Having just finished an exhaustive account of corruption in the Tammany Hall era called "Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius who Fixed the 1919 World Series" (by David Pietrusza), I am finally persuaded that my own naiveté in such matters is owing to the era in which I grew up. Postwar America was an innocent place.
After the Depression and "the good war," Americans were in a self-congratulatory mood. With the U.S. in the driver's seat, it was just a matter of time before the rest of the world would be converted to fairness, equality, freedom and, above all, righteousness.
Alas, people are people. Even Americans. It took me years to figure out that I wasn't any better than some poor kid in Beijing. I was just lucky. There was always food on the table at my house (and if we didn't clean our plates, pagan babies would starve). After church, my dad read aloud to us over waffles from the glossy supplements to the Sunday paper, all about how American breakthroughs in science were poised to eradicate disease and make the whole planet look like Disneyland.
It isn't 1960 any more.
The latest affront to my inner Candide is what recently happened to New Balance, the shoe company. If you don't know about the scandal to which I'm referring, it's because such goings-on no longer raise eyebrows or even merit a headline — unless a partisan outlet can find a way to spin it to make the other side look bad.
There wasn't a word in the New York Times (the story broke in New Balance's hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe — just another regional story, the Times editors no doubt sniffed), whereas the Weekly Standard and the Washington Times (vastly more conservative than the "left-wing" Post) found plenty to say.
What reportedly happened to New Balance, a company I'm partial to because it makes the only shoe that fits my long, skinny foot, is this:
Like the other major brands in its category, New Balance makes most of its shoes in Asia. Vietnam is the most important beneficiary of its outsourced jobs and one of the countries involved in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal whose main objective, it seems to me, is not to improve trade relations with Asian nations so much as to isolate China.
An unfortunate side effect is that deals like this not only have worsened an ongoing environmental holocaust but have eroded the wealth of ordinary Americans and have rigged the system in favor of those already invested in (and enriched by) the global economy. This, of course, is why Bernie Sanders ran for president, and why he won't win the Democratic nomination. That system is rigged, too. Donald Trump is the alternative candidate for those ordinary workers who have gotten a raw deal. Good luck with that, America.
The TPP is the economic component of President Obama's so-called "pivot to the East." Obama's legacy will be, or so he hopes, a "realpolitik" (Henry Kissinger loves the deal) power balance that demotes the Mideast to its proper status in a post-oil world and elevates Korea, Japan, Vietnam and other U.S. allies in Asia on the basis of their willingness to grow their capitalist industrial economies even if the polar ice cap melts, the desert swallows North Africa whole and the planet is poisoned to the point where it can lavishly support a fraction of 1 percent of the world population.
Let the rest eat cake.
New Balance makes about 1 in 10 pairs of its athletic shoes here at home. "Made in America" still means something to many consumers. Brand identity forced the company to break ranks with its industry and openly oppose the TPP on the grounds that it would cost American jobs.
Remember when a few members of Congress complained that the trade deal was being negotiated in private? This is the sort of thing that was being negotiated.
Our current president inherited the deal from George W. Bush via the Clintons, who got the whole trade-deal bandwagon going (with suitable bandwagon fanfare) with NAFTA.
Obama likes to have his way, but unlike Bill Clinton he gets it quietly. He is said to be more closed off to the media than any president in history including the notoriously controlling Bush.
The White House didn't cotton to an "insider" bad-mouthing the TPP, so it put the screws to New Balance, betting that its top management could be persuaded (coerced, bribed — you pick the verb) into tamping down the rhetoric in exchange for a fat government contract.
The contract in question was indeed enticing: The U.S. military is the largest single purchaser of American-made footwear. Some 186,000 pairs of shoes were up for bids. Obama would tip the balance in favor of New Balance, if …
Deal?
Heck, why not?
So the shoe company changed its tone on the TPP, put its shoemakers to work on various designs and waited. The clear implication from the Obama administration was that New Balance had only to sign the contract. The fix was in.
Another thing about our president: He doesn't like to look like a crook. He isn't in this to fatten his own wallet. Well, neither was Warren Harding, whose role in the Teapot Dome scandal would have ended his presidency had it not been revealed only after his death (the real culprit was Harding's Rasputin, U.S. Interior Secretary Albert Fall, who did enrich himself and served a long prison term for it). Harry Sinclair, a corrupt playboy gambler and oil magnate who shows up regularly in "Rothstein," was one of the recipients of the leases to oil land. When the scandal broke, it prompted a mightily indignant U.S. Supreme Court to compel the executive branch to testify before Congress on such matters in the future. The public had a right to know, right?
Not these days.
Obama regards himself as above such nonsense. In 2008, he campaigned against Hillary Clinton on her and her husband's uncanny ability to enrich themselves while in office, partly by playing nice with Wall Street. Corruption isn't in this president's DNA.
Well, power corrupts.
Barack Obama is no Warren Harding. Nor is he remotely similar to Dick Cheney, mastermind of the (also oil-inspired) Iraq war. Rather than go down in history as that sort of politician, the White House simply reneged. There was nothing in writing, after all.
Suddenly, what looked like a clean quid pro quo became a story of a morally questionable shoe company making false assumptions, unseemly ones at that, about the morally unimpeachable Obama administration. Bribery? This White House? Don't make us laugh.
What was actually said behind closed doors was more subtle than that, of course. But the whole story was never going to come out in the press, anyway. Not the important press. The New York Times is solidly in favor of "free" trade. Conveniently for Obama, so is the Wall Street Journal. The extreme right fell in line, taking pains to spin it as an example of Obama being feckless, not of Obama being corrupt.
They are still Republicans, after all, and the Republican Party's primary reason for being as far back as the 1890s, when Mark Hanna pulled the strings on the puppet president William McKinley, has been to use government as an instrument of corporate power. Even the isolationist Tea Party isn't willing, at least not yet, to question the big-business agenda if that means forfeiting an opportunity to attack a Democrat president.
What was New Balance to do?
Very little, as it turns out. Still hoping for a quiet side deal, the company played it just right. It said it would resume its opposition to the TPP, and it decried the blasphemous insinuation that U.S. workers are incapable of making military-grade footwear.
Blasphemous indeed. New Balance may get a piece of that military contract yet. Its strategy is very much in keeping with how things work in Washington these days and, I guess, always have.
As I said, I'm the idiot.
Bonnie Blodgett is a writer in St. Paul. Reach her at bonnieblodgett@gmail.com.
