By Joel Thurtell
A retired newspaper reporter was fuming about John and Monica Conyers.
How could John Conyers, the Detroit congressman, not have known his wife was awash in bribe money while she was a member of the City Council?
I need to mention that this was coming from an American who worked for American papers.
Because when I agreed with him, adding that I was frustrated by a similar know-nothing stance from editors at my old paper, the Detroit Free Press, when I tried to pursue articles about Congressman Conyers illegally assigning congressional staffers to do campaign work, babysit his kids and tutor his wife, my editors made me back off.
Rightly so, said the retiree.
Taking bribes is one thing, he said. That is corrupt. But who could blame a public figure for putting his or her relatives on the payroll or assigning staffers to do personal work on government pay? Isn’t that the American way?
Wait a minute, I said. Another congressman from Detroit, Charles Diggs, was convicted of fraud for assigning congressional staffers to work at his family’s funeral home, paid for by taxpayers.
Not the same as taking bribes. my friend told me.
Taking a bribe = felony, I said. Ditto falsifying pay reports. Diggs found out. He went to prison.
Not the same at all, my friend told me. There is a certain dignity and a certain expectation that officeholders will help themselves to the government payroll. “I seen my oportunities, and I took ’em,” said George Washington Plunkitt, the notorious Tammany Hall pol.
But taking money to sway government decisions is a no-no.
I stress that this guy is an American because right now Americans are doing their usual hypocritical condemnation of officials in another country for blatantly behaving corruptly.
The foreign corruption du jour is in Afghanistan. Another time, it might be Mexico or practically any place where American interests collide with local culture, including the culture of corruption. We are not comfortable with other people’s corruption, though we can feel right at home with our own, to the point that we don’t even recognize it for what it is.
On Sunday, September 5, 2010, The New York Times’ Week in Review took to task the current corruption bad boy country, “Corrupt-istan.”
Which is to say, Afghanistan.
No doubt about it, the Afghan government the U.S. is supporting is very corrupt.
According to the article, “Since 2001, one of the unquestioned premises of Americans and NATO policy has been that ordinary Afghans don’t view public corruption in quite the same way that Americans and others do in the West.”
Really?
How is it that Americans view public corruption?
As I mentioned, an American friend who worked for many years at a leading American newspaper perceives a difference between different categories of public filching in the U.S. Taking bribes is bad. Faking the payroll is okay.
It’s a curious differentiation, since you’d think it would cut the other way. At least the bribe-taker isn’t stealing from the public treasury.
Monica enriched herself with bribe-givers’ money. Hubby received free services at taxpayer expense.
But any differentiation justifies corruption.
When Americans justify corruption at home, how can they condemn corruption in other countries?
When I pleaded to be allowed to pursue the Conyers story, an editor told me, “They all do it.”
What he meant was that all congresspeople are corrupt.
Somehow, by a logic that I don’t follow, if everyone is corrupt, that would not be a story.
Only if Conyers were alone in his corruption would it be worth pursuing as news.
Now we have a fascinating story coming out of Great Britain about how Scotland Yard severely limited its investigation of corrupt news gathering practices by the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World, whose reporters and editors hacked into hundreds of people’s cell phone voice mail accounts and made news from illicitly-gotten tips.
Scotland Yard concentrated on illegal surveillance of royal family phones, maybe because the cops and the journalists had an unspoken but mutually beneficial arrangement by which police shared information with reporters in return for stories we American reporters call “blow jobs” about the cops. Wouldn’t want to blow the whistle on the entire British tabloid culture that happens to dote on the bobbies, would they?
If everyone were doing it — reporters tapping phones all over the place or every congressman screwing his/her taxpaying constituents, wouldn’t that make one hell of a story?
Corruption in Afganistan?
How about a system of financing political campaigns with “donations” that would better be called bribes to lawmakers who blatantly deliver the goods to their benefactors? Right here in Michigan we’ve been watching Manuel “Matty” Moroun pay elected officials and hopefuls large amounts of money in hopes of stopping a government-proposed bridge that would rival his decrepit Ambassador Bridge’s monopoly over truck traffic between Detroit and Windsor.
Why go to Afghanistan?
If you want to see corruption, Michigan and the U.S. are a veritable theater of political payola.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
