AMERICA: The green slime of corruption

“What power has law where only money rules?” — Gaiu Petronius (66 AD)

It is the nature of economic power to evolve into pernicious political power. If there is one lesson citizens in a democracy must learn it is that economic power must never be allowed to become concentrated. Political liberty or freedom is an illusion in an authoritarian economic system.

We have evolved into a nation in which over 41,000 lobbyists in Washington, D.C. have become our defacto legislative entities. Our elected representatives have been reduced to window dressing and publicly paid stooges of vested interests.

Corruption is now America’s number one industry. It may also be our number one export. Corruption is the putrefaction of integrity and human decency by a privileged, protected elite possessed of a pathological sense of entitlement. Corruption in legislative bodies such as our congress, like street crime, leaves people dead or disabled and destitute. Corruption always commits its crimes at arm’s length. Corruption is an absence of humanistic ethics, hidden behind a veil of respectability and rectitude. It hides behind the Flag, the Christian Cross, the Law, or other respected symbol or institution.

White Collar corruption enjoys the protection of law and government, whereas street crime does not. Corruption is legalized despotism. When Law doesn’t apply to all regardless of their economic, social, political, theological or other status equally, you have legalized anarchy. When access to the courts is denied any citizen, you have legalized despotism. Under a system of legalized despotism you do not have Law, but fiat. Under such conditions, the citizen is no longer sovereign, but a subject. Such is the litmus test that tells us if we really are a democracy. When any entity, individual, or corporation enjoys immunity from lawsuits or prosecution, democracy has died. Bluntly, corruption is simply exploitation of the powerless by those with power. When the political and legal system of a democracy becomes a commodity in the capitalistic market place, the transition to an authoritarian technocratic fascist state becomes a tragic sequel. Upton Sinclair stated that “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the Flag and carrying a Christian Cross.” Let’s hope that he was wrong.

I sincerely hope my assessment of our current economic, political and social gridlock will be proved wrong; nothing would make me happier.

J. ALBERT ROWE

Coeur d’Alene

bscutter@frontiercom