250 Years After the Declaration of Independence

What Went Wrong?  

The Fourth of July, 2026 is scheduled to be the day we celebrate our nation’s founding. The US has the reputation of being the world’s longest standing democracy. Despite numerous blemishes in that history, it is a claim to be proud of. In 1787, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, when asked “what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”, Benjamin Franklin replied “A republic if you can keep it”. 

Well, we tried and succeeded for a long time but nothing lasts forever. Just as the Roman Republic changed into the Roman Empire with the elevation of its first emperor, the USA has become an empire, no matter the title of the man at the top. People are now saying that Trump wants to be a king. As I’ve pointed out before, his goals and his methods suggest a desire to be emperor rather than king. We have neither a monarchy nor a republic at present. Few historians or other knowledgeable people have spoken about the American Empire until fairly recently and now everyone seems to be writing about the decline of the American Empire. I’d be the last person to contradict them. Of all the various forms of government that we have names for, “oligarchy” seems to best describe what we’ve got now. The institutions established by the US Constitution still have buildings to house them and budgets to pay employees to keep the lights on but in essence, they have abandoned or been relieved of the functions they were created for. 

Before we reach for the gin and turn on another ball game, I would like to suggest some of the events that got us to where we are now and why it will be difficult to restore what we think of as democracy. 

If you live in a tight ideological bubble or you get your news from the mainstream media, you may have little idea what’s been going on lately. Right now the US is supporting and collaborating in an on-going and publicly announced genocide, which is being seen live by anyone curious enough to look. The military and economic assaults on any country or people who do not adhere to the policies we impose continue with increasing violence. As I write, it looks like Venezuela will be the next target. The current American president has taken an ax to all institutions, in education, broadcasting, medicine, basic research, trade, journalism, regulatory agencies and law enforcement. The growing gulf between the ultra rich and everyone else has brought us closer to a new age of feudalism. In the older feudalism the people had a belief in God for consolation. In the secular neo-feudalism the consolation for the masses lies in gadgets, fast food, pornography, drugs and spectacles, including sports events with military flyovers and the virtual orgiastic half-time shows that accompany them. 

Everyone will have his or her own views on what brought us to this state of affairs, and I don’t claim that my short list is definitive but here are a few events in the demise of US democracy that the public seems unaware of or unconcerned about. 

1. The Powell Memorandum 1971- Lewis Powell was a conservative corporate lawyer from Richmond, Virginia who wrote a memo to the Chairman of the Education Committee of the US Chamber of Commerce urging that corporations become more aggressive in promoting their own interests and those of their major investors. Two months after the memo was written, President Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court. The memo leaked and its influence metastasized. Private foundations popped up like mushrooms to extend the influence of their ultra-rich and ultra-conservative founders beyond the grave. 

A few of the best known of these are: 

 -The Heritage Foundation (from 1973) which produced Project 2025, generally thought to be the blueprint for Trump’s assault on the government. 

 - The Koch Network - The Bradley Foundation 

 - The American Enterprise Institute 

 - The Cato Institute 

 - Young Americans Foundation 

The principal goal of all of them is to influence government policy. They vary slightly in outlook with some pushing hard-core Neocon pro-war policies while others are more libertarian and isolationist but mostly, they all promote tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, less government regulations, especially those protecting the environment and working people, and less investment in services and benefits for the general public. The effects of their efforts are all too visible, even if their role in the outcomes are not widely recognized. 

2. The Fairness Doctrine in US Communications Policy- 1949-1987 This Act, which derives from the Radio Act of 1927, required that all candidates for public office were to be allotted equal time by public broadcasters using the public airwaves. It was repealed in 1987 by the Reagan Administration over the objections of Congress. Anyone old enough to remember the Reagan Administration knows what a pitiful level US news broadcasting has sunk to since that time. CBS News, where Edward R. Murrow and his associates once provided serious investigative journalism, has recently changed ownership and is expected to compete with FoxNews in the sordid swamp of Neo-con propaganda interwoven with infotainment, gossip and commercial promotion. 

3. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) 1938 This Act was originally passed to limit the influence of foreign propaganda circulating in the USA, a seemingly reasonable goal, if rationally applied. A foreign agent is one who: 

     a. engages in political activities. 

     b. acts as a political adviser/consultant in the interests of a foreign principal. 

     c. solicits, collects or distributes funds in the interest of a foreign principal. 

     d. represents the interests of a foreign principal before any US official. 

FARA does have teeth. In 2015 US Senator Robert Menendez, representing my home state of New Jersey, was tried on bribery charges but got off with a hung jury, dropped charges, and censure from the Senate, none of which impeded his reelection in 2018. However, when he got into another multiple felony corruption scandal in 2024, this time including charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent (for Egypt), he was convicted and sentenced to eleven years in prison, which I believe he started serving last January. While I doubt that Sen. Menendez sees any humorous aspect to his troubles and FBI agents did discover hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash-filled envelopes and gold bars in his house, it’s hard to suppress a chuckle when a senator is sent off to prison for steering a halal meat certification contract to an unqualified friend with ready cash, and for assuring Senate approval of arms sales and aid to a foreign country, at the same time that the president of our country is openly soliciting bribes from foreign countries and ultra-rich people, both foreign and domestic, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in response, and bragging about it. Who was writing this script, Robert Crumb or Monty Python? 

By some divine(?) miracle, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has never been required to register, although its declared purpose is to influence American politics to promote policies favorable to Israel. Heads of state are exempted from registering with FARA so when Bibi Netanyahu accepts invitations to campaign for his preferred US presidential candidate in front of the combined Senate and House membership, he is not subject to FARA penalties, but one might suppose that all those making such visits possible would be, although it could be argued that treason charges might take precedence over whatever FARA penalties might be meted out. Of course, that would involve the entire Republican majority, so it isn’t going to happen. Why then are we not hearing meatier complaints from the Democratic opposition? First of all, by my conservative unofficial guesstimates, about 80% of Democratic members of Congress are also on the take from AIPAC. Besides, after the Democratic leadership constructed the Russiagate fairy tale in a sleazy effort to discredit Donald Trump, who would they be to complain about unethical tactics used to influence elections. 

4. Citizens United vs. FEC - 2010 The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, another of the far-right groups established in 1988 in the wake of the Powell Memorandum. Rather than issuing a narrow ruling to settle the specific case which regarded advertising during a political campaign for “Hillary:the Movie”, a partisan film the company had produced, the court majority issued a decision to overturn provisions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Law used to bar corporations from paying for advertising during election campaigns. Ironically, shortly before this Citizens United had lobbied to ban the advertising for one of Michael Moore’s films. The legal issues were complex but the effects of the decision were severe. It overturned several precedents and solidified the concepts that corporations were persons under the law and that spending money to amplify their voice was an activity protected under the Constitutional Right to Free Speech. The practical effect of this ruling was to legalize bribery and to cripple attempts to put limits on political spending. Fifteen years later, we now have a fully corrupt government, including all three branches, executive, legislative and judicial, which were established as separate entities to create checks and balances of power. Over the past decade academic studies have found that what the American public wants has virtually no effect on the legislation that the Congress passes. 

On a more subjective and intuitive level, I don’t believe that the majority of American citizens want the country to engage in a highly visible genocide. Maybe there are many who just don’t care about anything beyond their personal well-being but while I can’t produce any solid evidence, I don’t detect a collective lust for mass murder. We’ve seen that the Congress routinely approves funding of weapons and technology used for the genocide by majorities of about 85%. Either we have a representative government or we don’t. If it IS a representative government, then may the wrath of God bestow on us what we deserve, except that I don’t want to cop out by counting on any god to impose justice on the assassins among us. 

If the government is NOT representative of our collective will, then we must find a way to change it. This is not a partisan undertaking. While many clever writers document the unprecedented violations of international law, US laws, the Constitution of the United States and longstanding societal norms of decency by the current president, and his party colleagues give up their independence, their judgment and their decency to avoid his wrath, members of the “opposition party” do as they’re told by their patrons from AIPAC and the important corporations in the military industrial complex, the health industry, big pharma, big oil, and the financial sector. How does a country, an empire, or a civilization, when it has reached a level of widespread, all-encompassing corruption, ever recover? The short answer is that it doesn’t; it collapses, either from within, or from pressures brought by the world beyond its control. 

When the Roman Empire eventually collapsed it took Europe about a millennium to recover. Will that scenario be repeated? I doubt it as I think it more likely that the idiots who ridicule the risks of nuclear war, climate change and environmental disaster will manage to eliminate human life on our planet in less time. Is that too gloomy a view? Well, one of the most beautiful things about being here on earth is that life is full of surprises, some of them good. What can we do? Start by turning off the propaganda and face up to what we are doing, not what our designated enemies are doing, but us.

Corruption

We are hoping to overcome the coronavirus.  What about the corruption virus?  Corruption is as old as the human race but it affects some of us more than others.  Growing up in an American suburb, I had little awareness of corruption in government.  We heard stories of big city political machines, Tammany Hall in New York, the Hague Machine in Jersey City and others around the country but they were something that affected other people.  In high school and college history classes, the subject rarely came up except in reference to the administration of Warren Harding.  I had a very old uncle from Ohio who had been a friend of Cordell Hull, FDR’s Secretary of State.  This well respected uncle had a graduate degree from Harvard and spent his life as Superintendent of Schools in Paterson, NJ.  He surprised me by speaking of his admiration for Warren Harding, another Ohio native, who I mostly knew about from the Teapot Dome scandal.  It seems that Harding had assembled one of the most respected and highly regarded cabinets in record time.  His Secretary of Interior, Albert Fall, an old friend, and his Attorney General Harry Daugherty, who had been his campaign manager, proved to be the ruination of his legacy.  Fall was the first ever US cabinet member to go to prison after being convicted of accepting bribes.  The Department Justice was also corrupt under Harry Daugherty and vast amounts of illegal booze were taken by bootleggers through bribery and kickbacks.  Harding had two long term extra-marital affairs which also tarnished his legacy.  He has typically been regarded as one of the worst presidents in US history although apart from the scandals of his two corrupt cabinet members, his actions were not notably different or worse than those of any other conservative Republican presidents.  In any case twenty percent of his cabinet was proved corrupt.

I was not around to observe the era when Al Capone and the Mafia controlled Chicago until he went to prison for tax evasion.  His Mafia roots went back to Sicily where with the unification of Italy, property owned by the Church was seized and privatized, driving much of the population into abject poverty, resulting in massive emigration and the growth of the Mafia to fill the void created by a failed state.  The void filled by Capone in Chicago was largely created by the enactment of Prohibition in 1920.  The organization grew powerful enough to continue its criminal activities even after Prohibition was repealed in 1933.  Satisfying people’s illegal vices has always been a profitable criminal activity but when not enough things were banned, the protection racket could fill the coffers by offering “insurance” against risks that the insurance provider would also provide.

In the 60’s and 70’s my experiences with corruption, with the exception of a few questionable traffic “violations” in Tennessee and Chicago, were mostly second or third hand.  The Vice President of the United States, Spiro Agnew, took a plea bargain to avoid prosecution for extortion in exchange for his resignation from office shortly before Richard Nixon resigned the presidency  to avoid impeachment over illegal activities including the Watergate burglary.

At that time I worked for a large Atlanta firm established by George Heery, an architect who specialized in fast-track building and advanced construction management techniques.  He established branch offices in many US cities when invited by local authorities to solve their building needs.  The NYC branch where I worked was opened because Mayor Lindsey had asked him to design a series of swimming pools in predominantly black neighborhoods to provide summer relief in the stormy aftermath of the season of racially motivated assassinations.  Parallel agencies were created to bypass the Byzantine bureaucracy of the Building Department.  Permits were expedited and the projects were completed quickly.  It took a heavy toll on the NYC budget for years to come but the pools served their communities well.  Heery was also asked to do a major project in New Orleans but after looking into the situation, he balked, saying the level of corruption was so ingrained there that he wouldn’t take it on. Deeply rooted corruption can be as hard to wipe out as the coronavirus.

After that we moved to Italy.  When we rented a small summer house in the village of my in-laws and there was some delay in getting the electricity hooked up, my Italian wife, following local advice, called up the utility and said “I’m told that if I want the connection made quickly, I should offer a pair of pigeons.  (Pigeons are one of the delicacies of local Umbrian cuisine) Who do I have to give the pigeons to?”  The man on the phone was deeply offended and insisted on knowing who had said such a thing. “Oh just voices in the village.”  The electricity was connected without further delay and no pigeons were involved.  Apparently corruption is not as pervasive in Umbria as elsewhere.

Many years later, in the 10's, we got to know some people from Ukraine who worked in Italy as house cleaners and care givers.  Very nice people.  We heard hair-curling stories of how in Ukraine all the most basic needs of people, jobs, apartments, health care and even medicines were available, and only available, through extensive bribery.  Americans might foment coups or not, but regardless of the leader du jour, the corruption was solidly entrenched in the fabric of that society, much like New Orleans, only worse.

Back in the 80’s I spent a couple of years working in Saudi Arabia.  Corruption there was very different than in Sicily or Ukraine in that it was a very rich country and most of its citizens, although not always its guest workers, were very well off.  Still, executions and lesser punishments were meted out on the Sabbath (Friday) in a main square.  The stoning of adulterers was rare.  Mostly, it was Pakistani office boys found with their hands in a petty cash drawer getting their offending hands or fingers chopped off.  Meanwhile  the Prince who served as the Minister of Defense was celebrated as Saudi Businessman of the Year for the multimillion dollar “commissions” he received on the billions of dollars worth of weaponry he bought from the United States. 

The costs of building in the Middle East in those days were about double the costs of similar buildings anywhere else.  A part of this stemmed from logistical problems, such as the severe heat and the long distances from the sources of materials to the building sites, but it was also due to the long chain of open hands which could stop the flow of materials along the way.

The Mafia has had a heavy hand in Sicily and its influence spread throughout Italy and beyond with time.  However, it may not be fair to blame the corruption that damaged the country in the 80’s and 90’s on the influence of the traditional Mafia bosses and their extended families.  Italy briefly became the world’s fifth largest economy and the second largest in Europe after Germany.  It thrived through its industrial and artisanal prowess and some good luck.  At a time when France and Switzerland invested heavily in nuclear energy, Italian voters vetoed nuclear facilities and were then able to buy electricity below cost after zero investment.  A winning lottery ticket!  Alas, as with many lottery winners, they blew the winnings.  A system known as the partitocracy, also referred to by some as the kleptocracy, came into being whereby the many competing political parties all acquiesced in the division of the spoils and the retention of the status quo.  More than fifty major construction projects were built throughout Italy and then abandoned when the money for their completion evaporated.  The one I saw close by was the new hospital just outside Orvieto which was started in the 1970’s, sat unfinished for years until thoroughly vandalized, and then redesigned and refinanced around 1993 with construction completed by 2007.  Many such projects were not so lucky and have never been completed at all.

In 1992 the Mani Pulite (clean hands) Scandal emerged in Milan.  Before it was over, it was said that enough evidence had been gathered to implicate more than sixty thousand elected officials throughout Italy.  Most of them escaped prosecution but many did not.  The old political parties all either went extinct or changed their names.

Between globalization and corruption the Italian economy was devastated, dropping behind those of France and the UK even faster than it had surpassed them.  Was globalization or its implementation another form of corruption?  I suspect it was but that’s a discussion for another day.  Systematic corruption has taken a toll on Italy but overall the government has tried to give the populace what it wanted and what it needed.

My home has been in Italy for forty-seven years and I believe I love my adoptive country as much or more than most native Italians,  Nevertheless, I have not always been totally happy with its politicians.  Still, the one time I felt truly proud of the government was when it chose to deny Bettino Craxi the possibility of returning to Italy for medical treatment with exemption from prosecution.  Faced with indictment on more than forty counts of corruption, Craxi had fled to exile in Morocco, and there he died.

Craxi was corrupt but unlike many similarly prominent political figures in my nation of birth, he was not a war criminal. Will the US ever show the backbone of Italy?  Where did the US go off the rails?  Was it the failure to prosecute our war criminals, as we had done so effectively to German war criminals at Nuremberg, opting instead to persecute whistle blowers?  Was it the insidious influence of nihilists such as Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan on political figures?  Members of Congress discovering that lobbyist perks paid better than their public salaries?  The glorification of self and the down playing of community?  Letting those responsible for the 2007 economic meltdown off the hook and even bailing out their corporations?  Whatever the cause, the US Government has not responded to the needs and desires of the public.  Various studies in some of the better universities have shown that the views of the general population have almost no effect on government policies, which instead are established by corporate lobbyists and the whims of oligarchs.

In the wake of all this, large segments of the US population became so fed up that they sought change, radical change.  The slogan “Make America Great Again” aligned better with their aspirations and frustrations than the tone-deaf and presumptuous twaddle “America is already great”.  They wanted the perceived rot excised and the swamp drained, much as the French had wanted at the time of their revolution.  That one turned into a blood bath, with many of its leaders beheaded by the guillotines they had erected themselves.  In the US the nihilistic impetus was given a different path.  The sometimes inflated but generally effective federal agencies were handed over to mafia bosses, no not those of the Gambino or Gotti crime families.  No Sicilian roots here.  They were to loot and eviscerate the agencies they were chosen to oversee and most of them did what was asked. There may have been some Russian Mafia connections in the mix but mostly these were home grown American grifters, corporate lobbyists and other white collar criminals, appointed by a president who had established a charity to help children with cancer and then stole from its funds for his own personal expenses.  He may someday be indicted for that if Americans can muster some Italian style backbone.  Meanwhile he has at least been forbidden from ever again engaging in charitable organizations in the State of New York.

The Trump Cabinet, indistinguishable from a Mob convention, has been well documented by a number of writers but normally escapes the scrutiny of the major media, obsessed as they are by the tweets, the insults and other outrages that provide daily background noise to cover the criminal activities of the regime.  One of the best analyses written so far is “Mapping Corruption…” by Jim Lardner.  By all means, please read it here.    It can be hard to even keep score but I’ve tried, with a chart.  Some officials and advisors have been removed by indictment while others have been fired because they haven’t been willing to play along with the criminal enterprise.  Others for insufficient obsequiousness to the Big Don, Capo dei Capi.  The turnover rate has been unprecedented but there seems to be no shortage of aspiring made men.  Years after the collapse of Enron there must be legions of wily, experienced and hardened fraudsters out there somewhere waiting for a second chance.

 

Moscow Mitch, the Horatio Alger of the Senate, is up for reelection to the Senate.  Mitch McConnell has risen from relatively modest origins to become one of the richest people in the Senate over the course of a long career spent almost exclusively in public office.  Yes, he did marry into money but marrying into money is generally beneficial for anybody, even more so for politicians, and he’s not alone. John McCain, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and even Kamala Harris have all enjoyed spousal support for their campaigns, although typically the money hasn’t come from Chinese shipping companies whose activities their spouses were appointed to oversee for the US Government. I suppose even Al Capone had his supporters, mostly people who were afraid of standing up to him.  Kentucky has lagged behind most of the country in a number of statistical categories.  Will this be the year when its voters take the lead in the fight against organized crime or will TV’s Tony Soprano have proved to be such a crowd pleaser that state pride kicks in for their own favorite son, the Big Boss of the Senate?

We are about to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the landslide election of Warren Harding.  Twenty percent of Harding’s cabinet proved corrupt, a record at the time.  Harding’s three years in office never achieved the level of scandal that we’ve grown accustomed to in any week of the present administration.

Dare we aspire to getting the level of corrupt cabinet officials down to the levels of the Harding Administration ever again?  The coming days will tell.