Maggie's Farm

Corruption requires a wink, wink, nod,nod from many to succeed, even if the many are not overtly responsible.

Being from Chicago, I was born knowing that government is a form of racketeering, albeit sanctioned and necessary. It always has been, from the time that the first prehistoric elders cajoled/coerced the first chumps to build the first stick stockade to keep the livestock in and the two legged and four legged predators out. Add graft, nepotism, protection rackets, featherbedding, GHOST PAYROLLS and voila, you have Chicago, but, of course corruption, ie the CHICAGO WAY is not at all unique to Chicago; it’s part of the human condition.

In the US, we managed to keep this corruption down to a dull roar, at least enough so as to not crush the commercial/private sector, which depends, on stable currency and enforcement of contracts, a somewhat level playing field, some agreement on standards and measurements, financial infrastructure, and some relief from the significant criminal class ……It has enabled the USA to thrive now and again.


“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
― T.S. Eliot

Anecdotal I know, but I do think there has been a change in my lifetime. I recall the names and faces of the Chicago pols of my childhood, and though they were cynical, sneaky and greedy, they were not nearly as perverse, malignant, stupid, or Anti-American, as today’s glib, coiffed, and credentialed suits. At least they eschewed the intellectual veneer and stuck with the pinky ring image. They mostly knew better than to kill the golden goose, or eat the seed corn, or kr@p in their own nest; survival imperatives, No? Certainly, they weren’t taken in by “silly, fantastical, utopianist malarkey, like running a complex economy on unicorn farts; though they might use it to con the saps”(Althouse blog).

"The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals." - Neal Stephenson

I hope we all know that the founders realized this and were aware of human foibles?

That's why the checks and balances and the decentralization of power. They understood that human nature "is what it is". Corruption, grifters, sadists, predators, sychophants, leeches, hangers on, not to mention the self serving activists, like you find in the “Virtue Industry” follow the money and power. Any institution is vulnerable; look how corrupted many charities are. But it is part of the larger fabric of society.

Congressmen, congressional staffers, agency staffers, pentagon staffers, and assorted family members have been shuffled in and out of corporate board rooms, foundations, non-profits, and lobbying organizations for decades.

Corruption is not a government, Union, 1 %, or Wall Street thing. America is a bottomless pit of hustlers and always has been. Consider the OB-Gyn who performs the unnecessary C-section, the mechanic who sells you a new battery when you just need your cables cleaned, the repairman that uses substandard or counterfeit parts, or expired materials parts, the shop that seeds the order of good parts with parts that don’t meet spec, the processor who uses components whose shelf life has expired, the lawyer that pads his bill, the salesman who doesn’t strive to provide you with the product that best fits your needs but the one, on which he stands to make the most money. People dissemble and mislead (as taught in Marketing classes during the 60s), cheat, embellish, take short cuts, and cut corners at every level, in every occupation including the professions, academia and media, charitable foundations, and activists. Just ran into it this weekend at the rental car counter at Midway Airport.