Corruption at the Core: Bill Moyers talks with Sarah Chayes (1)
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. You may have seen the jaw-dropping news this week that some $2 trillion dollars – yes, two trillion dollars – poured through America's financial system to fund criminal activity over the past 20 years. Yet unnamed sources leaked the documents to BuzzFeed News which shared the information with other publications; you can check the full story at The Guardian.org., which reports that one of the named suspects is Paul Manafort, President Trump's campaign manager in 2016. The story broke just as we were about to release the interview Bill Moyers conducted with Sarah Chayes on her new book ON CORRUPTION IN AMERICA. As a prizewinning reporter for NPR Chayes covered France, Europe, North Africa the Kosovo war, and the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, She stayed to help rebuild the country, running a soap factory and founding a farmers' cooperative, among other things. After serving as a senior adviser to two U.S. field commanders and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff she took off to examine the roots of corruption in several far-flung countries. You'll find the name Sarah Chayes on three acclaimed books, including the latest, ON CORRUPTION IN AMERICA. Here is Bill Moyers with Sarah Chayes.
BILL MOYERS: Sarah Chayes, it's good to see you again.
SARAH CHAYES: Such a pleasure, Bill.
BILL MOYERS: You know, I have tracked you for a long time.
SARAH CHAYES: Yes, sir.
BILL MOYERS: And it's just been interesting to watch your life and your work bring you to this moment. And I know you have been working for a decade now to fight corruption in countries like Nigeria and Afghanistan and now the United States. You say corruption is the defining issue of what is happening in this country. Why did you take this on?
SARAH CHAYES: I didn't intend to work on corruption in Afghanistan. It was Afghans who came to me. This was the most important thing that was disrupting their lives. And to them spelled failure of the stated US mission to help birth a reasonably just, equitable government there in which the population would have a say in their collective destiny. Afghans were telling me, but look at how this government that you people are supporting is treating us. And so I came, quite quickly, to recognize that this issue is what was driving people back into the arms of the Taliban.
BILL MOYERS: Corruption was driving them?
SARAH CHAYES: Corruption. And so, what I did was go to a variety of different countries and found that corrupt government was driving just about every world crisis you could name, including the environmental crisis, including mass migration, including a lot of civil strife. So, I felt as though focusing on anything else is almost derivative.
BILL MOYERS: What you found was that people were indignant at their own government's corruption, and America's role in enabling it.
SARAH CHAYES: That is exactly correct. We are living in an unprecedented period of indignation against systemic corruption. Unprecedented. If I named all of the revolutions around the world, you know, it would take the rest of our hour, including the Arab Spring, including Ukraine, including South Korea, including Lebanon repeatedly, including a variety of Latin American countries. And there is a systemically corrupt government in all of the Gulf nations, but certainly Saudi Arabia. And we have been married, the United States has been married to enabling and reinforcing the Saudi Arabian government for decades. And yet I have rarely seen an example of a genuine reformer capitalizing on the indignation to bring the country in question to a more just and equitable situation governed by public integrity first. Instead I find that demagogues or the kleptocratic network itself almost everywhere are gaining the benefit of these reactions.
BILL MOYERS: You say in ON CORRUPTION IN AMERICA: AND WHAT IS AT STAKE, “It's not an isolated scandal or even a whole stack of them. It's the operating system of sophisticated and astonishingly successful kleptocratic networks.” And you compare these networks to the Hydra – the creature with the body of a serpent and eight mortal heads and a ninth head that was immortal and lived forever. Why the Hydra?
SARAH CHAYES: We're going back to mythology or sacred stories. So, the Hydra is an analogy for these networks for two important reasons. One is: those heads appear to be separate snakes. When you look at one or look at the other, it's a very scary snake doing its own thing, but they're joined to a single body. So, it really helped illustrate the idea that it's not one individual or one actor doing something wrong. Rather, they're acting to the benefit of this larger network. And we should never forget that as much as we have to look at, how did this individual benefit from his or her political office? How did Ivanka Trump? How did Mr. DeJoy? How did, you know– what we do have to bear in mind is that the transactional nature of the wrongful acts is not necessarily direct. US law commands us to look for a quid pro quo, but often the return comes later. So, I might bend a rule that I might never benefit from, but this other member of the network then benefits. You can't call that a quid pro quo, but that's how the Hydra operates. And so, that's why corruption is a deeper and more general phenomenon. The other aspect that's really critically important is that even the mortal heads, when you whack one off, two more grow. Too often, not always, but too often when I have looked at anti-corruption insurrections overseas, I see a fixation on the one individual or his or her family who seems to personify the corrupt system. And it never works. Look at Guatemala. Look at Egypt. Look at even Tunisia. So many of these anti-corruption uprisings, the government tumbles, the government comes down, but the network is able to generate a new head, which immediately takes the place of the old one. So, for Americans, I would urge all of us, as outraged, disgusted, offended as many of us may be by the lengths to which President Trump and many of those around them have brought the misuse of the public trust for personal gain, as outraged as we may be about that, we must not fool ourselves that by getting rid of this individual or this administration, we will solve the problem. And the problem is the Midas disease. When you have the Midas disease it's that you're so infatuated with money that you convert everything that's sacred, meaning our earth, the land, what's on the land, what's under the land, human creativity, human labor, love, relationships. You monetize all of that. And when a society is struck by the epidemic of Midas disease, what it means is that money becomes the chief source of social standing. And that's a huge conversion. It's no longer your honor, or your courage or your wisdom or your ability to play beautiful music. You're not honored by society for that as much as you are honored for accumulating money. And the danger of that is, it's a race with no finish line. Bill, you have $3 million in your bank account. You've got 3 million. How many zeroes is that? Three followed by, you know, this number of zeros. I better get a four ahead of my zeros because I otherwise I'm not better than you. And so it becomes this race and then it leads to preposterous extremes where you've got the current secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, you know, who lied to Forbes magazine about how many zeros he had, you know, I mean, really? Really? Like, we've descended to this? And the problem is that once a society is in the grip of that kind of a pandemic, the money hoarders organize themselves into a coalition in order to bend the rules of the game to ensure that they can keep competing with each other about more zeros, that, that the flow of money goes to them. And that's how you get systemic corruption.
BILL MOYERS: And as you say, it is not a partisan casino, it's run by both parties.
SARAH CHAYES: Yes. The virulence of the political battle can camouflage the identity of interests across that political divide among the meat hogs.
BILL MOYERS: And by meat hogs, you mean?
SARAH CHAYES: The plutocracy. You know, the plutocracy, the integrated network of government officials and top private wealth maximizers that are in this web where they switch places frequently, they rig this system to serve the interests of this network rather than the public interest.
BILL MOYERS: I was struck when President Trump delivered his acceptance speech of the nomination at the White House and the camera panned down to the crowd. The very first row was one plutocrat, one fat cat after another, right there looking very, very, very much at home. And in the back of them were the quote so-called ordinary people. It was the marriage, symbolically, of what you write about in the book, plutocracy and populism. You appeal to the populists, the everyday people who are angry at a risk system that's rigged, but the very people rigging the system are sitting there at the head of the line.
SARAH CHAYES: Okay, you've touched on two really deep issues here. One is the coalition of meat hogs, if you will, the plutocrats, right? What is fascinating about that coalition is it's a network. It's a web, right? Of connections among people. And what's really deceptive about these networks, these kleptocratic or plutocratic networks, is that they cross all the divides that we commonly use to categorize our society, right? They cross public and private sectors. So, by having in their coalition, government officials who can wield government powers and access government money, private, big businessmen who monetize authorizations and things like that, who convert sacred values into money. I mean, it's an extremely capable coalition. It's extremely flexible and adaptable. So that's who you were looking at on the stage and in the front row, right? You've got the symbols of government power, the guy holding them, and you've got the plutocrats and you know, those guys, the moguls in the front row.
BILL MOYERS: And democracy was supposed to be a check on the unbridled power of money.
SARAH CHAYES: Absolutely. But what you are seeing when you describe that crowd with the sort of ordinary folks who are revolted against the rigged system, somehow allying themselves with this very same rigged system, what you see is an expert manipulation of identity divides, and that it is the most powerful tool that kleptocratic networks use worldwide. Lebanon is a really stark example, but it's exactly what's happening here too, which is you appeal to people on an identity level. And if you make that appeal strong and effective enough, you actually overpower their indignation at the rigged system, or you deflect it. You say who's rigging the system isn't us billionaires. It's those educated people like, you know, it's the, it's the main stream, the lame stream media people. It's people with who have advanced degrees. You know, you're appealing to the resentment of the two thirds of the country that don't have a college degree, for example, who frankly have been treated with some contempt by the professional classes. And you activate that and you divert their indignation at rigged system against the professional classes while you laugh all the way to the bank.
BILL MOYERS: It's also a fact that both political parties in the eighties and nineties failed the people you are talking about.
