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Bribery in Government

There is a pretty good reason we frown on people with financial interests in government policy giving money to the people who decide that policy. Primarily because those decisions may not be made on the merits of the choices but because of self-interest, and secondarily because citizens will doubt the wisdom of those choices even if they (occasionally) turn out to be good even with the bribery.

One of the disappointments of adulthood was realizing how much white-collar wrongdoing is legal. Many policy makers are elected and the primary mechanishm in my adult years has been legal, through campaign contributions.

John McCain was a mix of good and not-so-good intentions; one of his issues was campaign finance reform. He once stated that nothing could ever improve in government without such reform, and he and Russ Feingold passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002 which made things better. It was often criticized by corrupt politicians for not fixing everything because since it made things better they couldn't find fault with what it did.

Mitch McConnell based his senatorial career on the notion that corporations were people too. Unsurprisingly he was always well-funded in his campaigns, and over the decades he fought against campaign finance limits; in large part it was his very well-funded work that led to the Citizens United decision by a Supreme Court, members (Alito, Roberts, and Thomas that we know of) of which were well-funded by folk who thought money should have a larger voice than citizens in government.

Now we are in Trump's second term as president. We are currently having an epidemic of cyclospora, causing debilitating diarrhea across the nation. Secretary RFK, Jr. ordered HHS to stop monitoring this illness nine months ago for reasons no one really understands. This past week the source of the epidemic was traced back by the FDA to a large agricultural corporation, Taylor Farms.

Bruce Taylor is the CEO of Taylor Farms and a large donor to MAGA Inc., one of Trump's political action committees. He met with Trump after Taylor Farms was named and the next day the FDA claimed that they had been wrong, that their test was a false positive.

Bribery is the antithesis of good government. It leads to poor decisions and a debilitating cynicism. Cynicism is a liar---it claims that it has always been this way for whatever the issue is. As someone who is older than most of the folk reading this let me bear witness: it has not always been this bad and it can be much better. We need to choose better at election time.

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