Corruption - a prescient warning

Corruption is a cancer. A cancer that eats away at a citizen's faith in democracy.

Diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity. Already tight national budgets crowding out important national investments.

It wastes the talent of entire generations, scares away investment and jobs.

But most importantly, it denies the people their dignity. It saps the collective strength and resolve of a nation.

Corruption is just another form of tyranny.

When politicians can be bought, when courts can be manipulated, when the media becomes a tool of propaganda, there you will find a society that is suceptible to manipulation from the outside.

There you will find a society that's losing control of its own destiny. Not only its political security but its physical security and military readiness is also compromised...

So, fighting corruption is more than just good government, it's self-defense.

V.P. Joe Biden (AKA 'The Big Guy')
Bucharest, Romania 2014

Yeah, Joe - a society like that would sure be in deep doo-doo and probably doomed... Unless/until its members decided to get serious and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

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itself...

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@Blue Republic

It's not easy to trade down from Donald Trump, but WE DID IT.

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

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@humphrey

is it that the FBI needs to protect the public from dangerous mis-impressions or that the Fedcops need to protect themselves from the public forming *accurate* impressions about them?

I'll take a wild guess that it could have something to do with the latter.

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Cassiodorus's picture

-- is the commodification of policy. Riley and Brenner again:

Under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return. This new form of accumulation is associated with a series of novel mechanisms of ‘politically constituted rip-off’. These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s cares Act, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and chips Acts and the Inflation Reduction Act. All these mechanisms of surplus extraction are openly and obviously political. They allow for returns, not on the basis of investment in plant, equipment, labour and inputs to produce use values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.

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"the reason you need a new class to come into power in the United States is because this one is useless" -- Vijay Prashad