Corruption Has Become The Norm
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-art-of-the-self-deal-6cf57c5a?mod=opinion_recentauth_pos_1
Peggy Noonan is back at her post at The Wall Street Journal after her summer break. Her column today (August 22) is all about how corruption may have reached its pinnacle in the Trump Administration. She identifies two key areas in which Trump has corrupted the government—”personal enrichment and the use of the government to satisfy private goals.”
It has been widely reported that Mr. Trump pocketed $1.4 billion last year, much of it from profits in the cryptocurrency markets. His sons profited as well. His Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick also made a great deal of money as did Lutnick’s sons.
Not only has Trump et al. made a fortune, they did so in a conflicted fashion as they oversee the industries in which they have financial positions or persuaded foreign governments with whom the U.S. has formal relations to buy into their schemes.
In personal matters, Trump uses the Justice Department to wreak havoc on his enemies even installing his own personal attorney as the Attorney General. And let us note that Congress went along with this outrage as it has with most all of Trump’s corruption.
As Noonan points out, the outrage that used to be expected of the American people when a president behaved like this (Nixon, Clinton) is missing. She writes, “the extraordinary becomes ordinary through repetition; scandals add up and become a blur, not a call to action.” But she then follows with, “every abuse we accept widens the range of possible misbehavior for the next administration.”
Then she gets to the point that I think is most important. “The larger threat of governmental corruption is that it hurts the public’s morale, its sense of seeing itself as a moral actor to whom politicians have to answer.” Finally, speaking about an American populace desensitized to corruption in government, “they’ll have to admit they surrendered their own views to the views of the tribe.” If that isn’t MAGA America, I don’t know what is. “Nothing good comes from this. When corruption is allowed, it governs not today, but tomorrow too.”
I am going to argue that this is exactly what happened at MD Anderson over the duration of this century and explains the passivity and lack of demonstrable outrage from the faculty in its tolerance of the poor leadership in the current institution.
From the moment that John Mendelsohn got his hand caught in the twin cookie jars of Enron board membership and self-dealing by having ImClone, the company making the drug he invented, on whose board he sat, and whose stock he owned, test his drug on MD Anderson patients being cared for by physicians reporting to him, when none of the patients were aware that their participation in the trial was enriching Mendelson, MD Anderson was headed down the slippery slope of tolerance for corruption in the highest reaches of its C-suite.
If the Board of Regents had removed Mendelsohn on the spot, perhaps that downward spiral could have been averted. The rumor was that the then-Board of Visitors chair, President George H. W. Bush, saved John’s job. Eventually, for reasons of which I am unaware, Mendelsohn stepped down (or was stepped down) as MD Anderson president.
Then came the DePinho couple and their penchant for expensive furniture, first-class travel, and absurd promises about ending cancer and developing a new drug-based revenue stream for MD Anderson’s keepers on the Board of Regents. Again, the degree to which DePinho and his wife abused their positions is not entirely clear to me. I do know he got a true golden parachute when he was removed as president.
Following that fiasco and some interim leaders, came the current president who makes more money than John Mendelson ever dreamed of making and, unlike either John Mendelsohn or Ron DePinho, has no real credentials for the job, has done next to nothing in his career, and has no strategy for the cancer center beyond good ratings from lay publications and the construction of more buildings so he can make more money and satisfy his handlers in Austin. Here’s a question for you. Does MD Anderson need a new hospital in Houston, part of a new one in Austin, part of the Kinder Children’s Cancer Center, and a new 25-story clinic building on Fannin and Holcombe? I wonder if anyone has projected the financials and the number of patients likely to use these facilities and calculated the wisdom of this building program.
Is it any wonder that the Faculty Senate, when it existed, tried to resist these trends of absolute power concentrated in the hands of one man and, is it any wonder why the State Legislature did away with faculty senates?
Corruption on the top of many organizations has become the norm—in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, among the no-bid contractors hired by Donald Trump. It will take great effort by men and women of integrity to reverse this trend in Washington, at UT, and on Holcombe.
Don’t hold your breath.
