No Dreampolitik For Whites

From a hit-piece printed in the September 2010 Playboy, Imagination Nation - Tea Party Resurrects the Past to Deny the Present, by Stephen Duncombe:

Either party activists really are the ignorant hicks liberals believe them to be, or they truly believe the federal government is a foreign body (with a foreign-born president no less!) and their elected officials don't really represent them. All signs point to the latter.

Tea Party people are white-skinned, white-haired, white bread, white. You can wander the vast mediascape and not witness another sea of whiteness like a Tea Party rally. Over the past 50 years--partly out of political concern but mostly to reach as broad an audience as possible--the culture industry has largely rejected such bland homogeneity.

Conjuring up the past is another way of denying the present. "Take our country back!" is a cry you'll hear at a Tea Party rally. Back. Back to a time when white people were firmly in power and those of other ethnicities knew their place. But also back to an imaginary America that was almost entirely white. Back to Leave it to Beaver, My Three Sons, and The Waltons. Tea Party rallies--the costumes, the outrage, the provocative rhetoric--are so theatrical because they are theater: a way for a dying strain of white people to represent themselves in a mediated world that no longer recognizes them.

Politics, like entertainment and advertising, is about dreams.

Effective leaders and movements tap into our fantasies of the future, not those of the past.

Duncombe doesn't sympathize with White people, but he's not so alienated or consumed with hate that he can't see the grass roots motivations of the Tea Party.

Duncombe makes a living opining on the history and politics of media and culture. He's a cultural marxist:

Courses taught include: Struggle for the Word: History of Mass Media I, The Image: History of Mass Media II, Digital Revolution: History of Mass Media III, From Citizen to Consumer, Cultural Resistance, Politics of Media: Power, Persuasion, Perception, Politics of Style, The Social Construction of Reality, Walter Lippmann and the Manufacture of Dissent, Antonio Gramsci and the Power of Culture, Democratic Persuasion, Special Topics in Media.

His own milieu is a sea of Whiteness.

Duncombe is perhaps best known for his book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. Use Your Illusion, a Villiage Voice review from February of 2007, by Emily Weinstein, is subtitled "Stephen Duncombe explains why the left should indulge Americans' fantasies":

He was born into activism: Charles Dickens caricatured one of Duncombe's ancestors, a member of Parliament, as "the radical dandy," and others in his family fled Canada after participating in a failed 19 th-century rebellion against Queen Victoria. His father was a minister and civil rights activist—their phone lines were tapped when Duncombe was a child—and Duncombe refers, with affection, to his teenage "punk rock days" in early-'80s New Haven. ("That scene was exuberant," he says. "It was passionate. Politics should be like that.") He went on to co-found the Lower East Side Collective, a community activist group, and helped organize events with others, including Billionaires for Bush. Their demonstrations were carnivals, attracting revelers who'd dance in the streets. Then came 9-11, followed by war. "Politics became something deadly serious," he said. Liberals lost whatever sense of humor they had.

Dream could have simply been an elegy to that pre–9-11 era—a nostalgia piece for the recent past. Instead, it reads like a manifesto inspired by a pop culture fever dream. Seizing upon references high and low, Duncombe makes the case that spectacle can be an ethical and sophisticated means of appealing to, even seducing, the American public. Rather than bemoan the fact that people are obsessed with Paris Hilton and condemn video games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, both of which Duncombe discusses with a mix of awe and critical glee, liberals need to determine why that obsession exists—pop culture as road map into the American mind. "We can't afford to ignore it," Duncombe said. "If we do, we're writing off the passion of a hell of a lot of people."

The idea, which Duncombe dubs "dreampolitik," is that progressives, armed with strategies derived from sources as vast as advertisements, celebrity-gossip magazines, and the casinos on the Las Vegas strip, would then be able to enact a politics that enthralls a broader sweep of Americans. The left needs to start appealing to people's hunger for hope and attraction to fantasy life. What's more, Duncombe said, they have to let go of the belief—"naive at best, arrogant at worst"—that intellectual arguments should be enough to win people over, and that spectacle, as the Bush administration employs it, is something to which they shouldn't have to resort, a tawdry means to an end. "It's a pathos of the left," he said. "We're worried about selling out, but no one's buying." Besides, the point isn't that liberals move towards conservatism; it's that they become savvier and, ironically, more realistic about what it takes to win.

"The Democrats are going to lose unless they figure out a way of imagining the world," Duncombe concluded. "They need to figure out what utopia they want to sell."

Duncombe's assertion that "spectacle can be an ethical and sophisticated means of appealing to, even seducing, the American public", is made in a partisan spirit. Still, there's nothing here about spectacles drawing on the past being bad. And nothing about it being bad if it inspires stupid, evil White people. These are ad hoc modifications he's been forced to adopt just now, seeing that hopey-changey "progressives" have let him down while the Tea Party actually did what he advised. How humiliating this would be, if only "progressives" could be humliated.

Lawrence Auster, Champion of "The Jews"

The need for a better word for anti-Semitism. Commissar Auster is searching for a new term because "anti-semite" isn't working as well as he would like. Oh, and it seems the facts aren't good for "the jews" either, so they'll need to be replaced too.

Auster refers, indirectly, to Committing PC's Most Mortal Sin. After three years of presenting facts and naming names I stand by what I've written.

The Unspeakable Blackness of Section 8 and Crime

30,000 line up for housing vouchers, some get rowdy:

Thirty thousand people showed up to receive Section 8 housing applications in East Point Wednesday, suffering through hours in the hot sun, angry flare-ups in the crowd and lots of frustration and confusion for a chance to receive a government-subsidized apartment.

The Housing Choice Voucher Program, called Section 8, subsidized the rents of low-income families living in apartments and houses that are privately owned. The federal program makes up the difference in rent that the poor can afford and the fair market value for each area.

The same media pundits who pathologize the Tea Party as violent and greedy and too White won't be saying anything like that about this seething crowd of self-interested blacks, or how desperate they are to be delivered from their own kind.

Hanna Rosin's American Murder Mystery tries to bury the answer to the "mystery" of the relationship between Section 8 and crime in paragraphs of tedious, turgid obfuscation. I'll try here to cut through it.

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? [Lieutenant Doug] Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.

Note that neither Rosin or any of the people she quotes in this article, except perhaps the police, sympathize with the "fearful" Whites. Never once is the terrible cost to Whites mentioned. The main reason this is a "dismal" tale "they don't want to hear" is that Section 8 has not helped non-Whites as much as they would have liked.

[University of Memphis Criminologist Richard] Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country.

After decades of pathologizing millions of "fearful" Whites who objected to Section 8 and other government-imposed racial integration programs as morally and/or mentally defective, statistics show that our fears were justified. But that isn't what Betts is "discomforted" or "deflated" about. What's such a "hard thing to say or write" is that crime and poverty and blackness are connected.

Betts’s office is filled with books about knocking down the projects, an effort considered by fellow housing experts to be their great contribution to the civil-rights movement. The work grew out of a long history of white resistance to blacks’ moving out of what used to be called the ghetto. During much of the 20th century, white people used bombs and mobs to keep black people out of their neighborhoods. In 1949 in Chicago, a rumor that a black family was moving onto a white block prompted a riot that grew to 10,000 people in four days. “Americans had been treating blacks seeking housing outside the ghetto not much better than … [the] cook treated the dog who sought a crust of bread,” wrote the ACLU lawyer and fair-housing advocate Alexander Polikoff in his book Waiting for Gautreaux.

Polikoff is a hero to Betts and many of her colleagues. In August 1966, he filed two related class-action suits against the Chicago Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, on behalf of a woman named Dorothy Gautreaux and other tenants. Gautreaux wanted to leave the ghetto, but the CHA offered housing only in neighborhoods just like hers. Polikoff became notorious in the Chicago suburbs; one community group, he wrote, awarded him a gold-plated pooper-scooper “to clean up all the shit” he wanted to bring into the neighborhood. A decade later, he argued the case before the Supreme Court and won. Legal scholars today often compare the case’s significance to that of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

It could be argued that the genocidal monsters who imposed this nightmare might have done so out of ignorance. At least as first. For those who continue to support it now there is no explanation but anti-White animus. Here we can see that animus in the depiction of White violence, decades past, in the same tired pathologizing terms. Why else ignore the self-defensive motivations of Whites long since proven justified, and why present White violence as worse than the more brutal, more enduring, and more widespread black violence perpetrated since?

A well-known Gautreaux study, released in 1991, showed spectacular results. The sociologist James Rosenbaum at Northwestern University had followed 114 families who had moved to the suburbs, although only 68 were still cooperating by the time he released the study. Compared to former public-housing residents who’d stayed within the city, the suburban dwellers were four times as likely to finish high school, twice as likely to attend college, and more likely to be employed. Newsweek called the program “stunning” and said the project renewed “one’s faith in the struggle.” In a glowing segment, a 60 Minutes reporter asked one Gautreaux boy what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I haven’t really made up my mind,” the boy said. “Construction worker, architect, anesthesiologist.” Another child’s mother declared it “the end of poverty” for her family.

In 1992, 7-year-old Dantrell Davis from the Cabrini-Green project was walking to school, holding his mother’s hand, when a stray bullet killed him. The hand-holding detail seemed to stir the city in a way that none of the other murder stories coming out of the high-rises ever had. “Tear down the high rises,” demanded an editorial in the Chicago Tribune, while that boy’s image “burns in our civic memory.”

If replacing housing projects with vouchers had achieved its main goal—infusing the poor with middle-class habits—then higher crime rates might be a price worth paying. But today, social scientists looking back on the whole grand experiment are apt to use words like baffling and disappointing. A large federal-government study conducted over the past decade—a follow-up to the highly positive, highly publicized Gautreaux study of 1991—produced results that were “puzzling,” said Susan Popkin of the Urban Institute.

More fitting words for "the whole grand experiment", as well as those who aid and abet it: mendacious, fraudulent, genocidal. Criminal.

The best Popkin can say is: “It has not lived up to its promise. It has not lifted people out of poverty, it has not made them self-sufficient, and it has left a lot of people behind.”

For Popkin, Rosin, Janikowski, Betts, Polikoff, Rosenbaum, The Atlantic, Newsweek, 60 Minutes, and their fellow travellers, what's really important is that non-Whites haven't benefitted enough. No apologies to the victims of their violence. No refunds for those who have been forced to fund their own genocide.

The article concludes with a talmudic shrug, magically transferring the blame to Whites:

It’s difficult to contemplate solutions to this problem when so few politicians, civil servants, and academics seem willing to talk about it—or even to admit that it exists. Janikowski and Betts are in an awkward position. They are both white academics in a city with many African American political leaders. Neither of them is a Memphis native. And they know that their research will fuel the usual NIMBY paranoia about poor people destroying the suburbs. “We don’t want Memphis to be seen as the armpit of the nation,” Betts said. “And we don’t want to be the ones responsible for framing these issues in the wrong way.”

Pathologizing Whites as "paranoid" is how these issues have long been framed.

Alexander Polikoff's Gautreaux Proposal, written in Nov/Dec 2004, puts it this way:

Ending black ghettos wouldn’t end anti-black attitudes any more than ending Jewish ghettos ended anti-semitism. But it is not easy to find anything in American society that matches the black ghetto for its poisoning effect on attitudes, values and conduct.

Sixty years ago, Gunnar Myrdal wrote: “White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice.” Decades later, sociologist Elijah Anderson’s studies of a ghetto and an adjacent non-ghetto neighborhood led him to conclude: “The public awareness is color-coded. White skin denotes civility, law-abidingness, and trustworthiness, while black skin is strongly associated with poverty, crime, incivility, and distrust.” In American society at large, most whites act like the ones Anderson studied — their public awareness is also color-coded, and they steer clear of poor blacks and keep them in their ghettos. Predictable ghetto behavior then intensifies whites’ sense of danger, validates their color-coding and drives their conduct.

Sixty years ago this kind of anti-White guilt-tripping might have seemed brave or iconoclastic. Today the government and blacks are the ones inflicting violence on Whites. We can see that "prejudice and discrimination" don't cause black poverty, crime, and incivility. Blacks know it. They prove it by suffering through hours in the hot sun to get an application to be put on a waiting list so they can escape and live amongst Whites. We know that they bring their poverty, crime, and incivility with them.

Knowing all this, we are justified in distrusting, opposing, and even despising the professional grievance mongers who are complicit in it. Their sympathies for blacks, even if sincere, don't excuse the harm their twisted thinking has caused Whites.

UPDATE 12 Aug 2010: More on Janikowski and Betts via James Edwards.

Couple's findings link crime in Memphis to Section 8 voucher renters » The Commercial Appeal, by Fredric Koeppel, 11 Sept 2008:

In other words, crime follows poverty wherever it goes.

"Well, that's a bit of a simplification," said Janikowski, associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Memphis and director of the Center for Community Criminology and Research, "though that's the way our studies have been interpreted. Crime and poverty are inextricably linked, there's no question, but it's not that poverty causes crime. Poverty creates a contact point that exacerbates all sorts of stresses on people. It's not that there's any one cause. It's a confluence of stresses."

In other words, crime and poverty and other stresses follow blacks wherever they go. There is no question that Section 8 has shifted crime and poverty to neighborhoods previously unafflicted by such problems. There is no question this has exacerbated all sorts of stresses on the people in these predominantly White neighborhoods, impoverishing them and making them miserable enough to leave, if they can. Clearly Janikowski isn't talking about these stresses. The attempt here is to obfuscate the link between blackness and crime and poverty. And it is done even while the problems are deliberately simplified and explicitly linked to Whiteness, which is consistently offered both as the only cause for the problems and as the only obstacle to ending them.

As outsiders to Memphis and as a couple committed to public service, Betts and Janikowski feel keenly the ambivalence of their position. They have, after all, and almost inadvertently, delivered the bad news that the Section 8 housing program in Memphis is not working. They are white college professors, trained in academic research; most residents of public housing are poor and black and uneducated.

The "bad news" here is not that Section 8 has been foisted on Whites who don't want it, justified by historic anti-White stereotypes and libels, and when it is empirically demonstrated not to lift blacks out of poverty and crime, that this too is blamed on Whites. That's just how the "bad news" (i.e. blackness is linked to crime and poverty) has been framed. It is classic blame-the-victim apologia from fulminating hypocrites who make their living sniffing out and pathologizing stereotypes, libels, and blaming-the-victim. The bad news for Whites is that Section 8 exists - that there's no question we, as a group, pay for it and are harmed by it.

At that meeting [where Betts and Janikowski presented their findings to the Memphis City Council] was Robert Lipscomb, director of the city's Housing and Community Development division. He remains among their most vocal detractors.

Lipscomb is black. He unequivocally describes Section 8 participants as "the victims of crime, not the cause".

"Well, Robert has his viewpoint," said Janikowski. "Maybe we should have put it differently, not emphasized vouchers so much. We have gotten local feedback that has been much more positive, but people have been saying racist things."

"There's been so much follow-up at the national level from people who have no background at the local level," said Betts. "The feeling that we share ideas with right-wing bloggers is devastating."

Janikowski regrets that he didn't try sooner and harder to frame the problems even more simply and explicitly as being caused by "racists" and "right-wing bloggers". The fact is that Whites at the local level have been deliberately harmed by the anti-White/pro-black policies. These policies are advocated by dishonest snake-oil salesmen operating at the national level, who are provided megaphones by media and academia and courts to broadcast their poisonous ideas.

Omar Thornton's "Anti-Racist" Killing Spree

Oddly, last night Manchester, Connecticut Shooting.: Several Dead; Omar Thornton Identified As Shooter, at the LA Times, was at the top of a Google news search for Thornton. The fact that Thornton was black was mentioned three or four paragraphs in. On page 4 the significance of the Hollander family was mentioned. Unfortunately I did not excerpt the story, and cannot find any archive of it.

Today that LAT link redirects to a two page report, Manchester Shooting: 9 Dead; Omar Thornton Identified As Shooter at Courant.com, which omits both facts.

Searching again today it is possible to find other stories that make Thornton's race and race-based motivation clear, eg. Omar Thornton: "I Killed the Five Racists" - Crimesider - CBS News.

However, most mainstream stories have, as of now, reduced the jewish angle to orthodox jew Louis Felder being amongst those killed.

The Hollander reference remains at Jewish father of 3 killed in Conn. rampage | JTA - Jewish & Israel News:

Steve Hollander, the company's head of marketing, and a member of the Hollander family that founded and owns the company, was reported to have been shot, according to the Hartford Courant.

“The Hollander family is probably one of the most venerated families in the Hartford area in the Jewish community," U.S. Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) told the Courant. "There isn’t a charity that they haven’t contributed to.”

The LAT and Courant may have memory-holed this aspect of the story, but the New York Times hasn't: Behind Hartford Distributors, a Charitable Family.

When Whites commit crimes, nobody in the media makes excuses. If there's a racial angle it is magnified, not suppressed. Such incidents produce immediate calls to pathologize and silence "conservatives"/"teabaggers"/"haters", however tenuously linked to the incident. The insinuation, if not outright accusation, is that any expression of collective interests by Whites is immoral, unethical, and evil. Even when Whites don't explicitly identify or organize by race we are cynically accused of deviously hiding our true motives.

Of course the broad-based anti-White "anti-racism" pumped out by the media 24/7 can be measured by the same yardstick. The media uniformly treats "people of color" as having legitimate grievances both as a whole as as various independent non-White "communities". They serve up numerous narratives concerning suffering and perennial victimhood at the hands of Whites, encourage activism on this basis, and generally defend those who do act. Taken as a whole it constitutes a deliberate incitement to violence against Whites. And that's exactly what it produces.

Sometimes this impacts jews. To the extent Thornton was acting on a hatred of Whites he'll be painted by the media as a victim and "racism" will be blamed. On the other hand, if it is determined that Thornton was acting against jews he'll be demonized and the most politically incorrect form of "racism", "anti-semitism", will be blamed. Either way, "anti-racism" is both excused and validated at the same time.

See also Christoper Donovan: Hate-Fueled Black Mass Murderer in Connecticut Spun as ‘Disgruntled Man’ by Media at The Occidental Observer Blog, and Racism Charges Not Without Consequences at Mangan's.

Tag Teaming Media Ownership

Newsweek Losses Revealed - The Daily Beast, 3 Aug 2010:

Yesterday's purchase of a 77-year-old magazine, Newsweek, by a 91-year-old audio magnate, Sidney Harman, had all the makings of a feel-good story, even as editor Jon Meacham announced his departure. A venerable media franchise rescued from an uncertain future by someone who loves the printed word—Harman is the author of two books and has said that writing "enables the process of self-discovery"—and considers Newsweek a "national treasure."

But make no mistake, Harman's pocket change purchase of Newsweek—he paid $1, plus the assumption of liabilities for the magazine—has to be a passion play, because it certainly isn't a financial one. The Daily Beast has obtained a copy of the 66-page sales memorandum that the Newsweek seller, the Washington Post Co., gave to prospective buyers, and it paints a picture of a media property given to someone unequipped to fundamentally change the current trajectory.

As with many weeklies, Newsweek's financial freefall is jarring. Revenue dropped 38 percent between 2007 and 2009, to $165 million. Newsweek's negligible operating loss (not including certain pension and early retirement changes) of $3 million in 2007 turned into a bloodbath: the business lost $32 million in 2008 and $39.5 million in 2009. Even after reducing headcount by 33 percent, and slashing the number of issues printed and distributed to readers each week, from 2.6 million to 1.5 million, the 2010 operating loss is still forecast at $20 million.

In fairness to Harman, many moguls, from Si Newhouse (The New Yorker) to David Bradley (The Atlantic) have had the patience to see their money-losing gems all the way into the black. But the print media outlook has never been worse—and even billionaires tire of losing money. For every Newhouse and Bradley, there are currently two Sam Zells, who had employees of the Tribune Company rejoicing about their good fortune in finding a benefactor willing to sustain millions of dollars in losses to protect journalism's standing as a public trust.

Not unlike Harman, Zell, too, promised minimal layoffs and a commitment to finding a business model that worked, Zell's tune quickly changed after realizing the realities of today's printed media world, however, and multiple rounds of layoffs and an eventual bankruptcy proceeding are the legacy his Tribune purchase left behind.

Those are the kind of realities that prompted Fred Drasner, the former CEO of Daily News and US News and World Report who also bid on Newsweek, to sum up Harman's $1 acquisition this way: "I think he paid a very full price."

Sidney Harman buys Newsweek - POLITICO.com, 2 Aug 2010:

Graham personally chose Harman from among several well-heeled bidders, in part because he would provide the most continuity for the magazine, according to the sources.

The other two finalists were New Yorkers: Marc Lasry, an influential Democratic donor who heads Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund where Chelsea Clinton worked; and Fred Drasner, former part owner of the Washington Redskins and former co-publisher of the New York Daily News.

Graham felt comfortable with Harman’s centrist politics, and was comforted by the idea of selling to a stalwart of the Washington establishment. Harman is expected to preserve the serious-minded, essentially New-Democratic tone Meacham set for the magazine.

From this friendly spin you'd think all these cold calculators want to own businesses that lose tens of millions annually because they're soft-headed "philanthropists" who just love "journalism", not because they've coldly calculated that media outlets provide them a political megaphone with which to tell the masses how and what to think.

Democracy is the theory that you have as much power and influence as plutocratic moguls like Harman, Newhouse, Bradley, Zell, Drasner, Lasry, ...

The Washington Post Company Agrees to Sell NEWSWEEK to Sidney Harman - Newsweek, 2 Aug 2010:

Asked why he wanted to purchase NEWSWEEK, Harman, in a brief interview, said he saw it as an "opportunity to synthesize all of that experience [in industry, education, and government]. I couldn't pass it up."

He added, "I did not and do not think of this in traditional business terms. The purpose of the investment is to provide fuel for the transition of the magazine in its current position into a thriving operation in the print, mobile, and digital worlds ... I'll consider it a victory when it breaks even. Breaking even is a big deal."

Harman’s wife, Jane Harman, is a member of Congress representing California’s 36th Congressional district in Los Angeles’s South Bay area, since 1993. She is chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence & Terrorism Risk Assessment, and is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, where she sits on the Health and Energy & Environment Subcommittees.

CQ Politics | Wiretap Recorded Rep. Harman Discussing Aid for AIPAC Defendants, 19 April 2009:

Rep. Jane Harman , a California Democrat long involved in intelligence issues, was overheard on a 2005 National Security Agency wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

“It’s the deepest kind of corruption,” said one of the sources, a recently retired law enforcement official who was involved in the AIPAC investigation. “It’s a story about the corruption of government — not legal corruption necessarily, but ethical corruption.”

Spy Story: Harman, Saban, and AIPAC | The Nation, 20 April 2009:

Who was Harman talking to when she was caught on tape by the NSA? Stein says she was speaking to a suspected "Israeli agent." The Jewish Telegraph Agency suggests -- as did earlier reports, in 2006, when the story first broke -- that the person lobbying Harman to intervene in the AIPAC case was Haim Saban, a top Democratic fundraiser:

Similar reports surfaced in October 2006, just prior to the midterm elections. Those reports named the Israeli "agent" as Haim Saban, the Israeli-American entertainment magnate who is a major donor to the Democratic Party and to AIPAC.

Federal prosecutors eventually abandoned the espionage-law case against AIPACers Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman. The non-jew involved, Lawrence Franklin, got 12 years.

Who Rules America?