Global Courant
On September 22, influential US Senator Bob Menendez was indicted for corruption along with his wife Nadine. It is the second time that Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has faced such charges.
According to the indictment From the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Menendez and his wife received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from three New Jersey businessmen in the form of gold, cash, a luxury vehicle and various other goodies. In return, the New Jersey Democrat is said to have used his position of power to benefit both the three businessmen and the government of Egypt, the home country of one of the men in question.
As the old saying goes, power tends to corrupt.
Of course, according to American mythology, corruption is entirely the business of other, less civilized countries – especially enemies of the US – that lack the proper commitment to democracy, the rule of law and all that nice and noble stuff.
But here’s a news flash for those sectors of the domestic public shocked by Menendez’s revelations: corruption is about as American as apple pie. (And a related newsflash: Menendez or no Menendez, the US has spent decades throwing billions of dollars at Egypt’s repressive apparatus—which should be a scandal in itself.)
To be fair, Menendez is certainly not the only bad apple in this pie. Take Clarence Thomas, the U.S. Supreme Court justice whose corrupt exploits have been thoroughly investigated by the New York-based nonprofit ProPublica. A recent ProPublica report notes that “Thomas’s leisure activities are supported like clockwork by benefactors who share the ideology underlying his jurisprudence.”
The report then documents the “leisure activities” listed, including at least 38 vacations, 26 private jet flights, eight helicopter flights and several excursions to luxury resorts, sporting events and so on. Billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow, an avid collector of Nazi paraphernalia, is just one of the filthy rich right-wing contributors to Thomas’ seemingly eternal “free time.” Crow has also funded numerous other favors such as pay for Thomas’s second cousin to attend an exclusive private boarding school.
In September ProPublica revealed that Thomas had secretly attended donor summits for the Koch Network, founded by the billionaire Koch brothers and dedicated to pushing American policy increasingly rightward. And what do you know? Koch’s strategy involves bringing cases before the court where Thomas sits to influence U.S. law.
So much for that silly old concept of ‘conflict of interest’.
But ultimately, Thomas’s antics are mere of a piece with the US capitalism, which is based on maintaining elite tyranny under the guise of democracy. In other words, it’s as corrupt a system as it gets.
Meanwhile, the fact that anyone can still apply the term “democracy” to the US with a straight face is a testament to the corruption of the language itself. After all, you can’t very well have “rule by the people” in a country where the Supreme Court is overturning campaign finance restrictions and where political influence is transparently for sale.
The list of offenders goes on and on. There’s Samuel Alito, another Supreme Court justice who was exposed this year for also accepting secret gifts from billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican Party megadonor Paul Singer. After being treated to a luxury fishing trip in Alaska by Singer in 2008, Alito ruled in favor of Singer’s hedge fund in a Supreme Court case.
And then there’s Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who was acquitted on September 16 of corruption charges in a historic impeachment trial in which he was accused of bribery, obstruction of justice, abuse of the public trust and other charges. misdeeds.
The allegations ranged from shady dealings with a Texas real estate developer to abuse of power to retaliate against whistleblowers.
An ally of former US President Donald Trump and a accomplice In the effort to overturn the 2020 election results, Paxton remains under FBI investigation into separate allegations and faces of corruption process on charges of securities fraud. After the Texas Senate acquitted the state’s top law enforcement official, Trump took to his social media platform to celebrate with typical eloquence: “Ken Paxton’s victory is so BIG. WOW!!!”
The online version from the Merriam-Webster dictionary offers several definitions of the word “corruption.” The first is “dishonest or illegal behavior, especially by powerful people”; the second is “incitement to harm by improper or unlawful means.”
Further on in the dictionary there is another option consisting of only two words: “decay, dissolution”. And while American officials get away with all kinds of bribery scandals and the frenetic injection of right-wing money into politics maintains a ruthless plutocracy, the whole scene indeed stinks of decay.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
