Originally posted at TomDispatch.
Here’s an oddity: Americans recognize corruption as an endemic problem
in much of the world, just not in our own. And that’s strange.
After all, to take but one example, America’s twenty-first-century war
zones have been notorious quagmires of corruption on a scale that should boggle
the imagination. In 2011, a final report from the congressionally mandated
Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion
and $60 billion U.S. taxpayer dollars were lost to fraud and waste in the American
“reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan (which undoubtedly will,
in the end, prove an underestimate).
U.S. taxpayer dollars were spent to build roads
to nowhere; a gas
station in the middle of nowhere; teacher-training centers and other structures
that were never
finished (but made oodles of money for lucky contractors); a chicken-plucking
factory that never
plucked a chicken (but plucked American taxpayers); and a lavish $25
million headquarters that no one ever needed or bothered to use. Thanks
to tens of billions of U.S. dollars, whole security forces were
funded, trained, armed, and filled
with “ghost”
soldiers and police (while local commanders and other officials lined their
pockets with completely unspectral “salaries”). And so it
went.
Of course, all that took
place in another galaxy far, far away where corruption is the norm.
In the U.S.A. itself, corruption is considered un-American (though don’t
tell that to the denizens of Ferguson,
Missouri). This is, of course, largely a matter of definition, as
Thomas Frank made vividly
clear at TomDispatch recently when he laid out the scope of the
“influence” industry in Washington. You know, the hordes of
lobbyists who live the good life and offer tastes of it to government officials
they would like to influence – none of which is “corrupt.”
It’s completely legit, a thoroughly congenial way of operating among Washington’s
power brokers.
In its 2010 Citizens
United decision, the Supreme Court offered its own redefinition of
corruption in America, ensuring that dollars by the barrelful could be piped
directly into the political system with remarkable ease to influence (not to
say buy) politicians and elections. Only the other day, it spoke up again
with a unanimous decision in favor of corruption as a perfectly acceptable way
of life. It overturned
the conviction of Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell for “using his office
to help Jonnie R. Williams Sr., who had provided the McDonnells with luxury
products, loans, and vacations worth more than $175,000 when Mr. McDonnell was
governor.” (Lest I seem too gloomy on the subject, let me mention one
small sign of something different. Anti-corruption scholar…