Secret Empires

Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends by Peter Schweizer, 225 pages

In 2019, it became front page news that Joe Biden's son, Hunter, had been paid millions of dollars to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, despite having no experience in the energy industry and not speaking Ukrainian, at the same time that his father, then Vice President, had taken charge of US relations with the Ukraine.  Interestingly, Peter Schweizer had already reported the story in this 2018 book, connecting it to other business dealings involving the Bidens, the Kerrys, and the Chinese, Mitch McConnell's in-laws and the Chinese, Rep Danny Rehburg's family and the Mongolians, George W Bush's uncle and the Chinese, the Daley family and the Chinese, the Kushners and Qatar, the Trump sons and Indonesia, and more, establishing an undeniable pattern of attempts by foreign businesses - many of them with strong connections to their own governments - to influence American political figures by channeling substantial amounts of money to their families.  Although, as he points out repeatedly, such behavior by US companies towards the families of foreign leaders is illegal, there are no restrictions in the other direction.

It is worth noting that there are no smoking guns here.  Schweizer charts the flow of cash into the pockets of politically connected individuals, but he cannot prove that this money bought anything - even though it seems naive to believe that it did not.  There is a suggestion of another kind of naivete, however.  In the West, modernity has advanced an ideal of the bloodless, "rational" individual, but the Rest is dominated by more humane, family-centered cultures, hence the clash between the fashionable Western vision of a family as a collection of autonomous individuals and the belief shared throughout much of the non-Western world that all business is ultimately family business.  The author seems to assume that the Western view is both correct and stronger.  At one point, he quotes Chicago dynast Richard J Daley's response to a question about favorable treatment his children allegedly received from the city, "If a man can't put his arms around his sons then what kind of world are we living in?"  Despite Schweizer's intentions, this question resonates throughout the book - is such a world even desirable, much less possible?