Washington Babylon. - book reviews

Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein, Washington Babylon (New York: Verso, 1996) $17.00 paper. 316 pp.

For those who subscribe to their newsletter Counterpunch, the vigorous writing of Cockburn and Silverstein will be no surprise. That journal, like Washington Babylon, is filled with exposures of what most of us on the left suspect, and of what we could find between the lines of our daily press (if we knew how to look). The tragedy is that too few of us can pay the scrupulous attention paid by the authors, who produce in Washington Babylon a directory of corruption among the U.S. power elite and its minions. The six chapters of Washington Babylon lake us from the media ("Babel's Tongues"), to the Congress, the lobbyists' world, the Pentagon ("Pork Central"), the green establishment, and the Presidency. We are treated to small but illuminating facts (that Cokie Roberts' brother is Tommy Boggs, Washington's top fundraiser for the Democrats and lobbyist for the insurance, legal, and other interests), as well as big and illuminating facts (the relationship of the oil monopolies and the green foundations), and along the way we learn quite a bit about the American Empire. For this, Washington Babylon deserves to be widely read.

The gem of the book is the first chapter, on the media. This has much to do with the authors' profession and obsession, but it deserves its leading place so as to leave no doubt as to why we have never heard the tale of gross corruption that is to follow. Washington Babylon lays out the reasons for the media's silence, and it should be no surprise that those reasons are the very corruption it fails to report. Cockburn and Silverstein detail the way that the U.S. super rich interconnect with the ultra-right to create think tanks that hand out cash to favored publicists (such as the Coors'-funded Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the American Defense Institute) and to fund the production and slick marketing of books by right-wing academics (such as Olin's support for Allan Bloom and Irving Kristol). Finally, we are led to appreciate the effects of editorial engineering of the news in the joint interests of entertainment and right-wing consensus. One product is a cultural callousness: between 1991 and 1993, as the Rwanda crisis gathered, the press concentrated its attention on endangered Rwandan mountain apes rather than on the accelerating bloodbath that enveloped that nation.

"Public service" at the command of the largest concentrations of money, is corruption. But this basic fact the media simply cannot take on board. There have been moments when this structural hypocricy of the American Way has been recognized: "the relationship between money and politics is so organic that seeking reform is tantamount to asking a doctor to perform open-heart surgery on himself" (Newsweek, December 13, 1971). But this is the way it has been since at least the first administration of Ulysses Grant in 1869. It was no secret to President Grover Cleveland who in 1884 noted that "no harm shall come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy as long as I am President ... a transfer of executive control from one party to another does not mean any serious disturbance of existing conditions." It didn't and it doesn't. Cleveland was beholden to John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, to William Whitney and his New York City streetcar and real estate interests, to Carnegie's steel interests, and to the bankers and bond dealers of Wall Street where he was to retire to a comfortable law practice on leaving the Presidency. For Clinton the list is a bit different, but not much.

A century after Cleveland, barons such as Dwayne Andreas of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), a $13 billion agro-industrial firm, provide the bulk of the cash to keep the political canaries singing. Andreas' career of corruption began with the Republicans (notably Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President or--one of the truly great Washington acronyms of our time--CREEP), but in 1994 he raised over $2.5 million for the Democrats. ADM controls about seventy percent of the U.S. ethanol market and it benefits from a $2 billion public subsidy. In October 1996 ADM reached an agreement with the Justice Department to pay $100 million in fines for fixing the prices of lysine and citric acid, but was left scot free on the charge of fixing the price of high fructose corn syrup. The latter is a $3 billion product, and if the government had pursued the antitrust remedies for ADM's corn syrup price fixing, the fine would have been very much greater.

Instead, the United States opted for the lesser infractions and gave ADM immunity from further prosecution. A similar deal was struck with the tobacco industry, who plied many millions into Congressional coffers in a splendidly bipartisan manner. These tales are typical. Washington Baby/on details the shenanigans of many others, such as the cash lubricated relationship of Arkansas chicken parts magnate Don Tyson and the Clintons, the slimy friends and deals of Clinton's former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, the ties of the Enron Corporation with Treasury Secretary Rubin, and other links through which great wealth runs the American system.

Of course, at moments "everyone" talks about reform of "campaign finance" and "everyone" is in favor of it. But the plutocracy has nothing to worry about. When a campaign finance stink arose in the last weeks before the 1996 election, the media didn't train its guns on the great corporations and the reins of cash by which they run Washington, but on "Asians." Without doubt the $1 million donated by James Riady's Lippo Group to the Democrats could tell us lots about Babylon's intimate links to such thugs, closely associated with that old U.S. friend and mass murderer, Suharto of Indonesia. In the CIA-backed coup of 1965 Suharto oversaw the slaughter of more than one-half million people, then initiated the looting of natural resources that has made his family worth over $25 billion and left Indonesia in a state of eco-disaster. Gabriel Kolko tells us that "no single American action after 1945 was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia," (Confronting the Third World, p.188).

Washington Babylon recounts the links between the U.S. Capitol and the murderous plunder of Indonesia. Freeport McMoRan, represented in Washington by Henry Kissinger, has extracted enormous wealth in Indonesian gold and copper, and in logging operations in precious rain forests. The company operates private armies in the area of its highly polluling operations, and executes its opponents. Kissinger is a fitting Freeport McMoRan representative. While he headed the State Department, Indonesia was given the green light to invade East Timor, leading to the massacre of an estimated 200 thousand opponents of the Jakarta regime. Kissinger was in Jakarta on December 7, 1975, the day before the invasion, and he told the press in July 1995 that since he was a global player, he didn't have time for "a little speck" like East Timor. Washington Babylon lists some of Suharto's special Washington friends: Democrats such as Inouye, Feinstein, J. Bennet Johnson, Republicans like Alan Simpson, and bureaucrats like the Pentagon's Stanley Roth. But the links between the U.S. Capitol (and U.S. capital) and the obscenity of recent Indonesian history were not what was exposed by the campaign finance stories. Instead the stories played to a further obscenity, racism directed against Asian Americans. This blowback of CIA-generated murder, wealth, and ecocide into U.S. politics is most excellently set out by Cockburn and Silverstein.

The cover of the paperback edition carries a quote from the Village Voice, declaring it as "down and dirty muckraking." In many ways Washington Babylon is within the muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair (on the meatpacking industry), Ida Tarbell (on Standard Oil), and Lincoln Steffens (on City Hall). There is one premise it shares with the tradition and another it does not. The difference is that the writers of the early 1900s believed that under the muck one could find a pristine, arcadian American ready and able to set things right; Cockburn and Silverstein have traveled too deeply into the depths of the imperial corruption of our times to believe in such an American Dream. For them, the United States has long since been captured by the dominant class of the corporate super rich, whose publicists have reduced the Dream to a high-tech commercial. But the one thing Washington Babylon nonetheless appears to share with the muckrakers is an apparent belief that the revelation of truth by itself will suffice. There is no discussion of what might be the roots for a rebellion against corruption, nor is there any assessment of the way forward. The danger is that what might instead be inspired is but the solitary burden of cynicism. The book ends with a note of weariness and we are left to feel the weight of Leviathan. I suppose it is for this reason that the authors choose to invoke Babylon, the place of absolute evil.

The problem for a Marxist reader is that the book is without any elaborated sense of the contradictions of the system or of everyday political life. It describes, but does not sufficiently explain. Anger and disgust at the monstrous corruption of imperial Washington is only a starting point; and we do need to start.

Vijay Prashad, is assistant professor in International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford Coneticat who last appeared in Monthly Review October 1994.

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