Hard as it may be to believe for Republican Party loyalists, the corruption scandal engulfing House majority leader Tom DeLay has a bright side if you're a Republican. For every blow the party suffers as a result of having embraced the Wall Street Journal's exhortations to give corporations control over important public policies, the Wall Street Journal''s editorial page loses influence in Washington.

The Wall Street Journal's loss is America's gain.

For years, the Journal has been the leading advocate for a globalcorp future of naked unrestrained capitalism administered by multinational corporations in a borderless world, a world in which nations are markets, and humans are labor.

The amount of corporate money flowing into Washington has exploded over the past decade, and the Wall Street Journal has led the cheers as an army of influence peddlers converted those billions into legislation favorable to the corporations.

The Wall Street Journal was so pleased with the success the influence peddlers were having helping multinational megacorps buy up the American democracy, that it even ran a front page article celebrating the best of the lobbyists, Jack Abramoff.

"Abramoff's glowing press clippings," the Washington Post noted in a front page article in Sunday's paper, included "a July 3 story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that described the millions he was bringing in to his lobbying firm. The article...called Abramoff Washington's 'GOP stalwart' because of his pull with Republican leaders such as DeLay, who praised Abramoff for getting Indians to donate to Republicans."

No political party can throw principle and civic duty out the window and unreservedly embrace the philosophy of greed and expect to last long. Such a party would be run, necessarily, by the greedy and self-interested, which would selfishly view the party as a cash cow, milked by the self-interested for what it's worth, and eventually destroyed when a disgusted public flees for fresher-smelling political pastures.

Republicans may have reason to be thankful for the opportunity the Delay scandal presents to oust the Wall Street Journal and avoid a total destruction of the party.

As for the Democrats, an important choice looms that will decide whether the party successfully exploits the DeLay scandal, or whether the party will only carp feebly from the sidelines.

Democrats will want to consider the possibility the DeLay scandal may grow, and that it may eventually reach into the White House.

If it does, the Democrats win big.

However, the seemingly permanent paralysis of the Democratic Party, which is a natural outcome of the factionalism produced by the group identity politics the party has foolishly embraced, may prevent the Democrats from rising to the occasion. (If, as some maintain, Democrats are avoiding pressing too hard on the DeLay scandal because of similar scandals lurking on their side of the aisle, rank and file Democrats need to find the obstructionists and neutralize them. The Democrats are out of power; it is the Republicans who have everything--including the presidency--to lose. The party would be stupid beyond words to forego all the marbles in order to save, say, a minority leader.)

The most widely discussed and thoroughly scrutinized aspect of the DeLay scandal so far is Jack Abramoff's lobbying activities on behalf of Indian gambling interests. The story is juicy, to be sure, and the amounts of money involved is certainly scandalous, but the scandal is containable because the victims are not powerful, there are only a few of them, and they aren't even that sympathetic--they're casinos, after all.

Furthermore, the brand of corruption in the Indian gaming scandal is mundane--just another example of white guys ripping off Indians--and the remedy easy. Public humiliation of the white guys, a little jail time, probably, damages awarded to the Indian tribes, and the scandal is fixed. It's over with, maybe, the resignation of one member of Congress.

For these reasons, even though there are links between the Indian gambling scandal and the White House, it's doubtful whether the scandal has the juice to make the leap from Capitol Hill to the Administration.

Another aspect of the DeLay corruption scandal, however, an aspect that has so far received less attention, may have the juice to make the leap.

Jack Abramoff's lobbying activities on behalf of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands have all the scandalous qualities of his lobbying activities on behalf of Indian casinos, and then some.

Moreover, there are several classes of victims of varying degrees of power and sympathy in the Marianas Islands story, and the CNMI scandal is more permanent than the Indian casino scandal, because there is no way to undo much of the damage (like the suicides of Chinese peasant girls)

Furthermore, the CNMI scandal is spectacular in the scope and sheer audacity of its corruption. If convicted of a crime, the persons involved in the CNMI scandal would face much harsher penalties. The CNMI brand of corruption is the kind that most threatens civil society. It touches on important issues and big social questions. Finally, the scandal touches more persons, and of a higher rank.

The the Marianas Islands aspect, is a story of public corruption as pure and as dangerous as it gets. It's a story of well-connected influence peddlers in Washington drunk on the grandiosity of their own ambition selling influence on behalf of foreign interests to acheive government policies directly opposed to both the wishes and the interests of American voters.

The no-nonsense 15th Century political realist, Nicolo Machiavelli, wrote (if we adapt his language to fit the circumstances of modern America), "The laws of a free Republic must ensure that no foreigner as powerful as the people in a Representative Democracy shall, by any accident, get a footing among weak protectorates; for it will always happen that such a one will be introduced by those who are discontented, either through excess of ambition or through fear."

Machiavelli describes precisely the lobbying relationship Jack Abramoff and David Safavian had with the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands--a relationship Machiavelli would say constituted high treason against the people of the United States.

Unfortunately, with the White House in the hands of a man who was transformed by the Celestine Prophesy of political theory, Natan Sharansky's puerile The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, the WSJ will continue to find for some time yet Republicans who believe in such things as "labor shortages."

G.W. Bush has said repeatedly, "I don't see why, if there is a willing employer in the United States, and a willing worker anywhere in the world who wants to work, they shouldn't be allowed to get together."

That's pure Wall Street Journal; that's the gospel of greed, and it won't fly. As Tom DeLay always knew, and now believes, "Ye cannot serve God and mammon."

Tomorrow:

Mammon Ain't Pretty
The Marianas Islands and the ugly ugly world of the Wall Street Journal

How would the world look if it were constructed according to the precepts of corporate houseboy Tamar Jacoby, pictured above (right), who produces such clever ad copy for the cheap labor profiteers who pay her salary. A paid advertisement she wrote (published as legitimate commentary in Sunday's Los Angeles Times, to its discredit) shilling for Jack Abramoff's immigration policies, contained the line: "For all their new interest in control, immigrant-rights advocates continue to argue that there can be little hope of enforcing an immigration code based on quotas too low to meet U.S. labor needs."

Luckily, it's not necessary to speculate on how a world constructed according to the policy favored by this frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal's editorial page would look. As tomorrow's ezine will show, the cheap labor profiteers and their lobbyists in Washington (Tamar Jacoby's "immigrant-rights advocates") helped create a real live example of Jacobyism in practice.