cheney years, Halliburton became the poster child for crony capitalism, which is why it was both surprising and utterly predictable when the company came roaring back into the headlines during the BP oil spill fiasco.
It’s like one of those horror movie killers who keeps popping back up from the grave. You thought Halliburton had been eradicated when government audits showed the company had bilked taxpayers out of a billion dollars during the war in Iraq?99 You thought it was over when the Justice Department brought a civil fraud suit against a Halliburton subsidiary in 2010 for charging the government for tens of millions in unauthorized security services in Iraq?100 You thought reports that Halliburton had allowed U.S. troops to bathe in contaminated water had left them dead and buried?101 Well, they’re baaa-aaack! And their work sealing the bottom of the BP oil well will very likely be found to be at least a contributing factor in the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon blowout.102
Doing a segment on Halliburton’s involvement with the BP disaster—including the fact that, after taking office, Cheney restaffed the Minerals Management Service with what Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., called “oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies”—MSNBC’s Chris Matthews couldn’t contain his indignation.103 “How do we stop this?” he sputtered.104 “It seems like a Third World banana republic would do things this way!”
Third World America … it’s closer than you think.
POWERBROKERS 2.0
These are the new breed of movers and shakers. Powerbrokers 2.0. Public shape-shifters, they effortlessly glide in and out and around government. They can be found on both sides of the ideological aisle—serving their own agendas more than either party’s. Janine Wedel calls them “flexians”: “top players who move in and out of government, corporate, and think tank roles, gathering exclusive information at each stop, and using that privileged asset to benefit themselves and their allies.”105 The members of this shadow elite keep morphing into their next incarnation no matter how often their conflicts of interest and their undermining of the public good are revealed.
With this merging