Wednesday, September 19, 2012
The Most Corrupt Members Of Congress: A List
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) evaluates members of Congress each year. ( See here for a link). Most of the corrupt behavior has to do with the use of campaign funds although not all does. Does the behavior bother you? Or is it what you expect to see? Have American politicians always been like this?
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Of course this behavior bothers me, yet it is completely expected at this point. I feel as if government and politics have been getting more and more corrupt throughout the last few decades and even more so recently. I'm not sure if I feel as if things have gotten even worse over the past couple of years because I now have more knowledge of the wrong-doings that are going on than I did as a kid, or if it really just has gotten worse. I did read an article about a month ago that said that in this years campaign ads for the presidential election that there has been more straight up lying than ever before, on both sides. In this article the journalist cited information from a political campaign historian who has looked at advertisements from all of the presidential elections throughout history, not just TV ads. Sometimes its just had to believe some of the horrible things that politicians do such as money laundering and tax evasion to provide even more for their own families while other Americans are going without basic necessities.
ReplyDeleteLike Beth, I am also bothered, but not surprised by this kind of behavior. I simply expect that those in power are corrupt and ineffectual. I don't need to see proof of individuals misdeeds in order to know that our political process is not run for the people any more. The old saying: "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely," seems applicable to these offenses. It seems that any opportunity that people in power have to enrich themselves, they take, because even being a congressman means that you represent at least a million people, but it puts you in a class with only about 200 others, all of whom are also taking advantage of their position, often in order to keep that position; many of the offenses detailed here are re-election campaign related.
ReplyDeleteThis behavior does bother me, but I am not surprised at all by it. I feel like Politicians in general have always had the problem of individual corruption. As we all know, information today spreads extremely farther and faster than it did even 20 years ago. So i dont really think that it is the behavior that is changing, it is just that now everyone is going to know about it.
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