Are Blagojevich and Jesse Jackson Jr.'s Money Dealings with Chicago's Indian Community Tied to the Corruption Charges?

By Vijay Prashad, CounterPunch. Posted January 2, 2009.

Mahajan rose to the head of Mutual Bank, whose well-heeled customers donated money to politicians anointed by the Mahajans. Blagojevich was a major beneficiary, as money entered his campaign war chest, and his wife, Patti, earned huge real estate contracts from the Mahajan circle. In 2007, the government arrested and charged Anita Mahajan with overbilling the State for millions of dollars on her State contract. Harish Bhatt’s pharmacies are currently under investigation on the grounds that Bhatt’s fund-raising for Blagojevich turned into phone calls to regulators to lay off from their investigation of fraud.

All of this has frazzled the Indian-American community. Nayak is a well-regarded businessman and a philanthropist. His charity includes setting up hospitals in India and raising funds for tsunami relief. Nayak’s closest ties are with the Jackson family.

He won the PUSH Excellence for Public Service award from Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push and accompanied Jackson to India in November 2007. (Nayak organised a lecture by Jackson at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.) In addition, Nayak brought the main Chicago Democrats into the India Caucus and was a booster for the India-U.S. nuclear deal. Nayak, Mahajan, Bedi, Bhatt and others are all close allies who have leveraged their political connections for economic gain and used that money to strengthen their political heft.

Everything that the Indian Americans did is customary. Political campaigns have become overwhelmingly expensive. The 2008 presidential race cost more than $1 billion. In addition, elected officials live within the social confines of the very wealthy and often aspire to their lifestyle. Even as more and more millionaires run for public office, the bulk of the elected officials do not win on the strength of family wealth.

Their jobs do not provide them with the kind of funds to earn the six- or seven-figure salaries that they would need to fulfil their upwardly mobile aspirations.

Scandals are now commonplace. The fallout from the sleazy pay-to-play empire set up by the lobbyist Jack Abramoff continues to resonate through Washington, D.C., notably inside the Republican Party (many of whose elected officials, such as Congressman Randy Cunningham, are now in prison).

Near my town, in western Massachusetts, a contractor goes to see the local Mayor to deliver his regular payment of $5,000. The Mayor, Richard Goyette, stops him. “What, no envelope?” he asks, stuffing the money into his pockets. In a federal wiretap, Goyette complains about those who had to pay him to earn city contracts, “They’re all greedy.” The symbiotic relationship between money and power is evident regardless of the scale, from a small municipal contract to the large no-bid contracts for firms to operate in Iraq (such as Vice-President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton).

Sleaze is characteristic of American politics, and it is one of the principal reasons for the lack of faith among the population in their elected officials and in the political process in general. Large numbers of people refuse to vote on election day for precisely the reason that they do not trust the process. Their withdrawal allows the connected and the wealthy to make the system their own, cynically.

Obama’s election raised hopes and brought large numbers of people to the polls. Millions hope that it will turn the page on the corruption at all levels of government. The Blagojevich scandal is a reality check, a reminder of how widespread corruption has become. Obama’s link to Blagojevich threatens to revive a sense of hopelessness.

Blagojevich’s various scandals are quite pedestrian in today’s America. One of them is that he wanted a payoff for the expansion of the Jane Addams Tollway. That deal did not happen over samosas and masala tea. But others did. When Obama won, Blagojevich recognized quickly that he had a “golden” opportunity, a goose that could lay a million eggs in one swoop. The larger the deal, the less the squalor.

Three of the past six Illinois governors spent time in jail for corruption, so the odds were always against Blagojevich. His affinity with the Indian Americans is not just for their money but also because both share the hunger of immigrants (Blagojevich is the son of a Serbian immigrant and a working-class American woman). Just as Bedi, Nayak, Bhatt and Mahajan turned to Blagojevich for their ascent, he was gifted by marriage to the politically connected Mell family. Money, power, family: this is as much a Hollywood as a Bollywood drama.

See more stories tagged with: jesse jackson jr., rod blagojevich, raghuveer nayak, rajinder bedi

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu 

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