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Nairaland Forum / Nairaland / General / Politics / You Think Nigeria Is Corrupt? Read This American Corruption Practices (660 Views)
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You Think Nigeria Is Corrupt? Read This American Corruption Practices by Nobody: 2:50pm On Oct 12, 2015 |
Those ratings that castigate Afghanistan and
some other poor countries as hopelessly
“corrupt” always imply
that the United States is not corrupt.
VOA reports :
While it is true that you don’t typically have
to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in
the US, in many key ways America’s political
and financial practices make it in absolute
terms far more corrupt than the usual global
South suspects. After all, the US economy is
worth over $16 trillion a year, so in our
corruption a lot more money changes hands.
1. Instead of having short, publicly-funded
political campaigns with limited and/or free
advertising (as a number of Western
European countries do), the US has long
political campaigns in which candidates are
dunned big bucks for advertising. They are
therefore forced to spend much of their time
fundraising, which is to say, seeking bribes.
All American politicians are basically on the
take, though many are honorable people.
They are forced into it by the system. House
Majority leader John Boehner has actually
just handed out cash on the floor of the
House from the tobacco industry to other
representatives.
When French President Nicolas Sarkozy was
defeated in 2012, soon thereafter French
police actually went into his private
residence
searching for an alleged $50,000 in illicit
campaign contributions from the L’Oreale
heiress. I thought to myself, seriously? $
50,000 in a presidential campaign? Our
presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars
each! $50,000 is a rounding error, not a
basis for police action. Why, George W. Bush
took millions from arms manufacturers and
then ginned up a war for them, and the police
haven’t been anywhere near his house.
American politicians don’t represent “the
people.” With a few honorable exceptions,
they represent the the 1%. American
democracy is being corrupted out of
existence.
2. That politicians can be bribed to reduce
regulation of industries like banking (what is
called “regulatory capture”) means that they
will be so bribed. Billions were spent and
3,000 lobbyists employed by bankers to
remove cumbersome rules
in the zeroes. Thus, political corruption
enabled financial corruption (in some cases
legalizing it!) Without regulations and
government auditing, the finance sector went
wild and engaged in corrupt practices that
caused the 2008 crash. Too bad the poor
Afghans can’t just legislate their corruption
out of existence by regularizing it, the way
Wall street did.
3. That the chief villains of the 2008
meltdown (from which 90% of Americans
have not recovered) have not been
prosecuted is itself a form of corruption.
4. The US military budget is bloated and
enormous, bigger than the military budgets of
the next twelve major states. What isn’t
usually realized is that perhaps half of it is
spent on outsourced services, not on the
military. It is corporate welfare on a cosmic
scale. I’ve seen with my own eyes how
officers in the military get out and then form
companies to sell things to their former
colleagues still on the inside.
5. The US has a vast gulag of 2.2 million
prisoners in jail and penitentiary. There is an
increasing tendency for prisons to be
privatized, and this tendency is corrupting
the system.
It is wrong for people to profit from putting
and keeping human beings behind bars. This
troubling trend is made all the more
troubling by the move to give extra-long
sentences for minor crimes, to deny parole
and to imprison people for life for e,g, three
small thefts.
6. The rich are well placed to bribe our
politicians to reduce taxes on the rich. This
and other government policies has produced
a situation where 400 American billionaires
are worth $2 trillion, as much as the bottom
150 million Americans.
That kind of wealth inequality hasn’t been
seen in the US since the age of the robber
barons in the nineteenth century. Both eras
are marked by extreme corruption.
7. The National Security Agency’s domestic
spying is a form of corruption in itself, and
lends itself to corruption. With some 4
million government employees and private
contractors engaged in this surveillance, it is
highly unlikely that various forms of insider
trading and other corrupt practices are not
being committed. If you knew who Warren
Buffett and George Soros were calling every
day, that alone could make you a killing. The
American political class wouldn’t be
defending this indefensible invasion of
citizens’ privacy so vigorously if someone
somewhere weren’t making money on it.
8. As for insider trading, it turns out
Congress undid much of the law it hastily
passed
forbidding members, rather belatedly, to
engage in insider trading (buying and selling
stock based on their privileged knowledge of
future government policy). That this practice
only became an issue recently is another
sign of how corrupt the system is.
9. Asset forfeiture in the ‘drug war’ is
corrupting police departments and the
judiciary.
10. Money and corruption have seeped so far
into our media system that people can with a
straight face assert that scientists aren’t
sure human carbon emissions are causing
global warming. Fox Cable News is among
the more corrupt institutions in American
society, purveying outright lies for the benefit
of the billionaire class. The US is so corrupt
that it is resisting the obvious urgency to
slash carbon production. Even our relatively
progressive president talks about exploiting
all sources of energy, as though
hydrocarbons were just as valuable as green
energy and as though hydrocarbons weren’t
poisoning the earth.
Even Qatar, its economy based on natural
gas, freely admits the challenge of human-
induced climate change. American
politicians like Jim Inhofe are openly
ridiculed when they travel to Europe for their
know-nothingism on climate.
So don’t tell the Philippines or the other
victims of American corruption how corrupt
they are for taking a few petty bribes.
Americans are not seen as corrupt because
we only deal in the big denominations. Steal
$2 trillion and you aren’t corrupt, you’re
respectable. |
Re: You Think Nigeria Is Corrupt? Read This American Corruption Practices by jascon1(m): 2:55pm On Oct 12, 2015 |
Believe what u know. Nowhere is not corrupt, but Nigeria is far beyond corrupt. Encyclopedia is still researching a word to qualify our level of corruption |
Re: You Think Nigeria Is Corrupt? Read This American Corruption Practices by DaBullIT(m): 2:57pm On Oct 12, 2015 |
This aint write up , this is bullshyt unreable , but comparing corruption in US with NG ? that's crazy , they don't get away with it and come for second/third /fourth term in USA |
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