Carlyle Group Redux

A journalist recently got in touch with me looking for some comments about how Bill Kennard, the former F.C.C. chairman and Carlyle Group Advisor also happened to be on the board of the New York Times. She wondered if I thought that may have skewed the Times' coverage of the Carlyle Group over the years, and whether I thought the Times review of my book, The Iron Triangle, was unnecessarily harsh.

I think the New York Times, and most other major media outlets, have misunderstood the concept of "conflicts of interest." Because we live in a litigious society, most people believe that if you can't prove something, uncover the smoking gun, or follow the trail of money, then it's not a crime.

But there is a far more insidious form of crime that happens every day in Washington. It is the kind of back-room dealing, the currying of favor, the unspoken arrangements that make good people make bad decisions.

Carlyle is an instrument of this culture. It seamlessly combines the worlds of politics and money. By concentrating so much political power with so much global wealth, it puts people like former president George W. Bush in a position to be spending wildly on military deployments that enrich the very company his father works for. That is not a possible conflict of interest. That is a conflict of interest. It puts the president in a position to either knowingly or unknowingly make decisions that affect his family's personal finances. That is the nature of a conflict of interest. It doesn't need to be proved. It just is.

Just because these arrangements are not illegal doesn't mean they aren't an outrage. And they should be illegal. Because if there's anything we've learned in the early days of the Obama administration, with all of its rhetoric contrasted against the repeated moral failings of its cabinet candidates, it's that we need desperately to believe that our politicians are acting on our behalf, not their own. It is hard enough to cultivate this belief when our elected officials' actions are transparent and scrupulous. It is almost impossible to cultivate this belief when their actions are opaque and in conflict with the interests of the people.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, and a host of other politicians (not just Republicans) should know this. They should know that the people need to believe in the righteousness of their elected officials. That's 90 percent of what leadership is about. But they either did not care or didn't understand this. That is why they lost the trust of the American people. That is why their administration will go down as one of the worst and most damaging ever. And that is the most tragic failing of our current political system.

As for the review of my book in the Times, in all honesty, I think it was spot on.

Comments

[Alan]

Kennard was a bundler for the Obama campaign. He was one of two Carlyle Group employees packaging donations for Obama.

[Robert M. Stockmann]

I still have that Redherring Article online :

http://crashrecovery.org/carlyle_group.pdf

Be careful when going to Russia my friend, its a lethal zone for investigative journalists.