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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In "Pigs at the Trough," the former Republican skewers corporate evildoers. But don't call her a Democrat.
Feb 11, 2003 | Ever since Arianna Huffington began her transformation from Newt Gingrich Republican to scourge of corporate evildoers, critics and admirers alike have tried to find her a new label. Is she a Democrat now? A John McCain Republican? Some kind of left-winger? Two weeks ago, the Portland Oregonian decided that whatever she is, Huffington isn't a journalist anymore, insisting that her satiric, widely covered ad campaign linking SUVs to terrorism had crossed the invisible line that separates analysts from activists, and dropped her syndicated column.
That's Portland's loss. Whatever Huffington decides to call herself, she is a lucid, entertaining writer, one of the best working in the limiting 750-words-and-out Op-Ed form today. She's been chipping away at her new book, "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America," for the last two years in the pages of Salon and roughly 50 newspapers, using her twice-weekly column to gather the raw material on the looting of America by greedy corporate titans.
Huffington has served as the diarist of corporate excess during the twilight of the new economy, and it's tempting to say the book wrote itself. Headlines about corporate corruption have come at us almost daily, and screenwriters couldn't make up some of the surreal details: Adelphia CEO John Rigas borrowing millions from his troubled company and using it to build a golf course in his own backyard; WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers, who hid the company's staggering losses (and also helped himself to lucrative loans) while suggesting that supervisors count coffee filters to make sure employees weren't taking them home; stock analyst Jack Grubman trading his positive rating of AT&T stock for fun, profit and a nursery school recommendation for his twins.
But "Pigs" is not just a who's who of the corrupt and the callous. The book captures how an insular, self-dealing world of stock analysts, accountants, CEOs, lobbyists and government regulators brought us the last two years of corporate scandals. She quotes Gore Vidal approvingly: "What we have in this country is socialism for the rich, and free enterprise for the poor," and she shows exactly how it works. She's most scathing, and hilarious, on what she calls the "upstairs-downstairs" nature of modern American life, in which average Americans work hard, pay taxes and go to prison if they screw up, while corporate chieftains make huge salaries even when their companies tank, evade taxes, and get a slap on the wrist for wrongdoing.
Of course, Huffington's current political incarnation -- anti-SUV polemicist, diarist of corporate greed -- is an unlikely development for a woman who came to American political prominence as the wife of oil magnate Michael Huffington, a Republican congressional representative best known for spending $30 million to almost knock off California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 1994. She was widely viewed as the brains behind the campaign, and when it failed, she went on to work with House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Then she began a slow, surprising evolution leftward -- talking up the rumors of Warren Beatty's presidential run, championing the candidacy of Republican insurgent John McCain, hosting the distinctly activist Shadow Conventions during the boring Democratic and Republican presidential-nominating gatherings in 2000, and finally, organizing the Detroit Project, which raised money and produced the controversial anti-SUV ads.
For three years, it's been a parlor game among liberals and lefties: Is Huffington for real? Can we trust her? Some of the criticism has seemed simply sexist. Mother Jones dismissed her as "a former conservative vamp," while writing favorably about the Shadow Conventions in 2000. That same year, the Nation had one of its famous in-house brawls over Huffington's authenticity, with David Corn and Marc Cooper publicly vouching for her and Katha Pollitt holding out, arguing that the columnist had reinvented herself too many times to be trusted. Ironically, some of her worst critics have been women. Writing for "In These Times," Laura Flanders also doubted Huffington's conversion, and even suggested she'd traded on the power of the men in her life to get ahead -- when in the case of the not-terribly-charismatic Michael Huffington, at least, it obviously worked the other way around.
But Huffington's work on crucial issues -- from child poverty to the drug war, corporate reform, fuel efficiency, tax justice -- has mostly silenced her critics on the left. There's still frustration at her refusal to pick a political label -- to declare herself a liberal, a lefty, a Democrat, a Green. She won't be pushed. "I'm an independent," she told Salon, over and over again. Salon columnist Joe Conason was a Huffington holdout, savaging her last book, "How to Overthrow the Government," in the Los Angeles Times. But while Conason says he still doesn't always agree with her, he counts her as a reliable ally. "She has stuck it out and proved her sincerity," he says.
Salon talked to Huffington about "Pigs," politics and her political conversion -- and why she resists labels.
Do you think if Enron and the wave of corporate scandals hadn't happened in the wake of Sept. 11, the Bush administration would have paid a higher political price?
Well, yes -- but we're not in Act V of this story yet. The last chapter, the conclusion, has yet to be written. And the conclusion has to be written by an outraged public. It won't be changed by the Democratic leadership in Washington. It will have to come from the people. But I believe this is a populist moment. I think people are going to be galvanized. Sure, it's going to be a small minority, but that's all it takes to make real change. The politicians are just so spineless -- but that's the good news, because it means they can be scared by public outrage.
But let me push you on that a little: Just as people talk about "compassion fatigue" about social problems, isn't there a kind of "outrage fatigue" at this wave of corporate scandals? In the book you refer to "scandal fatigue." It seems like there are headlines day after day, but what's come of it? Certainly it didn't matter during the midterm elections. Where are you seeing the outrage and activism?
Well, in the midterm elections, the Democrats running didn't make it an issue. Anyway, you can't look to traditional party politics. We have to go into the other American tradition of grass-roots politics. In American history, social movements and social change start with small numbers of people -- the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the antiwar movement, the AIDS movement -- all started with small groups of people mobilizing at the grass-roots level. They were not initiated by Washington. It was people sitting down at a lunch counter in Greensboro that initiated the civil rights movement. Not Washington. That's where we are at the moment.
I'm on a 15-college tour for the book. And I can assure you -- young people are absolutely outraged. I mean, they're always going to be a strategic minority. But look, it only took about 200 activists to change our policies regarding selling AIDS drugs to South Africa. Remember? You'd have these small groups demonstrating at Al Gore rallies, because the Clinton administration -- a Democratic administration -- had sided with the drug industry, which was suing South Africa for distributing AIDS drugs. And Gore changed his mind. The administration changed sides. So it only takes a small minority to make change. That's where we are at the moment.
Clearly this administration is practicing class warfare. They say their opponents are, but they're the ones -- look at that budget, look at the tax cuts, look at all the corporate welfare...
Well, look, I don't mean to be partisan, but when you raise those points back to back I can't resist: I know the Democrats are spineless, and usually do corporate America's bidding, but they did reverse themselves on the AIDS drug issue. And since Democrats use the rhetoric of fairness and inclusion and siding with the people against corporations -- well, sometimes you can hold them to their rhetoric. You can sometimes shame Democrats into doing the right thing, but on these issues I think Republicans are shameless. Their ideology makes them that way.
[Laughs] That's a good point! The Democrats may be more susceptible to shame. That's true. Definitely the chutzpah of this administration is amazing. The stuff with Dick Cheney and Halliburton is becoming more and more significant. You have accountants pushing these tax shelters and tax havens on their clients. Cheney is the poster child of tax havens. That's the Cheney mind-set. We'll never bring about any real change with Cheney and Bush there -- they feel it's perfectly fine for corporations not to pay any taxes.
So yes, they are shameless. And if this movement I'm talking about ends up shaming the Democratic leadership into challenging what the Bush administration is doing, that would be major progress. Because they do have the megaphone.
You won't state a political affiliation.
I am an independent. I have no allegiance to either party.
But you were a McCain supporter in 2000. Do you have any hope that he could run for president again -- in any scenario?
I definitely do not see him running as a Democrat.
Some people have urged him to run as an Independent ...
I would obviously love that, but realistically? I don't see it at the moment. But the moment could change. Who knows where Bush is going to be in the polls a year from now? The economy is so tragic right now. I don't think we can predict. But for me right now, the interesting game is not the 2004 race and who's running. It's how can those of us working in the trenches, in grass-roots movements, change the atmospherics in the next nine to 12 months to have an impact on the 2004 race. That has to be the highest priority -- to move these issues to the forefront. And the key issue is what I'm calling in the book the "upstairs-downstairs America." We need to be constantly pointing out how this administration's policies are exacerbating that, exacerbating the disparities between the rich and everyone else. That is the one critical issue, and we can see it in every aspect of life -- education, healthcare, tax policy. And it's not just the poor -- you're seeing middle-class people whose savings have been wiped out in the stock market, and they can't send their kids to college.
But apart from McCain -- is there anyone in the '04 primary race who you think is representing these issues?
I'm really not focused there.
So there's not even someone who's caught your eye. I'm trying to push you here ...
[Laughs] I'm really not focused there. We have plenty of time for that. The point I'm making to all my friends who have money is: Fund alternative media, fund organizations, fund grass-roots movements, keep building the critical mass. Don't pour all your money down the hole of 2004 candidacies -- yet. This is a window, a nine-to-12-month window, to build these movements. After that, fund whomever you want. And people are getting it.
Our readers are always curious about your political evolution. Occasionally we get people who still think you're a Republican completely confused by your columns. You were still a Republican, the first time we talked -- about six years ago, I'd done a report on successful inner-city anti-poverty efforts, and you called me because you were writing a column about it. And my coworkers at the time were shocked: "She's a Republican! Why does she care about that?"
