Open thread for night owls: The corporatization of politics

The primary lesson of the Libor scandal'the discovery that top banking institutions engaged in, to be terse, price-fixing at the top, most global levels of the economy'seems to be that we should simply presume that all banking institutions are engaging in crooked behavior, all the time, unless explicitly proven otherwise. That has been the lesson of all the recent scandals, in fact. Thanks to the careful dismantling of post-Depression regulation, there is already a great raft of things that unethical banks can get away with legally; as we have seen, though, even that isn't enough for the captains of finance.

Digby sez, specifically about Mitt Romney's refusal to release any more detailed information about how he made his money, where he parks it, what taxes he does or does not pay on it, etc:

It didn't used to be considered ethical to "game" the system just because you could. Yes there have always been game players. But leaders and statesmen were not supposed to be among them. Indeed, until recently "game players" were held in disrepute. [...]

[I]f you cannot count on the leaders at the top to have some sense of ethical boundaries beyond explicit legal constraints, you have a problem and a big one. We're already dealing with the fallout from our elastic definition of war since 9/11 and the stretching of norms that came during the torture regime. (Today it's, "well, assassinations are better than torture, right? Killing happens in war all the time.") Now we're seeing a presidential candidate and his supporters babble like Wall Street pirates about the tax system being a "game" (with the winners presumably being the ones who can get away with paying the least.) This is the sickness at the core of elite American life. The winners are, by definition, the ones who get away with the most.

I'm not sure I remember a time when the titans of industry and banking, as a group, ever shied away from gaming whatever system needed gaming. While local businessmen have historically tended towards more upstanding behavior (possibly because having to deal with your neighbors directly, after screwing them, does not lend itself to a long or prosperous life), the largest business institutions have almost always held to the rule that they are allowed to do whatever they are allowed to do, and more to the point, they are also allowed to do all the things they are not allowed to do so long as they don't get caught. Or so long as the repercussions for doing so are less significant than the profits to be made.

What seems to have happened of late is that more of that behavior has, for perhaps obvious reasons, shifted into the political sphere. Political figures who seem to care honestly about helping their communities, as opposed to ones merely willing to pay lip service to the premise, are more often considered sentimentalists or rubes. There used to at least be the rosy premise that some of the people seeking to lead government would be in it to make America a better place, but the definition of better place now consists almost entirely of what the same captains of finance and industry (a.k.a., the crooks, as per above) believe would make it better. It isn't just notions of caring for the poor and the sick that are now scoffed at as socialistic functions of government; even re-paving community roads is met with skepticism and hostility. And in Congress, the standard of behavior has steadily declined from the level of what should be done to what is the lowest level that can be gotten away with. The hostage-taking over the debt ceiling was an institutional example; dear Rep. Joe Wilson shouting You lie! at the president of the United States during a State of the Union speech was a personal one. There was never any legal requirement that representatives refrain from shouting things at the president during a speech, but a general social decorum was in place that said if you did such a thing, your peers would at the least be angry with you.

Super PACs are another fine example. They exist at all because ethical restraints on the role of business in elections were loosened. The rules on them are scant, and even those are all but ignored: Nobody with any integrity above that of common crook can seriously claim that American Crossroads is an issue-based advocacy group, and not one focused on helping specific candidates in very specific races. Where once we were told that corporate spending in campaigns would be countered by the disapprobation those corporate entities received from the public, thus providing counterbalance to any institution that attempted undue or exceptional influence in campaigns, we are now told that we are not even allowed to know which companies those are. They are not legally obliged to tell us, and anyone citing an ethical reason is quickly rebutted with the very specific reminder that no, they are not legally obliged to tell us.

It is the Wall Streetification of politics. We were told that government should be run more like a business, and in the standards of behavior, the manipulations of events, and the general running of the show for the benefit of the elected "executive class," not the powerless shareholders, we are receiving exactly that. Given the steady trading of personnel between government, banking titans, other industry titans and the lobbyist class that provides for a luxurious halfway house between the two, it would seem obvious that the two institutions would begin sharing more and more behavioral and ethical quirks and, indeed, begin to share the same motives.

As for the Libor scandal itself, the vast scale of the economic damage involved (and how easily it was accomplished, and how perfectly reasonable it appears to have seemed to all involved parties, at the time) is difficult to comprehend. It seems a rather difficult thing to even level fines against, if all the allegations are proved. Instead it seems to suggest that only a corporate death sentence can possibly put an end to the excesses of an entire financial generation so devoid of ethics as to be, at this point, irredeemable. Previously socialist notions like breaking the large banks into pieces, or restoring post-Depression regulations against the mixing of true banks and glorified gambling institutions, now seem the only possible path to take. We cannot simply start decapitating our moral-less upper class, French Revolution-style, but we can certainly decapitate the institutions that allow them to make great deals of money in ways that explicitly (and often gleefully) harm all the rest of us. The big banks have essentially been putting arsenic in our economic drinking water'and no matter how often they are caught, or what the damages have been, they have kept doing it. It simply must stop.

As for the same vultures in government, that is an even more difficult proposition. Removing their food supply (corporate electioneering, post-career financial rewards in industry, and the like) would seem the only solution, but the New Constitution, as interpreted by our recent courts, seems to assert that politicians have more right to money than poor Americans have to food. Whether it is ethical is not the issue. Whether it is even legal is not the issue. The only moral issue considered by our new political business class is what can be done without getting caught.

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