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CounterPunch
November
2, 2002
A Day at the American Enterprise
Institute
by RUSSELL MOKHIBER
and ROBERT WEISSMAN
Didn't have anything good to do earlier this week,
so decided to spend the day at the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI).
AEI is the granddaddy of the big corporate
front groups. Their job?
Re-engineer the political economy to
the liking of their corporate paymasters.
Last year, AEI took in $23 million from
corporations, corporate foundations, and wealthy individuals.
Need to undermine the antitrust laws?
 Hire AEI scholar in residence Robert Bork to
spew his ideology.
Need to slander the United Nations?
Hire AEI scholar in residence Jeanne
Kirkpatrick to do the dirty work.
AEI, Heritage, and Cato, the big three
corporate fronts in our nation's capital, have done immeasurable
damage to our democracy, advancing corporatist and extremist
right-wing views.
We wanted to know: is it the power of
their ideas, or is it their power?
After spending a day at AEI, we suspect
it's the latter.
In the morning, we caught a session titled:
Europe: Anti-Semitism Resurgent?
Looked around the audience. There was
Bork. There was Kirkpatrick.
They were there to listen to what was
supposed to be a debate between two right-wingers, Ruth Wisse
of Harvard University and John O'Sullivan, of United Press International.
But there was little debate.
Everyone agreed that the issue wasn't
anti-semitism, as traditionally defined, but anti-Israel views.
In fact, Wisse and O'Sullivan had now
effectively redefined the term anti-semitism to mean anti-Israel.
We had suspected this, but didn't get
a confirmation until a questioner in the audience asked Wisse
about Billy Graham's 1972 conversation with Richard Nixon, memorialized
on the White House tapes, and made public earlier this year by
the National Archives.
In the conversation, Graham says to Nixon
that "a lot of Jews are great friends of mine."
"They swarm around me and are friendly
to me," Graham says. "Because they know I am friendly
to Israel and so forth. They don't know how I really feel about
what they're doing to this country."
And how does he feel?
Graham tells Nixon that the Jews have
a "stranglehold" on the country, and "this stranglehold
has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain."
"You believe that?" Nixon says.
"Yes, sir," Graham replies.
"Oh boy," Nixon says. "So
do I. I can't ever say that but I believe it."
So, the questioner wanted to know whether
Professor Wisse considered these sentiments, as expressed by
Graham, and widely publicized earlier this year, to be anti-semitic.
No, they are not anti-semitic, Professor
Wisse says.
Not anti-semitic?
No, anti-semitism exists today in the
form of "political organization" against Israel.
Inference: the religious right in this
country, as long as they organize politically to support Israel,
can say and think whatever they want about Jews.
Not anti-semitism.
We went for a walk in the rain, a reality
check with nature, and then back in to catch another AEI panel,
this one titled: "Does Excessive Regulation Threaten Subprime
Lending?" featuring Gary Gilmer, the vice chairman of Household
International, a finance company which just last week was slapped
by a group of state attorneys general for engaging in predatory
lending -- basically ripping off the poor with outrageous interest
rates and fees.
The company paid $484 million to settle
the case.
Household is one of the largest sub-prime
lenders in the country.
While sub-prime lenders provide credit
to borrowers with damaged credit, some of these lenders have
engaged in predatory practices whereby consumers -- even those
with good credit -- are targeted to borrow money on disadvantageous
terms, including high interest rates, steep bank fees and payments
for undisclosed insurance products.
The high costs serve to increase the
consumer's debt burden and reduce the equity in the consumer's
home.
You would think that the company would
have a sense of humility after being so publicly spanked for
engaging in such wrongdoing.
But no.
Instead, AEI gives the company's vice
chairman a forum to attack the same state laws that his company
allegedly violated and that led to the $484 million payment.
Tough state laws that seek to curb predatory
lending, like one passed recently in Georgia, have the finance
industry in a tizzy.
The finance companies say they are refusing
to make loans in Georgia, perhaps as part of a drive to get that
law, and other similar laws repealed.
Maybe it's time to simplify the entire
legal morass in this area by bringing back the usury laws --
by mandating a simple cap on interest rates.
The usury laws were erased in the early
1980s after a heavy lobbying effort by finance companies like
Household.
We raised the possibility of bringing
back the usury laws with the AEI panel members, but they unanimously
thought it was a bad idea.
We went outside again, to get some fresh
air. The rain had turned to a cold drizzle. In anticipation,
we returned for the day's final panel, titled In Defense of Empires.
Deepak Lal, a professor at the UCLA,
argued that imperialism should not be perceived as a negative
phenomenon. Empires provide international order. Empires promote
prosperity by integrating separate areas into a common economic
space. Empires are good.
After picking up the materials, listening
to about 30 minutes of Professor Lal's talk -- with no mention
of the violence necessary to create and maintain empires -- we
walked out, back into the rain.
And we thought: maybe it is all harmless
to talk this way. It's almost laughable.
Nobody can believe this stuff, can they?
Russell Mokhiber
is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational
Monitor, and co-director of Essential Action. They are
co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999.)
Yesterday's
Features
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International & Israel: Say it isn't so!
Jeffrey St. Clair
Gag the
Messenger, Kill the Fish
Ben Tripp
Fourth Estate for Sale: Unfurnished
Neve Gordon
Yigal
Bronner's Rights Violated by IDF
Kurt Nimmo
The Delusions of David Horowitz
Desiree Hellegers and
Laurie Mercier
Red Squads
Redux:
Portland Activists Mobilize Against the FBI's Joint Terrorism
Task Force
Anis Shivani
Anthropologists on Wall Street
Anthony Gancarski
All's
Well That Ends Wells:
Parching the Palestinians
Lee Sustar
Report from the Docks:
This Is Union Busting!
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- Saddam's Amnesty: Could It Happen Here?
- Criminalizing Dissent: a history and preview;
- Iraq 1987: When the Going Was Good;
- Egypt in Turmoil: an Anthropologist's Account;
- Green and Grounded: Profiled at the Gate.
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