CORRUPTION

For quite some time a creeping corruption has encroached on virtually all of America’s institutions:

·       Political campaigns are transparently pay-for-play with voter cynicism and tribalism keeping accountability at a minimum. The only scandal rule that seems to still hold fast is not to be caught in bed with a dead lover or a live child.

·       Wall Street is so blatantly bad that it fights a toothless rule that says they should put their client’s interest first while hedge fund executives rake in billions for performances that can’t even match a simple index formula.

·       In healthcare one only need look at the price of drugs and fact that Medicare is forbidden by law from negotiating pharmaceutical prices.

·       The criminal justice system is virtually incapable of disciplining a prosecutor who willfully imprisons an innocent man and judges are forced to impose insanely harsh racially imbalanced sentences, even on a child. History will be unkind to me for my indifference.

·        Academicians and universities have whored themselves in the most profound ways. Students have become customers to be parted from their student loan dollars and research is to be sold for what the buyer wants.

I don’t know where history will leave us after this legacy but I do know that we have come to a fundamental point where our debasement of facts and truth will put humanity in true peril. We have a post-truth president who will ignore the science of climate change and flirt with nuclear war. As I write this he is sending a carrier task force to confront North Korea and we have no assurance he grasps the implications. To him, and his supporters who see him as in their tribe above all else, factual reality is an inconvenience to be ignored in pursuit of our nihilism. Corruption has its price.