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Profoundly Corrupt Politicians are a Sign of Our Irrevocably Broken Political Institutions.
And yet another reason for a complete overhaul…
Over here in the United Kingdom, we have been following the Eric Adams indictment with a bit of amusement.
It hasn’t helped that the current mayor of New York city has always come across quite badly and lacked the dignity that the late David Dinkins brought to the job in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Contrasting Adams’s extraordinarily brazen theft of millions of dollars, with his willingness to kill poor people evading train fare is simply unforgivable and unconscionable.
But the man isn’t alone in the business of corruption.
Nancy Pelosi, along with her colleagues in Congress, have taken full advantage of their inside knowledge to trade stocks and made millions of dollars in the process.
We read about Clarence Thomas, receiving vast amounts of money from wealthy Republicans, while failing to recuse himself from a few sensitive cases.
And we should never forget that Donald Trump spent the better part of his time at the White House, monetizing every aspect of his Presidency and doing very little for those who voted him into the most powerful job in the world.
But this isn’t a problem unique to the United States of America as our politicians have been infected with the same disease, too.
The newly elected Labour government led by Keir Starmer has only been in power for a minute and yet umpteen news of their accepting bribes from unknown donors have been dominating the airwaves.
What was disgusting about the Starmer episode wasn’t the fact that our Prime Minister accepted free Taylor Swift tickets or that he took tens of thousands of pounds from nameless, faceless oligarchs, but that he was prepared to defend his actions as just.
The recently defenestrated Conservatives aren’t any better too.
One of the four players in contention to lead the Tory party was exposed as having taken 75,000 pounds from a company registered in the Cayman Islands which hasn’t got a single employee in the United Kingdom.