Corruption. Rot. Decay. Degradation. Putrescence.
Words that describe a path from being whole and healthy to not being. Americans hate corrupt government. They also tolerate it. It gives them something to complain about. They can say it’s hopeless to try to fix it. Everyone does it so what’s the point? Nothing I can do. Besides, it doesn’t really affect me.
Many voters think corruption is background noise. It isn’t.
Many government contracts require competitive bids to ensure fair access to the work and a proper review of the contractor’s capabilities. No-bid contracts, offered to only a single contractor, ignore those principles. The work can be steered to friends of “important people” and bypass meaningful review. More qualified and possibly more ethical contractors may be locked out because they are on the wrong side of a political dispute, thus wasting taxpayer dollars and creating risk. Imagine driving over the bridge built with sub-par steel from a no-bid contract. The people who managed the contract may have gotten richer but the steel isn’t any stronger. The bridge isn’t any safer.
The same distorted decision-making that led to the low-quality bridge extends to security. When officials select staff and cyber-security systems based on loyalty to insiders, they risk choosing less qualified people and systems and leaving holes in the security infrastructure. Failure to do a rigorous review of candidates opens the door to low quality products, foreign influence, blackmail, and incompetence. Incompetent but loyal higher level security officials will hire incompetent but loyal lower-level officials as well. When loyalty replaces competence, security degrades. Now you and I are exposed to data breaches, medical privacy violations, theft of military and industrial secrets, and other failures if sub-par security systems are in place because they didn’t hire the best.
Corruption is not only about money. It is about staying in power. To stay in power, the regime wants to control what people know – or are allowed to know. When the government restricts press freedoms, they get to shape what can be believed about their own actions with little fear of contradiction. A free press prevents them from being the sole force shaping our understanding. When the free and independent press weakens, we lose the ability to understand how the bridge contract was issued, how the security contractors were chosen, who knew about projects before they went out to bid. We can no longer make choices about our news sources. We can’t challenge decisions if we don’t know how they were made nor even that they were made. Accountability is gone. Once the government has controlled the free press, it has a wide range of other corrupt practices it can engage in.
When corrupt acts are not punished, it sends a message that corruption is ok. Corruption that is tolerated leads to public cynicism and disengagement. Accountability weakens further as the public withdraws and pays less attention. The corrupt officials grow bolder and more successful in their enterprises and attract more participants. That encourages further corruption and the cycle continues and grows. Cancer-like, untreated it grows and spreads.
The moral basis of democratic society is our trust that the government will follow and enforce the law. The checks and balances in our constitution are there to enforce that trust. When the government squanders that trust, it does more than take money out of our pockets, prevent us from understanding governing decisions, and put our security at risk. It takes the government away from us. The framers intended for us to have a government of the people, not a government of privileged insiders, loyalists or self-dealers. Once our voice in the government is compromised, it becomes more and more difficult to speak up again.
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