Journalist Thomas Frank, author of a new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (about the poisonous relationships between lobbyists and the US Republication Party and two degrees of separation from John McCain), talks about convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s Apartheid connections:
… the next stop in Abramoff’s political adventure was, of all places, South Africa?
He surfaced as the chairman of something called the International Freedom Foundation — the IFF — which had branches in Washington and in Johannesburg. They published a magazine and a bunch of newsletters, they sent out direct mail, sponsored conferences, gave out awards, the usual. Above all, though, they fought the critics of apartheid, in particular the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s group. Naturally they did this by accusing the critics of apartheid of being secretly pink, if not flaming red.
It’s uncomfortable to remember now, but the American right was pretty fond of the apartheid regime. Yeah, they made all the correct noises about how South Africa was moving in the right direction, how apartheid was not as bad as everyone said, but the bottom line for them was that we had to take South Africa as it was. It was too valuable an ally in the Cold War. Of course, they also shared a conspiratorial worldview with the apartheid government, making them soul mates in a larger sense.
The funny thing is, the IFF later turned out to be a project of South African military intelligence. For all its constant attacks on the left for being closet tools of the Soviet Union, the conservatives were the ones who were on the payroll of a foreign power — discreetly, of course. Abramoff and Company were, once again, fighting liberalism for pay. This was pretty big news in South Africa when it came out during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Not so big here.
So the IFF folded shop when apartheid ended?
Actually, just a little bit before. The apartheid government was floundering by 1992 and at some point it pulled the plug on the group’s funding. The IFF tried to struggle on for a short time on its own, but somehow that didn’t work out. As with so many right-wing groups preaching the free-market gospel, this one couldn’t make it without subsidies.
What was really fascinating about the IFF was the transformation it went through as the Cold War ended. Where once it had been a conspiracy-spotting organ of the hard right, it became libertarian. By 1991 or so it was obvious that apartheid was doomed. So the IFF’s new task, strange as it might seem, was to try to depict the apartheid system as having been an offense against markets. The IFF — a bought-and-paid-for front group of the apartheid regime, remember — declared that the only true way to post-apartheid freedom was through complete privatization and deregulation of everything. Free trade was also essential. So their magazine puffed for NAFTA. It announced state-run electric utilities to be Stalinist. It called for the privatization of oceans.
There were other groups in South Africa taking the same line, and the idea was to set the stage for a post-apartheid future in which money and business would be safe from nationalization. And they got what they wanted.
How does this all relate to the scams that landed Jack Abramoff in jail?
There are a lot of parallels between what Abramoff did for South Africa and what he did for his clients as a lobbyist, but most of them weren’t criminal. The key similarity is the concept of political entrepreneurship, of bringing market forces to bear on politics. Abramoff eventually became a lobbyist, sort of the ultimate political entrepreneur. Lobbying generally puts our relationship to our government on a paying basis, and Abramoff was one of its ablest practitioners.
Along the way, he and his pal Michael Scanlon set up a whole bunch of hollow nonprofit corporations, at least one of which called itself a “think tank.” And Abramoff continued to direct an army of pundits, particularly libertarian ones, although that’s hardly a crime. He also steered his clients’ money into the by-now-enormous conservative industry in Washington, essentially directing all sorts of advocacy groups in the war on liberalism. It’s like he had stepped into the role of the Pretoria regime, running and subsidizing a whole army of American ideologues.
Abramoff also managed to insinuate himself with the “government” of Bophutatswana.