
The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten by the Public - cmurf
https://longreads.com/2018/11/20/the-second-half-of-watergate-was-bigger-worse-and-forgotten-by-the-public/
======
AndyMcConachie
Two things.

1) This wasn't really forgotten by the public. There was a law passed by
Congress meant to address this, which if anyone has worked in American
corporate governance is well aware of. The article mentions the FCPA.

2) The much more interesting question about Watergate is what were the
Plumbers looking for? Why did they conduct their break ins? This was not
understood at the time.

We now know about Nixon's successful attempt to torpedo the Vietnam peace
talks in '68\. Something Mark Felt didn't even know. We also now know that LBJ
knew about it as well right before the elections in '68\. LBJ didn't make it
public, but instead kept a file on it that later came to be held in his
presidential library. Nixon and the plumbers were likely looking for this
file. They never found it and it wasn't until a researcher in the mid-90's
discovered it in LBJ's presidential library. This information, had it been
made public, would have destroyed Nixon.

~~~
moccachino
Torpedoing peace talks in order to win an election. Such a despicable act, I
don't know any words fitting for it. I know it was not the first or last time
in history this has been done, but since this instance can be proven I would
suggest that some choice sites such as Nixon's birthplace should be torn down,
the ground burned and it left permanently in ashes as a reminder.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
SOP in Washington. LBJ's escalation of the Vietnam War made his corporate
sponsors an absolute fortune.

More recently, Theresa May's backing for military action in Syria pumped the
stock price of British Aerospace, which happens to be part-owned by a capital
fund that employ's Theresa May's husband.

The real problem with politics is that very few people understand how
absolutely amoral and cynical it is. LBJ still had some interest in public
service, but for a terrifying number of modern politicians the public service
ethos is a fig leaf.

The real morality is narcissism and greed. As long as money keeps rolling in
no one cares how it's made or who gets damaged in the process.

~~~
ThomPete
One has to be extra careful with distinguishing correlation from causation.

For anyone in top of politics they are likely going to be connected to people
who are top in either corporations or organisations.

Theresa May isn't a dictator and can't just decide what she wants to without
being in agreement with the rest of her politicians.

Insinuating that there is some causational relationship here is just as much
part of the problem.

That said, there definitely are cases where the relationship seems very
suspicious, but it's not a rule and I wish people would be more careful to
prove their claims rather than just putting them out there. But maybe I am
missing something here.

~~~
claudiawerner
>Theresa May isn't a dictator and can't just decide what she wants to without
being in agreement with the rest of her politicians.

This is true, to the extent where I wish people would stop individualizing
problems that are obviously endemic to the entire system. The damage caused by
individual conspiracies isolated in history is negligible to the scale of
systemic issues in modern political economy. Applying some abstract thinking
would help us understand that May isn't a dictator, but capital _is_.

~~~
profalseidol
What do you think of going for worker-owned-and-directed-cooperatives
replacing traditional corporations as a first step in combating capitalism?

I think the idea is, to distribute power to the people. These cooperatives
would generally make decisions that benefit the majority. Unlike what we have
today where mega corporations (dictated by a handful few) keep doing whatever
they can for 'growth' even if that means destroying people's lives and our
planet.

------
skybrian
re: "The SEC filed an injunctive order against Gulf Oil on the grounds that
their bribes were material information that should have been disclosed to
investors, and that by failing to disclose them, it violated existing federal
securities laws."

Huh, that looks like an early example of Matt Levine's rule that everything
bad is also securities fraud. (From before the anti-bribery law was passed.)

~~~
tanderson92
I commented at almost the precise moment (great minds!) of your comment on
this fact, and cc'ed matt into the discussion:
[https://twitter.com/wokeberia/status/1065053152775270400](https://twitter.com/wokeberia/status/1065053152775270400)

The followup tweet includes my suspicion this might have been the first
because they first discovered the lack of a law, and creatively got around
that fact.

~~~
mcguire
Al Capone was imprisoned on tax charges.

~~~
Dylan16807
Not for lack of his other activities being illegal.

------
Spooky23
The corruption back then was staggering. LBJ had attorneys flying money in
briefcases back to Texas. Plus the fig leaf if his wife’s radio station
purchase, which attracted all sorts of advertising from folks looking for
favors.

~~~
anigbrowl
We just learned today that the current acting Attorney-General was the sole
employee of a nonprofit that paid him $1.2 million over 3 years but whose
donor(s) are anonymous. The stated purpose of the nonprofit was to increase
government transparency.

~~~
sonnyblarney
Is there a scandal here though?

He was part of a non-profit advocacy group that advocated for a specific
cause. Some people contributed to that. Seems he ran around doing radio
interviews, not making profits.

In a free society, I don't see anything wrong with that.

I'm not even sure if non-profits should be obliged to publicize their donors
if the donors don't want to be identified.

Of course, if the work is specifically political, it should be transparent.
Also, given that he's going to take a government position, we want to know who
he's been taking from ...

While it does maybe look a little suspicious at face value there's no there
there.

If a bunch of people want to run around advocating some kind of principle and
raise money for themselves to do that then so be it, they can do that.

~~~
dragonwriter
> He was part of a non-profit advocacy group

“Part of” doesn't really capture his status as the _sole_ paid employee.

> Seems he ran around doing radio interviews, not making profits.

The $1.2 million isn't the contribution to the entity that paid expenses and
his salary, it's his salary from the entity. So it very much seems like he was
running around doing radio interviews _and_ making (rather large) profits.

~~~
sonnyblarney
No.

That he was the sole member is not relevant.

And you're misunderstanding the issue of 'non profit': he was not operating a
profitable entity. His comp. doesn't count as profit for the org.

Again - there's nothing here. He was part of a private firm that did advocacy,
among other things. 1/2 of the people that go into government go in from
private firms, and we know nothing about their relationships otherwise.

This guy worked for this odd non-profit long before anyone could have
conceived that he would be the US chief attorney, so there's no smoke here
really.

~~~
dragonwriter
> That he was the sole member is not relevant.

That he was the sole paid employee is relevant to the minimizing deflection
you keep making that he was merely “part of” the entity.

> And you're misunderstanding the issue of 'non profit'

No, I'm not (but you are).

> he was not operating a profitable entity.

Not that that is germane to anything, but non-profit doesn't mean that an
organization isn't profitable, it means that there are no equity claims on any
profits (that is, it doesn't return profits to it's owners.)

> His comp. doesn't count as profit for the org.

Which would be relevant if he issue was whether the _org_ was making profits,
but not when it is whether _he_ was making profits.

> This guy worked for this odd non-profit long before anyone could have
> conceived that he would be the US chief attorney, so there's no smoke here
> really.

The former might be relevant to the latter if the accusation was that he was
being bribed in anticipation of becoming AG, rather than the opacity of the
background of a non-Senate-confirmed and otherwise non-publicly-vetted
appointee as Acting Attorney General outside the normal line of succession.

~~~
sonnyblarney
> That there was 1 or more people is irrelevant, and I'm not deflecting
> anything.

> "So it very much seems like he was running around doing radio interviews and
> making (rather large) profits."

This statement implies a lack of understanding of what a 'non profit' is,
because there is no indication of profit here.

But it doesn't matter - by all accounts, this was just a regular non-profit.
There's nothing curious about it.

> "The former might be relevant to the latter if the accusation was that he
> was being bribed in anticipation of becoming AG"

He was employed there since 2014 - you're implication would be that somehow,
years before Trump was elected, years before his nomination, that someone
could have bribed him - which is totally far fetched.

Also - again - hypocritical if you don't apply the same logic to other members
of such offices, all of whom have 'opaque' financial backgrounds were they in
private office. Who paid Loretta Lynch's millions for 10 years before she
became AG? And where was the uproar then?

There are no loaded dice here.

Just regular DC inanity.

~~~
sonnyblarney
I know exactly what a 'non-profit' is - your statement about 'making profits'
clearly indicates you're something amiss with it - and there clearly is not.

It was a non-profit. He got paid. That's it. There's nothing to bring up. So
why would you otherwise?

\----

" but that you are beating a strawman because literally no one anywhere has
made that claim."

Really?

"This is intellectually lazy its a clear case of corruption" ... is what
someone wrote just above - and is the general implication of those commenting
here.

The entire thread is devoted to insinuating that this guy has some kind of
major conflict of interest due to his shady involvement with this non-profit.

So, no, it's not a 'straw man' \- I'm responding directly to the assertion.

There is nothing here.

A curious but otherwise normal non-profit, in operation long before anything
relevant.

There's probably no fire, there's not even any smoke.

~~~
shaki-dora
Dude... stop digging you (metaphorical) grave. You lost this argument five
levels up. Pretending not to understand why someone could be compromised by a
cool million and change for a few interviews makes it terribly difficult not
to assume bad faith on your part.

It is, however, the sort of public humiliation one might be willing to accept
as an employee of _Completely Ordinary People for the Advancement of Motivated
Reasoning and Large Paychecks_.

------
christophilus
> Senator Charles Percy of Illinois observed, “I am convinced that creative
> minds in the name of greed can concoct schemes faster than we can get
> legislation against them.”

That much, at least, hasn’t changed.

------
readhn
"I don't know the solution for this"

The solution is simple - its called the "rule of LAW". These corps and gov
people should be prosecuted to full extent; giving/taking bribes should be
illegal just as being caught with a plane full of heroin.

The problem that we have is that law system is not really working when it
comes to "big guns". They have politicians and lawyers/judges in their
pockets/protecting them.

~~~
bluetwo
It is already illegal.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Then we need to find enforcement.

------
garysahota93
This is wild. I honestly had no idea, but I am really glad that Hacker News
showed me this. I really wonder what the implications have this has been all
of this time.

------
akkartik
The two reasons given to outlaw foreign bribery are awesome:

a) Selfishly, it has unanticipated consequences for foreign policy.

b) Altruistically, it causes developing countries to misspend money on stuff
they don't really need (mostly arms).

The second is particularly compelling. Laws outlawing foreign bribery seem
like a powerful weapon against the resource curse
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse)).

------
scottlocklin
I would be more shocked if corporations weren't overtly bribing people.
Billionaires and PACs as well.

Church's other investigations were bigger, worse and also forgotten by the
public.

~~~
Latteland
its against the law now for us corporations to pay bribes, and it's not too
uncommon for them to get caught and have penalties.
[https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/fcpa/fcpa-
cases.shtml](https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/fcpa/fcpa-cases.shtml)

~~~
cimmanom
The trouble here presumably is that the penalties are anything less than
jailing of the entire C-suite and/or complete dissolution of the corporation.

~~~
matt4077
And while we're at it: death penalty for any crime (or misdemeanor). Including
the criminal's family!

That should stop these murderers and jaywalkers once and for all!

~~~
turndown
While we all appreciate your strawman, I would encourage you to actually think
about situations where the law actually does implement punishments that are
beyond what would be considered proportionate, and when it does the opposite.

------
jhallenworld
The part about the OECD was interesting. I can see the argument that Western
countries could be at a commercial disadvantage vs. Russia and especially
China. The so-called BRIC countries should somehow be encouraged to cooperate.

[http://www.oecd.org/about/membersandpartners/](http://www.oecd.org/about/membersandpartners/)

~~~
gcb0
coup in brazil was the cut the head of BRIC. brazil was the most moderate,
that had any chance of upsetting US powers in europe and americas. now it's
russia or china vs the world under the US.

------
Sniffnoy
I'm confused -- in what sense was this the "second half of Watergate"? I don't
see any obvious relation to Watergate as it's usually known.

~~~
frotak
This

> Its revelation that multinational corporations, including some of the most
> prestigious brands in the United States, had been making illegal
> contributions to political parties not only at home but in foreign countries
> around the world would later be described by Ray Garrett, the chairman of
> the SEC, as “the second half of Watergate, and by far the larger half.”

Is in reference to this:

> the Multinational Corporation Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations
> Committee; the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee; the
> Subcommittee on International Economic Policy of the House Committee on
> International Relations; and the President's Task Force on Questionable
> Corporate Payments Abroad

See: [http://www.djcl.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/FOREIGN-
BRIBE...](http://www.djcl.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/FOREIGN-BRIBERY-BY-
AMERICAN-MULTINATIONAL-CORPORATIONS-A-STATUS-REPORT.pdf)

------
anonymousDan
The FCPA is an impressive piece of legislation and a credit to the USA. Do
most other countries have equivalent laws I wonder?

------
boomboomsubban
It's funny that an investigation over "bribes" paid to Nixon led to laws
changing and a system where US politicians are the only legal "bribery"
target.

~~~
matt4077
There's a difference between "bribes" and "bribes".

A bribe is usually understood to be of benefit to the politician _personally_.
This sort of corruption is actually incredibly rare in the US.

What is, unfortunately, very common are payments to their campaigns. These are
legal and, since Citizen United, basically unlimited. There are, however,
rather strict rules as to how they can be used. And as that Republican idiot
from California is currently experiencing, these rules are enforced.

I'm not making apologies for the undeniable harms of the latter practice. But
it is different, and marginally less evil . As to the relative evilness: the
"traditional" bribe is strictly more useful to a politicians, because they
always had the option to convert it to campaign money. That option does not
exist in the other direction.

I think it's important to appreciate such nuances. First, because it stops the
corroding effect of cynicism on your soul. And, second, if we condemn
everything at the same level of maximum evilness, any change that is not
instant paradise is indistinguishable to the status quo. Because Paradise no
longer exists (or is now a strip club), nothing will ever happen.

~~~
iscrewyou
Bribes buy influence. “Payments to campaign” buy influence. Unlimited
“payments to campaign” buy unlimited influence. With a given amount of
resources at the congressman’s office, unlimited “payments to the campaign”
buy up influence at the expense of other constituents. Which is what bribes
do. Before Citizens United, I may have agreed with you. Not anymore.

~~~
matt4077
I believe it's almost tautological that a politician would prefer personal
cash instead of campaign donations. Among other things, campaign donations
cannot be used to buy themselves a boat or ensure luxury in retirement.

It's a pretty good example of the point I'm trying to make that my post is
being downvoted, presumably by people of the mindset of the other reply, i. e.
"Nope. U STUPID. Burn all politicians". I completely agree that Citizen United
is atrocious. But blanket hate and cynicism is the surefire way to populism,
and the ensuing wide lurches across the political spectrum.

It just seems far too many people think everything is so bad it's time to get
out the guillotines. That proposition strikes me as rather shortsighted,
considering today still would seem to be the best time in history to be alive.

A revolution acts a lot like random shuffling. If you consider society as a
puzzle, which is not done, but more complete than ever before, throwing it in
the air and letting the pieces fall where they may seems unlikely to produce a
more perfect arrangement, just by the principles of entropy.

~~~
akiselev
That assumes that progress in civilization is a forward path and that there
are no local minima that are both extremely difficult to get out of given the
institutions that got them there and dangerously unstable. Entropy eats away
at systems no matter the path we chose and there is no guarantee that the end
result of our current path won't be worse than a traumatic reshuffle now.

I'm not advocating revolution, having seen the end result of one first hand,
but to say that revolution is shortsighted entirely misses the forrest for the
trees. All complex systems, be they biological organisms or deep learning
neural networks, need randomness injected into them or they will fail to
respond to the randomness of the environment around them. In the case of
societies and organisms, that could very well mean extinction.

It's a risk-reward calculation like any action.

~~~
whatshisface
I'd want a revolution like I'd want to have my molecules scrambled by standing
in the LHC beam - sure, maybe I'll end up in a superior configuration, but the
odds are that if I am at all happy today in even the slightest way, a randomly
chosen state will regress me to the mean of complete, brutal dysfunction.

~~~
dmix
Violence tends to be the dynamic in which power is doled out in the anarchy of
post-revolutionary states. Whether it's direct violence against political
groups or against honest hardworking citizens so their property can be handed
to another group. Usually it's a little of both.

------
SamWhited
If you're interested in this era and all the various scandals around the time
of Watergate (but not necessarily related to it), Rachel Maddow's "Bag Man" is
a pretty good podcast that focuses on Agnew and the team of prosecutors
investigating him:
[https://www.msnbc.com/bagman](https://www.msnbc.com/bagman)

------
fallingfrog
None of this is surprising at all, and most likely it’s chump change compared
with the institutional criminality going on right now, today. Ever wonder why
the price of insulin goes up 5% per year, every year? Yeah. Bribes, price
fixing, and market manipulation.

------
booleandilemma
Watergate-gate?

------
Medox
Reminds me of the Stupid Watergate "series" (2 episodes) from John Oliver's
Last Week Tonight:

1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVFdsl29s_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVFdsl29s_Q)

2:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOVPStnVgvU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOVPStnVgvU)

------
PavlovsCat
> Watergate was a matter of a bunch of guys from the Republican National
> Committee breaking in a Democratic Party office for essentially unknown
> reasons and doing no damage. Okay, that's petty burglary, it's not a big
> deal. Well, at the exact time that Watergate was discovered, there were
> exposures in the courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of
> massive FBI operations to undermine political freedom in the United States,
> running through every administration back to Roosevelt, but really picking
> up under Kennedy. It was called "COINTELPRO" (short for "Counterintelligence
> Program"), and it included a vast range of things.

> It included Gestapo-style assassination of a Black Panther leader; it
> included organizing race riots in an effort to destroy the black movements;
> it included attacks on the American Indian Movement, on the women's
> movement, you name it. It included fifteen years of FBI disruption of the
> Socialist Worker's Party - that meant regular FBI burglaries, stealing
> membership lists and using them to threaten people, going to businesses and
> getting members fired from their jobs, and so on. Well, that fact alone-the
> fact that for fifteen years the FBI had been burglarizing and trying to
> undermine a legal political party - is already vastly more important than
> the fact that a bunch of Keystone Kops broke into the Democratic National
> Committee headquarters one time. The Socialist Workers Party is a legal
> political party, after all - the fact that they're a weak political party
> doesn't mean they have less rights than the Democrats. And this wasn't a
> bunch of gangsters, this was the national political police: that's very
> serious. And it didn't happen once in the Watergate office complex, is was
> going on for fifteen years, under every administration. And keep in mind,
> the Socialist Workers Party episode is just some tiny footnote to
> COINTELPRO. In comparison to this, Watergate is a tea party.

> Well, look at the comparison in treatment - I mean, you're aware of the
> comparison in treatment, that's why you know about Watergate and you don't
> know about COINTELPRO. So what does that tell you? What it tells you is,
> people in power will defend themselves. The Democratic Party represents
> about half of corporate power, and those people are able to defend
> themselves; the Socialist Workers Party represents no power, the Black
> Panthers don't represent any power, the American Indian Movement doesn't
> represent any power - so you can do anything you want to them.

> Or take a look at the Nixon administration's famous "Enemies List," which
> came out in the course of Watergate…You've heard of that, but did you hear
> about the assassination of Fred Hampton? No. Nothing ever happened to any of
> the people who were on the Enemies List, which I know perfectly well,
> because I was on it - and it wasn't because I was on it that it made the
> front pages. But the FBI and the Chicago police assassinated a Black Panther
> leader as he lay in his bed one night during the Nixon administration (On
> December 4, 1969). Well, if the press had any integrity at all, if the
> Washington Post had any integrity, what they would have said is, "Watergate
> is totally insignificant and innocuous, who cares about any of that in
> comparison with these other things." But that's not what happened,
> obviously. And that just shows again, very dramatically, how the press is
> lined up with power.

\-- Noam Chomsky, "Understanding Power" (2002)

------
gallerdude
The left thinks bad corporations are responsible for the ills of society,
while the right thinks bad government is responsible. I think we just need to
understand that A. both sides of the bribe are wrong and B. big is bad.

I don't know the solution for this - absence of government just leads to less
restrictions for corporations, and absence of corporations will mean that
worse corporations will be tolerated by the market.

~~~
roywiggins
The mainstream liberal opinion is that corporations should a) be regulated by
a sufficiently funded independent government agency, b) pay taxes, and c) be
required to limit contributions or at least disclose campaign expenditures

The only people advocating the destruction of corporations are actual
anarchists and anarcho-communists.

A large chunk of the right believes in the wholesale destruction of government
agencies- they don't think EPA should even exist. But the equivalent opinion
on the left has no political power at all. The leftiest member of Congress is
not calling for a Worker's Revolution.

~~~
tdhoot
The equivalent opinion of "disband one agency" is not a "Worker's Revolution",
it's "disband one corporation/industry", and there are plenty of those
opinions on the left (tech monopolies, oil/gas, defense contractors, etc.)

The equivalent argument to a Worker's Revolution on the right would be the
disbanding of the Federal government or a reduction to independence-day
levels. That opinion does not exist in Congress either.

~~~
roywiggins
Saying corporations should be broken up is not the same as saying there should
be no corporations. The former is just old-fashioned antitrust and yeah,
definitely has some sway on the left.

A split-up Google just makes bunch of corporations; abolishing tech
corporations _entirely_ and taking them over as a public utility or worker's
cooperative is what I'm getting at. "This particular corporation is too big"
is a mainstream-but-lefty opinion; "this corporation should be expropriated
and owned by the public" is not a mainstream opinion.

Steve Bannon is on record as wanting to dismantle the "administrative state",
he held the ear of the President for a while. The head of the CFPB doesn't
think the CFPB should exist. Paul Ryan wants to privatise Social Security.
"Shrink government enough to drown it in a bathtub" is a Grover Norquist
quote. They may not want to roll back the entire government to Independence
Day but they do want to take it back to the 19th century if it means they can
cut taxes. They don't just want less regulation; they want the feds to get out
of the business of regulating industry at all.

~~~
tdhoot
I'm not sure if we're speaking past each other, but it seems we're both making
the same point.

The right is _not_ advocating for the complete destruction of the Government.
The left is _not_ advocating for the removal of corporations as a legal
entity.

Those two positions are equivalent and neither side has cachet at the moment.

The destruction of certain government agencies is closer to the breakup of
certain corporations or industries than it is to the right-equivalent of a
Worker's Revolution.

~~~
roywiggins
I guess I'm equating "oil corporations should not exist" with "oil
corporations should not be regulated by the feds". The latter seems to have
some sway with the current administration, see:

[https://slate.com/culture/2018/11/john-oliver-last-week-
toni...](https://slate.com/culture/2018/11/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-
drain-the-swamp-scott-angelle.html)

This guy does not seem worried that he might look a bit cozy with the industry
he is supposedly regulating; he's practically asking the industry to ask him
for leniency.

There are countries with state oil companies and nobody is advocating for
that; but there seems to be people advocating for the total abdication of
regulation of oil companies. If there's a continuum between "state run" and
"fully unregulated", the "fully unregulated" side seems to have a certain
amount of sway whereas the other end doesn't.

