Cultural Resources
Corruption
Articles/Essays/Op-eds
They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie? Gideon Lewis-Kraus.
Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they’ve both been accused of fabricating data. …
Ariely, for his part, predicted that nudges were just the beginning, and held out for more ambitious social engineering. He told me, “I thought that in many cases paternalism is going to be necessary.” ... It now seems as though the “fudge factor” was less of an explanation of a phenomenon than a license for it—yet another just-so story about why a little deceit isn’t so bad after all. …
George Loewenstein, ...has refashioned his research program, conceding that his own work might have contributed to an emphasis on the individual at the expense of the systemic. “This is the stuff that C.E.O.s love, right?” Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago, told me. “It’s cutesy, it’s not really touching their power, and pretends to do the right thing.” [read more]
Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off of Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison, Peter Schweizer.
“One of the biggest scandals in American politics is waiting to explode: the full story of the inside game in Washington shows how the permanent political class enriches itself at the expense of the rest of us. Insider trading is illegal on Wall Street, yet it is routine among members of Congress.” (1/20/2022: Pelosi opens the door to stock trading ban for members of Congress.)
Let’s Make It Easier for Public Officials to Be Honest, Binyamin Appelbaum.
“Friends, I’m here to tell you about a simple product that could help to restore public confidence in government officials: the index mutual fund. A surprising number of the people who run the country can’t seem to separate their private investments from their public responsibilities. They own shares in companies that they oversee; they make public policy decisions that increase the value of their private portfolios. They dance in the borderlands of illegality, and even when it’s impossible to prove they’ve broken the law, they are clearly trampling on the public trust… Public officials should be restricted to passive investments like index mutual funds, which invest in broad categories of companies or assets. Anything else, like a family business, should have to go in a blind trust… Putting money into an index fund is generally a better investment than buying individual assets — unless, of course, one is trading on the basis of insider information. (read more)
How Accounting Giants Craft Favorable Tax Rules From Inside Government, Jesse Drucker and Danny Hakim.
“The largest U.S. accounting firms have perfected a remarkably effective behind-the-scenes system to promote their interests in Washington. Their tax lawyers take senior jobs at the Treasury Department, where they write policies that are frequently favorable to their former corporate clients, often with the expectation that they will soon return to their old employers. The firms welcome them back with loftier titles and higher pay, according to public records reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with current and former government and industry officials. From their government posts, many of the industry veterans approved loopholes long exploited by their former firms, gave tax breaks to former clients and rolled back efforts to rein in tax shelters — with enormous impact... Even some former industry veterans said they viewed the rapid back-and-forth arrangements as a big part of the reason that tax policy had become so skewed in favor of the wealthy, at the expense of just about everyone else. (read more)
Life After White-Collar Crime, Evan Osnos.
“Every week, fallen executives come together, seeking sympathy and a second act... ‘Achievement, I think, is like a drug,’ he said, after a pause. ‘Once you achieve one thing, you need to achieve the next thing. And, when you’re surrounded by people that are doing that, it becomes self-reinforcing. When you also have insecurities, which a lot of highly motivated people do, you’re more apt to do what is necessary to achieve. And it’s easy to step off the line.’ Caplan convinced himself that paying to change his daughter’s test results was scarcely more objectionable than other forms of influence and leverage that get kids into school. ‘I saw what I believed to be a very corrupt system, and I’ve got to play along or I’ll be disadvantaged.’
Greed, of course, is older than the Ten Commandments. But Caplan’s experience illuminated the degree to which greed has been celebrated in America by the past two generations, engineered for lucrative new applications that, in efficiency and effect, are as different from their predecessors as an AR-15 rifle is from a musket. (read more) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/life-after-white-collar-crime” (read more)
How Did the Sacklers Pull This Off? Patrick Radden Keefe.
“Members of the billionaire Sackler family will most likely soon receive a sweeping grant of immunity from all litigation relating to their role in helping to precipitate the opioid crisis. Through their control of Purdue Pharma, the families of Raymond and Mortimer Sackler made a vast fortune selling OxyContin, a powerful prescription opioid painkiller that, like fentanyl, is a chemical cousin of heroin.
Though they are widely reviled for profiting from a public health crisis that has resulted in the death of half a million Americans, they have used their money and influence to play our system like a harp.”
The Sacklers Are Walking Off Into the Sunset. Reform the System, Ryan Hampton.
"...Ultimately, Purdue’s lawyers and a majority of the attorneys general managed to get most of the committee to vote to shield the Sackler family from ever being sued in civil court for its role in the overdose crisis, using a controversial bankruptcy mechanism known as nonconsensual third-party releases..." (read more)
American Corruption, Larry Walker.
“Self-serving, dishonest, unethical, illegal, full-blown corruption fuels the System — publicly, right before our eyes. We’ve seen the headlines, the articles, the statistics — and seem to ‘sigh and turn away’ as it has all become ‘normal.’
Here’s a list of past and current actions that would be less acceptable if only we labeled them as corrupt. You could add more. The longer the list, the greater the need for reform.” (read more)
Private inequity: How a powerful industry conquered the American tax system, Jesse Drucker and Danny Hakim.
“There were two weeks left in the Trump administration when the Treasury Department handed down a set of rules governing an obscure corner of the tax code.
Overseen by a senior Treasury official whose previous job involved helping the wealthy avoid taxes, the new regulations represented a major victory for private equity firms. They ensured that executives in the $4.5 trillion industry, whose leaders often measure their yearly pay in eight or nine figures, could avoid paying hundreds of millions in taxes…” (read more)
Podcasts
Empire of Pain - An Exclusive Sample of Patrick's New Book.
“While he was working on Wind of Change, Patrick Radden Keefe was also researching and writing a new book, a sweeping investigative chronicle about the billionaire Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was ruined by OxyContin. This excerpt from the audiobook, narrated by Keefe, tells the little-known story of a massive chemical explosion at a plant owned by the Sacklers.”
Film
Studio 54 - documentary.
“The story of the notorious 1970s New York City nightclub.”