Neither Singer the Vulture, the Kochs, Penny P., nor the Ice Man invented the checkbook election.
In 1972, there was CREEP, the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The CREEP-in-Chief was Richard Nixon.
You probably know this story from the papers if you were around then, or from the movie, All the President’s Men, about the Watergate break-in.
I got the story from one of the guys who funded the break-in and cover-up, a Chicago businessman. He told me about it over escargot at an exclusive members-only eatery high above Michigan Avenue on Chicago’s Gold Coast.
I’d never eaten snails before except on a dare, and I’d never seen a garlic clove. Where I come from, garlic is a powder in a plastic shaker. You put it on pizza.
The businessman laid it all out. He’d dropped at least $50,000 in cash on Jeb Magruder, Nixon’s slithery little deputy campaign director. The businessman wasn’t a Republican, he wasn’t a Democrat either. He’d been a communist then switched to a cynicalist. He’d learned from Karl Marx that there are those who produce wealth and those who spend it. He thought the choice was obvious.
Anyway, for Magruder the cash for CREEP wasn’t a political contribution but an investment, and the creepier and more illegal the use of his money by the president’s men, the better—they’d owe him big time. The returns were already coming in. The businessman, Harold Palast, my uncle, was given two tickets to the President’s inaugural ball, one ticket for him and one for the hooker in a ball gown that the Republican Party placed in his limousine to escort him for the evening.
They threw in a federal charter to start a bank—before Magruder began his prison term.
(NB: And one other thing, that stuff about breaking into the Watergate to find evidence that Nixon’s opponent got help from Castro in Cuba? Forget that bullshit. If that were true, Nixon wouldn’t have tried to blame the break-in on the FBI—the FBI would have done it gladly—long-serving dirtbag J. Edgar Hoover was director until his death in the middle of that election year. The Cubans weren’t looking for evidence; they were looking to plant evidence.)
I wasn’t a journalist then, just a student at the University of Chicago, and Uncle Harold wanted to explain why my professor, Milton Friedman, was a schmuck. There was no such thing as a “free market”—it was very expensive, you had to fix the game, and fixing the game required fixing the dealers at the blackjack table, the politicians. Uncle Harold paid off cops on the beat, he paid off ward captains, and now he’d pay off the president. You pay to play.
Others were playing too. Dwayne Andreas of Archer Daniels Midland Company placed one thousand $100 bills on Nixon’s desk in the Oval Office ($25,000 of it ended up in the bank account of the Watergate burglars). Andreas was wary of checks after he’d faced criminal charges for paying Nixon’s opponent $100,000 four years earlier. (He beat the charges.) Andreas must have thought he would win sympathy at the Justice Department, which was then up to its keister in the Watergate conspiracy because ADM itself was directing its own little conspiracy fixing the international price of vitamin C.
Years later, ADM got into a bigger con: ethanol—fuel from corn—which sucked up $30 billion in US Treasury subsidies, most going to ADM. Andreas agreed with Uncle Harold’s philosophy. “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market,” Andreas said, “Not one. The only place you see a ‘free market’ is in the speeches of politicians.”
We never got a free market, but politicians got a free ride—on ADM’s planes. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole took twenty-nine rides on ADM’s corporate jet for his 1988 presidential campaign (for which he was fined by the Federal Election Commission).
Dole, known as the “Senator from Ethanol,” also took a $100,000 donation from ADM for his Better America Foundation. And what could be better for America than Bob Dole as president? The charity was in fact a front for Dole’s presidential run, and the FEC hammered Dole with a fine for that too. Back in 2003, Dole had to shut Better America. Today, under Citizens and Speechnow, Dole’s foundation could make America even Better by campaigning with the “charity” money.
Unfortunately for Dole, in 1996, he suffered from electile dysfunction, losing the presidency to Bill Clinton, a candidate generously funded by . . . ADM.
In 2008, the new “Senator Ethanol,” Barack Obama of Illinois, also earned a lot of frequent flyer miles on ADM planes jetting into Iowa during the presidential primary. (No FEC fine.)
While I don’t approve of the president getting high with ADM, to his credit, I have to say that by 2012, Obama’s budget zeroed out the subsidy for ethanol.