Afrasianet - Gillian Tate - Political scandals in the United States, such as shady investments, have become part of the normal behavior of political and economic elites, reflecting the normalization of political deviance and corruption.
The Financial Times has reported on suspicious ties between prominent political figures and individuals linked to corruption cases, highlighting shady investments that may have influenced U.S. policy.
Below is the text of the article:
Allowing dangerous behavior to become the norm makes us lose sense, paving the way for disaster.
Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel, is often seen as an unconventional figure in the market. This week, however, he took a political stance that went against the mainstream. Speaking in West Palm Beach, he complained that U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is "making decisions or paths that greatly enrich the families of officials in the administration." In other words: corruption is rampant.
While this is not surprising — it turns out that a member of the Emirati royal family invested $500 million in a cryptocurrency project for the Trump family days before he took office and the White House unveiled pro-crypto policies — what is surprising is that Griffin has stated the obvious.
In recent months, I have repeatedly heard America's corporate elite privately complain that the White House is being exploited for its own personal interests. Even some Trump loyalists have begun to feel resentment in silence. One recently told me in a text message (which has disappeared): "This is disgusting." Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump supporter, called his political slogan a "lie."
But until Griffin spoke publicly, none of the business leaders publicly attacked Trump for this. Rather, there was an atmosphere of exhausted capitulation, reminiscent of the attitude of some former elites toward the outrageous early rumors about Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted child sex offender. Fear is one factor, no corporate board wants to anger Trump by criticizing him. Greed is another factor: Many executives seek to maintain their influence in the White House in the hope of striking deals that benefit them rather than their competitors. Trump's divide and rule strategy has worked.
But a third, less common factor in the debate is the problem of "normalizing deviance," as engineers and social scientists might call it. The term first appeared after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, when NASA asked sociologist Diane Vaughan to study its causes.
Officials initially assumed that the disaster was caused by a single engineering error. But Vaughan rejected that analysis. Instead, she argued that NASA engineers, over the years, gradually became accustomed to small gaps in safety protocols — such as gaps in rubber seals — quietly ignoring them, because nothing bad happened (at first). Their concept of "normal" gradually changed.
Vaughan noted that "the social normalization of deviance means that individuals within the organization become so accustomed to deviant behavior that they don't consider it deviant." Or, as the Journal of Safety Research puts it, "in the absence of anticipated loss or damage, deviant practices become acceptable," through the "process of sagging." No one realizes that risks accumulate — until disaster strikes.
Experts in other sectors, such as chemical engineering, medicine, and aerospace, were inspired by Vaughan's idea. So did business schools. Ultimately, when companies are hit by a scandal, it's rarely because of an individual wrong decision, and standards often gradually deteriorate over the years, as a result of ignoring many small decisions that at first seem insignificant.
Two decades ago, business leaders themselves might have been outraged if Barack Obama or George W. Bush had accepted Emirati investments in their family businesses days before they took office.
But such stories are now almost normal, and not just in the Trump era, given the scandals surrounding Hunter Biden, the former president's son. The revelation of the Epstein-related atrocities adds to the psychological stress and apathy. The result is disgusting cynicism and distrust among the general public.
Of course, the economy and the stock market have continued to boom throughout this period, no doubt creating an additional incentive for CEOs to remain silent and normalize this aberration. But herein lies the danger: Just as small, widely ignored loopholes in the Challenger's rubber rings eventually led to its crash, the now-widening cracks in the US political economy could also explode.
As historian Yuval Noah Harari notes in his new film "The Doctor of Artificial Intelligence": "If you lose trust completely, democracy becomes impossible." The U.S. business and finance sector has long thrived thanks to a predictable and rules-based form of capitalism, and a loss of credibility could eventually lead to high political and economic costs.
In 2014, NASA officials outlined six steps to counter "non-discrimination" in engineering: "not using past successes to redefine acceptable performance," "preventing groupthink," "maintaining the independence of safety programs from the activities they conduct," and so on. These steps make a lot of sense.
What we need now, however, is much simpler: CEOs must follow Griffin's lead, especially by recognizing how perverse the current climate is — and aggressively addressing it. Yes, there is a moral obligation to do so. But there's also a personal motivation — if CEOs want to maintain a thriving capitalism.
• Source: Financial Times
