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One way to reduce the influence of the ideological extremes is to change the way we elect our members of Congress. In 2006, only about 45 of 435 House races were seriously contested. Since members in so-called safe districts do not have to worry about challenges from the opposite party, their biggest vulnerability is getting outflanked in their own party. This is especially true in the era of bloggers, who make national targets out of politicians they deem ideologically impure. The result is that members of Congress from both parties tend to drift toward the extremes as insurance against primary challengers. Our government would be more productive—and our politics more civilized—if congressional districts were drawn by panels of nonpartisan elders instead of partisan state legislatures. This would make for more competitive general elections and a less polarized Congress. Making the change would require politicians to give up some of their power, never an easy task. But for future presidents looking to tackle a big problem, this would be a worthy one to take on.
Decision Points
George W. Bush
He could provide for that only in the same way that President Eisenhower had: namely, by allowing lower commanders to exercise their own judgment in those circumstances. In any case, the two admirals found this sub-delegation totally compatible, even obligatory, in terms of naval traditions. But in this situation the logic that applied to the Navy and to CINCPAC applied as well to all the other unified and specified commanders to whom the president had allegedly delegated authority. These were the theater commanders in Europe, Alaska, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Strategic Air Command, as well as NORAD, the air defense command. Unless the president forbade such further delegation explicitly (and perhaps even if he did), the example of his own delegation to CINCPAC and other theater commanders seemed likely to be imitated, not only in the Pacific but also in other theaters around the world. And it was implicit in what these officers told me that the president had not explicitly forbidden these theater commanders to delegate that authority any further in the manner that CINCPAC had sub-delegated to the Seventh Fleet. Nevertheless, I found it hard to believe that the president would have wanted any further delegations, or that he even knew they existed. His own action of delegation—assuming these letters really existed—distributed the authority to just over half a dozen four-star generals and admirals. Further delegations multiplied the number of individuals with authority, under some conditions, to initiate nuclear war, and also drew into that circle officers of progressively lower rank, lesser experience and maturity, and narrower responsibilities and access to information. At some point, as one moved down the chain of command, the advantages of providing further assurance of a retaliatory response would be outweighed—it appeared to me—by the increased risks of a wrong response. Not only were the risks progressively greater as lower units and levels of command became involved, but from the president’s perspective, the need or incentive for subsequent delegations was progressively smaller, involving smaller portions of the overall retaliatory forces. But to a commander at the lower level, whose mission understandably seemed to him to have transcendent importance if it involved any nuclear weapons at all, it wouldn’t look that way. He would want to be sure that “his” weapons took part in the big war—the fight for national survival and victory. If you left the decision whether to delegate further to each successive layer of command, I suspected it would be likely to go down to the bottom.
The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg
$234 Billion Twelve years earlier, in the late evening of September 13, 2006, a 41-year-old man named Andrei Kozlov, the chairman of Russia’s Central Bank and one of a handful of honest Russian officials, had just finished a friendly soccer match with other regulators at Spartak Stadium in Moscow. As he made his way to his car in the parking lot, two armed men approached him and his driver and opened fire. Both Kozlov and his driver were struck multiple times. The driver died instantly, but Kozlov, who was hit in the head, chest, and stomach, initially survived. He was taken by EMTs to Moscow Hospital No. 33, where he died on the operating table. He was survived by his wife and three young children. Three months earlier, Kozlov had traveled to Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to meet with that country’s chief financial regulator. Kozlov had identified a major money laundering scheme originating in Russia and flowing through Sampo Bank in Tallinn, and he wanted help in putting a stop to it. The Estonians heard him out, but did nothing. The money laundering continued unabated. Five months after Kozlov’s assassination, Sampo Bank was acquired by a larger bank from another country. Danske Bank. This was the same branch of the same bank that would end up laundering $200 million connected to the Magnitsky case, as well as the $8.3 billion that Eva and Michael would eventually expose in their reporting. Not long after the Helsinki Summit, in September 2018, Danske Bank finally published the findings of their audit. It quantified the actual volume of dirty money that had flowed out of Russia and the former Soviet Union through this Estonian branch over a 10-year period. The amount was $234 billion! That’s right. $234 billion. This was 28 times greater than Berlingske’s figure, and more than 1,000 times greater than the $200 million we’d identified. This shook Danske Bank to its core. Between 2017, when Eva and Michael started reporting on it, and 2019, one year after the audit, Danske Bank lost 65 percent of its market value; its CEO, Thomas Borgen, along with most of senior management, was forced to resign;I and a major criminal investigation was finally opened in Denmark.
Freezing Order
Bill Browder
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