Catastrophe (19 page)

There can be no doubt that the $900 million in new U.S. aid to
UNRWA—to say nothing of the more than $4 billion from the international community—will end up helping Hamas. Whether simply by repairing and governing Gaza while Hamas turns its attention to rocket launchings into Israel or through direct training, indoctrination, and sheltering of terrorists, UNRWA is a key to the survival of Hamas in the Middle East.

Whatever the intentions of its founders, UNRWA is no longer an impartial organization. Any belief that U.S. funds channeled through it will not reach Hamas terrorists is a dangerous delusion. The U.S. government should be commended by all nations for its work to close the flow of charitable contributions to terrorist organizations around the world. Yet whatever cash flow it has stopped in those efforts is dwarfed by the nearly $1 billion it will now be giving in aid to UNRWA—and thus, in effect, to Hamas!

For a nation that takes great pride in its claims of unwavering support for Israel and peace in the Middle East—not to mention its hard-won stance against terrorism—this is a devastating blow to our credibility.

ACTION AGENDA

It’s one thing for Barack Obama to spend and spend in the United States in a misguided attempt to revive the economy. It’s quite another when the aid is going to Gaza. We can’t sit back and let the fig leaf of UN involvement deter us from opposing foreign aid for terrorists.

The most vulnerable figure in the mix is Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. As senator from New York and a once and likely future presidential candidate, Hillary has always played to the Jewish community. In fact, when she ran for senator in 2000, she dug up the fact that her step-grandfather was Jewish—a discovery of a branch of the family tree that came just in time to appeal to the fifth of the New York electorate that is Jewish. (Funny that she never raised her latter-day claim of Jewish ancestry in Arkansas!)

But now Hillary is taking long and loud criticism from Jewish groups such as the Zionist Organization of America for her aid proposals for Gaza. We need to keep up the heat. Write her, email her, tell her you don’t approve
of your tax money going to Hamas—either directly or through the United Nations.

Hillary can be reached at:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

U.S. Department of State

2201 C Street NW

Washington, DC 20520

202-647-4000

E-mail address: Go to www.secretary.state.gov and click on “Contact Us” and then on “E-Mail a Question/Comment.”

From Idealistic Reformers to Privileged Insiders

Charlie Rangel and Chris Dodd have a lot in common. They’re both long-time Democratic members of Congress from northeastern states. They were both elected to Congress as idealistic, charismatic young reformers. They have both served on the Hill for more than three decades. And they have both risen to become powerful committee chairman—Rangel chairing the House Ways and Means Committee and Dodd chairing the Senate Banking Committee.

Unfortunately, they now share something else. Both have also evolved into cynical caricatures of the ultimate Washington political insider: greedy, self-serving darlings of the special interests, hypocrites flouting the rules and getting rich on their influence and political connections.

They think they’re entitled. Entitled to do whatever they want. Entitled to special favors because of who they are. Entitled to line their pockets.

Well, they’re not.

It’s time to send them packing.

They’re a disappointment to the people who elected them, and they don’t deserve the privilege of serving in Congress.

FIRST, THEY WERE IDEALISTS

In 1970, Charlie Rangel was elected to Congress, defeating the illustrious and iconic Harlem politician and civil rights leader Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Running as a reform candidate—and criticizing Powell for his failure even to show up in Congress—Rangel won by only 150 votes. He quickly became a voice for the low-income and downtrodden members of his constituency.

A few years later, in 1974, Chris Dodd was elected to the House of Representatives, part of a new generation of congressional reformers known as “the Watergate class.” These young challengers were supposed to be different—a new wave of honest, dedicated politicians who were chosen to purge the political system of the unethical excesses of the Nixon administration.

How time does change things! Now Dodd and Rangel are twin poster boys for everything that is wrong in Washington.

They weren’t always that way. Both men say they felt a calling to public service that was developed while serving their country in a foreign land. Rangel was only twenty years old when he fought in the Korean War; he was awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star after he was wounded by shrapnel and forced to lead forty members of his troop behind Communist enemy lines. In his memoir,
And I Haven’t Had A Bad Day Since
, Rangel described how his terrifying experiences in the Army changed his life, leading him to consider wider horizons. On his return home, he finished high school, college, and law school and became an assistant U.S. attorney.

Dodd took a different and less difficult road but one that was just as influential on his decision about what to do with his life. From 1966 to 1968, Dodd served in the Peace Corps in a small town in the Dominican Republic, an experience he later described as “life-changing.” During a two-year stint, he helped people in a remote village build a school and improve their infrastructure and community. He told National Public Radio, “I came back from that experience determined that, one way or another, I wanted to be involved in the public life of my country.”
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In 1969, on his return to the United States at the height of the Vietnam War, Dodd joined the Army Reserve. In 1972, at the age of twenty-eight, he graduated from law school, spent about a year and a half in private practice, and then ran for the Con
necticut House of Representatives seat that he would hold for three terms. In 1980, he was elected to the Senate.

WATCHING THE CONSEQUENCES OF CORRUPTION…

It wasn’t just the Peace Corps that inspired Dodd to enter politics. There was another big factor. While Dodd was living in the Dominican Republic, his father, then–Connecticut senator Thomas Dodd, was serving his third term in the U.S. Senate. In 1967, Thomas Dodd was formally censured by the Senate for taking $116,083 in campaign money ($782,183.62 in 2009 dollars) for his personal use and for accepting other illegal gifts.
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Chris Dodd was far from home when it happened, but he could not have escaped the family’s sorrow over his father’s downfall. Though Thomas Dodd avoided impeachment and remained in the Senate for several more years, he was a broken man, with few friends and no influence. Returning home, he lost the race for his own party’s nomination to the Senate in 1970. Even after the Democratic Party abandoned him, Dodd refused to give up and ran as an independent. Chris Dodd served as campaign manager for his father’s final, unsuccessful Senate race.

Dodd’s understanding of his father’s painful humiliation in the Senate and his stunning rejection by the voters seems to have left him with a visceral need to exonerate his father and probably contributed to his decision to enter politics. For the next thirty years he would try, with some success, to rehabilitate his father’s name and legacy. According to Chris Dodd’s older brother, Thomas Jr., his father is always on his brother’s mind. “He said to me once, ‘Every time I walk on the Senate floor, I feel that he’s vindicated.’”
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…BUT NOT LEARNING FROM THEM

One thing Dodd didn’t learn from his father’s tragic fall from power was to beware of friends bearing gifts. For years, other people have paid down payments, expenses, and mortgages on homes where he resided and that he claimed to own. Some of these benefactors had business with the federal government, which created, at the very least, an appearance of impropriety. Bur Dodd saw nothing wrong with that. He thought it was just a “courtesy.”

And that kind of courtesy is something Chris Dodd has come to expect. As a senator for twenty-nine years, he’s grown accustomed to the “courtesies”—small and large—that are provided to him. Dodd’s comments over the years suggest he thinks they’re no big deal. Most of us, on the other hand, might think otherwise and would describe the “courtesies” as special treatment he received solely because of his elected position.

The same might be said of Congressman Rangel. As a young lawyer in Harlem, he watched as one of the most respected leaders in his community, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was unseated in the House while under investigation for misusing $40,000 in public funds. Powell was a legend in his district. Elected in 1947, he had challenged racial discrimination in Congress, often inviting his constituents to join him in the House Dining Room, which was informally segregated and open to white members only. Powell became chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and worked with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to pass legislation creating the school lunch and student loan programs, increasing the minimum wage, increasing aid to education, and almost fifty other landmark bills.

But despite his charisma, commitment, and success, Powell lost the support of his colleagues and his constituents after accusations about misuse of government funds and long, unexplained absences from Congress. After he lost a libel lawsuit in New York, he was found in contempt and spent most of his time in Florida and Bimini in an effort to evade a subpoena. Eventually, he was expelled from the House during its investigation of him—a much more serious fate than the one suffered by Senator Dodd in the same year. Although Powell was reinstated almost two years later, his loss to Rangel a few months later spelled the end of his political career.

But Rangel, like Dodd, seems not to have internalized either the moral or political dangers of public corruption. He now stands accused of using his position as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee to solicit money from corporations (including AIG) to fund the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York; of failing to report $75,000 in rental income from his vacation villa in the Dominican Republic; of living in four rent-stabilized apartments in New York City in violation of the rent stabilization laws and at below-market rates; of failing to disclose the sale of a home in D.C.; of committing discrepancies in reporting the value of property he owns in Florida; of improperly using the
House garage to store his old Mercedes-Benz; and of paying his son more than $80,000 in campaign funds to design a web site that has been ridiculed for its ridiculous design and independently valued as worth about $100.

It is a sad story: Today, these two reformers, these two idealists, are both subjects of Ethics Committee investigations.

They have one more thing in common: both are favorites of the American International Group. AIG, of course, has a great interest in the work of Rangel’s House committee, which writes tax legislation, and in Dodd’s Senate committee, which controls banking and insurance legislation. Now, with AIG as the international symbol of everything that’s wrong with corporate America, their cozy relationships with that corporate pariah are contributing to their own deserved demise.

CHRIS DODD AND “OPM”—OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY

From the time he entered Congress, Chris Dodd quietly depended on other people’s money to pay for his houses and some of his living expenses. It doesn’t seem to have troubled him that most adults actually pay for their own homes with their own money. That’s the way we do it in America. We don’t ask others to contribute to improving our standard of living. We don’t look around and wonder who would be the best person to make our down payment. But that notion was apparently completely foreign to Dodd. Nor did it seem to cross his mind that there was something wrong with the specter of a member of Congress, a senator, asking for handouts from people who potentially had interests before Congress that could affect their livelihood. He wanted a nice place to live—apparently nicer than he felt he could afford on his own—and somehow, miraculously, others stepped forward to donate to that most worthy cause.

Time after time, Dodd’s patrons were willing to fork over substantial amounts of money to purchase and maintain various houses for him. His first housing benefactor was a Washington, D.C., club owner named Sanford Bomstein, who was a longtime personal banker and fund raiser for Dodd’s father. Later he turned to Edward R. Downe, Jr., a charming and generous New York entrepreneur who ultimately pled guilty to federal criminal charges arising out of his blatant insider trading.

Downe was a high-profile player on the New York political and social
scene. In the early 1980s, he frequently hosted political fund-raisers and cocktail parties for prominent Democratic politicians at his sumptuous apartment on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street in New York City. The duplex apartment on Central Park, graced with modern art and antique furniture, was a regular setting for his political soirees. Several times a month, he would invite people from his wide circle of friends to meet rising political stars. In 1986, he married the automobile heiress Charlotte Ford, the elder daughter of Henry Ford II. He and his wife then lived in twin apartments in New York City and separate mansions at the beach in Southampton. The one place they never seemed to spend much time in was Washington, D.C.

Finally, after Downe’s criminal convictions made him radioactive on any joint public documents with Dodd, a business associate and close friend of Downe, who received millions in federal contracts—stepped up and went in with him on a house in Ireland for Dodd.

With a little help from his friends, Dodd got a free ride for years. Then he turned around and made a profit on it, selling the D.C. property and buying out the Ireland estate.

Why would he do this? Because he could. Wasn’t he entitled? After all, he was a congressman and then a U.S. senator. And since he’d worked full-time in the real world for less than two years before he was elected to the House, he hadn’t had much time to build a suitable nest egg to buy a place of his own. So what’s a congressman to do? Live in a rented apartment in Washington? Not Chris Dodd! Instead he knocked on the door of rich friends—twice in Washington and once in Ireland. Rich friends who might have had some interest in what Congress or the federal government do. And who were only too happy to help the needy senator.

Given the private pain and sorrow and the public humiliation that Chris Dodd and his family must have endured during his father’s scandal, it’s astonishing to realize how soon after his own election Dodd brazenly accepted the financial help of a former crony of his father to pay for a house in D.C. for himself. The ordeal Dodd’s father went through wasn’t just a minor embarrassment, it was historic: only five other members of the Senate had ever been censured. After sixteen months, the Senate committee investigating the elder Dodd unanimously recommended censure, saying
that his conduct was “contrary to good morals, derogates from the public trust expected of a Senator, and tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”
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The charges were serious. The committee report accused Thomas Dodd of:

• Accepting $8,000 ($53,905 in 2009 dollars) in cash from the International Latex Corporation, in violation of the prohibition on corporate contributions
  
• Double billing the Senate and private groups for travel expenses for thirteen trips
  
• Accepting the free use of three cars paid for by a constituent for almost two years
  
• Diverting $116,083 ($782,183.62 in 2009 dollars) in campaign funds raised at testimonial dinners to his personal use between 1961 and 1965, including $50,000 used to renovate a summer home
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According to the renowned columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who first publicly exposed the broad range of Thomas Dodd’s unethical conduct, the Senate also ignored or failed to follow up on other credible evidence of wrongdoing, including his “backdoor law practice, payroll padding, payroll maneuvering, favors to gift-bearing lobbyists, [and] accepting free automobiles and airplane travel from those doing business with the government.”
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Pearson and Anderson’s sources were two employees and two former employees of Dodd, who secretly copied four thousand documents from Dodd’s office and provided them to Pearson and Anderson.

For example, according to the journalists, a former employee of Latex International had told them that the former head of the company had paid Dodd $8,000 in cash to get his support in seeking an ambassadorship but had then changed his testimony before the Senate.
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Another witness, Sanford Bomstein, also reversed himself, testifying that the money raised at the Dodd testimonial had clearly been intended to be a personal gift to Dodd,
even though Bomstein had previously signed a report that said just the opposite.
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