New Orleans The corruption indictment on a bunch of nasty counts of bribes, influence peddling, and campaign finagling didn’t come as a surprise to read in the Times. For daily readers, it seemed like one shoe after another was dropping around him and had been doing so for a good part of his term, accelerating to an avalanche of investigations and resignations in recent days. We are big fans on a professional and personal level of the bureau chief for the Times at City Hall. We didn’t have any inside information, nor did we ask for it, but we knew she had been like a dog on a bone making sure there was still accountability by Mayor Adams and his administration. If there was something fishy going on, it was going to come out, and now after a lengthy investigation it hit the whole gang like a ton of bricks. In something of a Trump replay, the Times is calling for the Mayor’s resignation, and he is standing on the classic playbook for now that he will fight it and prove his innocence.
This was one of those occasions where too many stars were lining up to make the whole mess predictable. I had just read and interviewed Ciara Torres-Spelliscy about her new book, Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians, on Wade’s World. The constant role of corporations to win favor and gain advantage doesn’t lead to corruption charges on a daily basis, but the professor made it clear that there’s a through line in American and world history where capitalism’s lack of any moral compass other than profit makes their role in public affairs fraught and bending towards the venal. Put susceptible, fast dealing, and like-minded politicians in the same mixing bowl with big companies with deep pockets on the prowl, and the results are likely going to combust into corruption. These days, the fine line that former President Trump walks between personal gain and ethics has also blurred the line for public figures and our political life.
Torres-Spelliscy starts her investigation not at the notoriously corrupt Harding administration in the 1920s and the Teapot Dome scandal in Wyoming, where oil companies were being allowed to tap the federal oil reserve, but in Germany. In excruciating detail, she documents how major corporations, many of them still common names in business and industry today, embraced Adolph Hitler and his plans to eliminate democracy. When the National Socialist Party was near bankruptcy, major corporations were pulled together by Hitler to keep the party afloat, even as he told them categorically that his plans were to gut the political system. Tragically, they embraced the plan and put up the money to make it happen.
All that may seem like ancient history these days, but Corporatocracy starts this way in order to shake us up to see that the current dark money and corporate role is as dangerous now, as it was then. One chapter after another makes the case, whether its prison leasing schemes, not much different that the slave labor of concentration camps, or direct bribes and the quickness at which US corporations abandoned their pledges not to support the Congressional Sedition Caucus that abetted the January 6th and election denial efforts.
Where’s there’s money, there may be mayhem polluting our public life. There doesn’t seem to be much of an effort to rein all of this in, so stories like those involving Trump and New York’s Mayor Adams could become routine, if we don’t get a grip.