RECOVERED HISTORY: DON'T CRY FOR ME, ARKANSAS

[This was an attempt to put the Clinton scandals into a broader context. Note the reference to NSA wiretapping of American phones from abroad, something that would not make mainstream news until nearly a decade later]

SAM SMITH, 1998 - Although it hard to gather from the conventional media, the Clinton scandals reflect a broader decadent culture that has permeated not only Washington politics but other aspects of American life. Key elements of this culture are multinational corporate corruption; the political and economic influence of the illegal drug trade; disinterest in democracy and constitutional protections among politicians, the media and other elites; and a growing sense of impunity by those in power. This then is the context of the Clinton scandals: they are not aberrations of establishment culture but symptomatic of it.

Whereas Nixon's corruption represented a classic conspiracy -- a tightly controlled abuse of power, the corruption of Clinton's Washington represents a whole ecology of abusive power. What is happening now is bipartisan, multinational, multi-professional and pandemic. Thus the consequences are far more serious than Watergate and their cure far more elusive.

Specifically:

-- Corporate corruption: The corporate corruption of politics is at levels unseen since the 1920s or the late 19th century. Unlike these earlier periods, however, much of this corruption is no longer domestic. As former Senate investigator Jack Blum explains, "no really major crime is domestically limited anymore." Between the politicians who do not wish to pursue it and the primitive state of international law enforcement cooperation, much of this crime goes unpunished.

For example, the Justice Department took a fall on the American aspects of the massive BCCI scandal. For another example, some of the illegal money flow in Arkansas may have ended up in Grand Cayman, the sixth largest holder of bank assets in the world. As of a few years ago, the island had a population of 18,000, 570 banks, one bank regulator, and a bank secrecy law.

-- The drug trade: According to a UN projection, the world's illegal drug trade is roughly equivalent to the global automobile industry. Could such an industry exist in the United States without direct and significant contact with, and influence over, politicians? Of course not. Among the places the drug trade has flourished has been Arkansas, unimpeded by curiously incurious politicians like Governor Bill Clinton who repeatedly ducked demands that he investigate what was going on at Mena and elsewhere.

When special prosecutor Donald Smaltz attempted to expand his Agricultural Department probe to areas that might have revealed details of Arkansas' drug trade and some of the major people involved, Attorney General Reno turned him down.

-- The Dixie Mafia: One of the reasons Bill Clinton talked so much about Hope, Arkansas, was so that people wouldn't notice how much of his youth was actually spend in the mob resort town of Hot Springs. But Arkansas didn't really have to import mobsters; it had enough of its own, part of what law enforcement officers call the Dixie Mafia. As investigative reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: "Less famous than the Cosa Nostra, the Dixie Mafia was, and still is, far more dangerous."

During a ten year period from 1968 to 1978 when the Italian Americans mobs were in the news for killing thirty people, the Dixie Mafia was offing 156. Rex Armistead, who headed the organized crime strike force in New Orleans in the 1970s, told Evans-Pritchard: "The big difference [with the northern Mafia] was the lack of ceremony. It was just 'I'm going to get rid of Ambrose today;' I don't need permission; and I go out and do it. As simple as that. And that's the end of Ambrose. It hasn't much changed."

Bill Clinton has friends in the Dixie Mafia, he and his wife were close business partners of a crook named Jim McDougal, about a dozen Friends of Bill have been convicted or pleaded guilty of criminal offenses, others show up in DEA files as suspected drug traffickers. If Clinton were mayor of a northern city he would be known as a mob-connected politician.

-- The breakdown of law and democracy: Because of the growing tendency of America's leadership to disregard democracy and its protections, we have arrived at today's political crisis absent what used to be known as the "rule of law." Both Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton are now making their own rules, often replacing legal procedures with most cynical mechanisms of propaganda or tactics normal citizens consider underhanded. They are not alone. The FBI's reputation for probity has been in free fall over the past few years. The CIA is serving as security pimp for US mega-corporations with ever-lessening concern over domestic involvement. The NSA is tapping phones at an extraordinary rate on the pretext that violating constitutional rights is okay as long as you do it from a foreign monitoring station.

All these agencies have something at stake in the Clinton scandals and are operating according to internal rules that are often contemptuous of democratic safeguards. The result is not justice, but a form of legal anarchy.

-- The other side of town: There is a side of Washington that rarely breaks water. You are reminded of it when a private investigator tells you that the going rate for breaking into someone's checking account is around $300 a line of data. You are reminded of it when you hear of a bunch of congress members deciding not to run again and you remember how J. Edgar Hoover used to use his files to handle political problems on the Hill. You are reminded of it when you recall the 900 FBI files the Clinton White House improperly obtained and the dirt being spread around town about people's private lives and the suicides that don't seem quite right and Monica Lewinsky saying she doesn't want to end up like the White House intern murdered at Starbucks and then you are reminded that all that is part of the ecology of Washington, too.

This all should not be read as a roman a clef from which the reader deduces conclusions concerning specific events, but rather as a guide to the context in which these events have occurred and will occur in the future. This context is baroque, dangerous and heavily corrupt. It will not disappear because the media ignores it. We face a unique and particularly risky moment in American history and it does no one any favor to pretend otherwise.