On September 22, influential United States Senator Bob Menendez was indicted on corruption prices alongside along with his spouse, Nadine. It is the second time Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has confronted such prices.
As per the indictment from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Menendez and his spouse obtained tons of of hundreds of {dollars} in bribes from three New Jersey businessmen within the type of gold, money, a luxurious car and various different goodies. In change, the Democrat from New Jersey allegedly used his place of energy to learn the three businessmen as nicely as the federal government of Egypt, the house nation of one of many males in query.
As the outdated saying goes, energy tends to deprave.
According to US mythology, in fact, corruption is completely the enterprise of different, much less civilised nations – significantly enemies of the US – that lack the correct dedication to democracy, the rule of legislation, and all that good and noble stuff.
But right here’s a information flash for these sectors of the home viewers scandalised by the Menendez revelations: Corruption is about as American as apple pie. (And a associated newsflash: Menendez or no Menendez, the US has spent many years flinging billions of {dollars} at Egypt’s repressive equipment – which ought to represent a scandal in itself.)
To make certain, Menendez is hardly the one dangerous apple on this pie. Take Clarence Thomas, the US Supreme Court justice whose corrupt exploits have been totally investigated by the New York-based nonprofit ProPublica. One latest ProPublica report notes that, “like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence”.
The report goes on to doc stated “leisure activities”, which have included at the least 38 holidays, 26 personal jet flights, eight helicopter flights, and varied excursions to luxurious resorts, sporting occasions and so forth. Billionaire actual property tycoon Harlan Crow, an enthusiastic collector of Nazi paraphernalia, is however one of many filthy wealthy right-wing contributors to Thomas’s seemingly everlasting “leisure”. Crow has additionally funded quite a few different favours, such as paying for Thomas’s grandnephew to attend an unique personal boarding college.
In September, ProPublica revealed that Thomas had secretly participated in donor summits for the Koch community, based by the billionaire Koch brothers and dedicated to driving US coverage ever extra to the proper. And what have you learnt? The Koch technique consists of bringing instances earlier than the very court docket on which Thomas sits to impression US legislation.
So a lot for that foolish outdated idea of “conflict of interest”.
At the tip of the day, although, Thomas’s antics are merely of a chunk with US capitalism, which is predicated on sustaining a tyranny of the elite underneath the guise of democracy. In different phrases, it’s about as corrupt a system as you will get.
That anybody can nonetheless apply the time period “democracy” to the US with a straight face is, in the meantime, a testomony to the corruption of language itself. After all, you may’t very nicely have “rule by the people” in a rustic the place the Supreme Court reverses marketing campaign finance restrictions and political affect is transparently up on the market.
The checklist of offenders goes on. There’s Samuel Alito, one other Supreme Court justice who this 12 months was uncovered as having additionally accepted undisclosed items from billionaire hedge fund supervisor and Republican Party mega-donor Paul Singer. After being handled by Singer to a luxurious fishing journey in Alaska in 2008, Alito dominated in favour of Singer’s hedge fund in a case earlier than the Supreme Court.
And then there’s Ken Paxton, the Texas lawyer common acquitted of corruption prices on September 16 in a historic impeachment trial, during which he was accused of bribery, obstruction of justice, abuse of public belief and different misdeeds.
Allegations ranged from shady dealings with an actual property developer in Texas and misuse of energy to retaliate towards whistleblowers.
An ally of former US President Donald Trump and an confederate within the effort to overturn the 2020 election outcomes, Paxton stays underneath FBI investigation on separate corruption prices and faces trial on allegations of felony securities fraud. After the Texas Senate acquitted the state’s prime legislation enforcement official, Trump took to his social media platform to have fun with typical eloquence: “The Ken Paxton Victory is sooo BIG. WOW!!!”
The on-line model of the Merriam-Webster dictionary provides a number of definitions of the phrase “corruption”. The first is “dishonest or illegal behaviour especially by powerful people”; the second is “inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means”.
Further down the dictionary entry is an alternative choice consisting of simply two phrases: “decay, decomposition”. And as US officers get away with all method of bribery scandals and the frenetic injection of right-wing cash into politics sustains a brutal plutocracy, the entire scene does certainly reek of decay.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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