Corruption is everywhere in our democratic system. It is epidemic. It is also part and parcel of how our system operates. It is sort of the ’shadow world’ of politics but this shadow world is allowed to flourish only because the nature of running for office and the temptations that lie there are so lucrative. Only when people go totally nuts and squeeze too many people or are in office too long, get nailed. But there are many ways of preventing this freebooter-style of corruption.
After a rash of scandals, the new party in power always forbids the old methods of corruption but the lobbyists and petitioners seeking favors find, with the very strong help of the politicians seeking to gain, a way of getting around anti-bribery laws. When McCain was caught in the Keating Five scandal:
Lincoln Savings and Loan collapsed in 1989, at a cost of over $3 billion to the federal government. Some 23,000 Lincoln bondholders were defrauded and many elderly investors lost their life savings. The substantial political contributions that Keating had made to each of the senators, totalling $1.3 million, attracted considerable public and media attention. After a lengthy investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee determined in 1991 that Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, and Donald Riegle had substantially and improperly interfered with the FHLBB in its investigation of Lincoln Savings, with Cranston receiving a formal reprimand. Senators John Glenn and John McCain were cleared of having acted improperly but were criticized for having exercised “poor judgment”.
All five of the senators involved served out their terms. Only Glenn and McCain ran for re-election, and they both succeeded. McCain would go on to run for president twice, including being the unsuccessful Republican Party nominee for president in 2008.
This brush with infamy was no barrier for running for office of President. And the desire to punish fellow members for soliciting bribery money as ‘campaign contributions’ meant that this odious practice continues to this very day and is not being stopped. It is getting much, much worse.
Proof is simple: all tax cuts, since the bribery business took off, are aimed mostly at helping the very rich. The very rich are allowed, with utter impunity, to run pirate cove banking scams across the planet and thus, evade paying any taxes at all. They have imposed ‘free trade’ on us even as the dire downside effects are painfully obvious. When they are not donating to politicians to thus, control them, they run for office, themselves. While running pirate cove schemes such as the governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney ran for President in the GOP primaries!
Continued>>>
http://emsnews.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/political-corruption-is-totally-epidemic-now/#more-587
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