Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, by Peter Schweizer
orruption in and of the political class has evolved over the years. Gone are the days when Louisiana congressman William Jefferson was found to have stashed "$90,000 in bribes in his freezer", or "Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham who created a “bribery menu” that netted him $2.4 million." The reason for this evolution is that "Politicians are like the rest of us in that they avoid overtly criminal or publicly embarrassing behavior." In India, politicians are refreshingly less concerned with embarrassing behaviour, and usually place the fear of public embarrassment secondary to the pursuit of pelf. In the United States, political corruption has evolved to avoid such public embarrassments and taken on two indirect forms - one is what the author calls "corruption by proxy" and the other is "smash and grab."
Peter's book is a fact-laden ride through the morass of political corruption in the United States, and the picture on both sides of the political aisle is not pretty at all.
Like most enterprising people, and politicians are nothing if not entrepreneurial by nature, politicians too have adopted several ways of exponentially increasing their personal wealth by leveraging their political office, while at the same time avoiding disclosure rules put in place that would attract negative public scrutiny. While American media has spent the better part of 2017 and 2018 in a manic exercise to uncover venality in the Donald Trump administration, this book gives us a look at some rather curious coincidences that occurred during the tenure of President Obama.
From among all the examples the author cites, let's look at four.
