They won, we lost: How corruption became America’s national pastime

[unhappycamper]

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/11/they_won_we_lost_how_corruption_became_americas_national_pastime/



How the nation's corporate elite "extorts hard working people for their own political and financial gains"

They won, we lost: How corruption became America’s national pastime
Janine Wedel
Saturday, Oct 11, 2014 08:15 AM EST

What does “SWIMNUT” know that the world’s supposed experts on corruption or the elites who gather each year for skiing and schmoozing in Davos do not?

This anonymous commenter was responding to an online article about the 2013 ranking of the world’s most corrupt countries, as measured by the best-known international arbiter of corruption, the organization Transparency International. In TI’s survey, the experts canvassed perceive Somalia, North Korea, and Afghanistan as the worst transgressors. But “SWIMNUT” sees it differently:

Not quite sure how corruption is defined but I think the US needs to be included as one of the most corrupt “civilized” countries in the world. . . . In the US . . . we have created a political elite that extorts hard working people for their own political and financial gains.

“SWIMNUT” wasn’t the lone voice of skepticism. Well over half of the 180-odd commenters to this article targeted the United States as an offender that was grievously under-scrutinized. Amid the usual partisanship, name-calling, and crackpot conspiracy theories that one finds in comment sections, many of these readers conveyed undeniable threads of truth, ones I’ve been weaving together for decades.