Can Obama stop corruption?
ven in colonial days, chicanery and corruption were endemic among American politicians. It's become part of the American electoral tradition.
Can it ever be fixed? Barack Obama has been a champion of improving government ethics at both the state and federal level, but he faces a long history of improbity among our elected officials.
Benjamin Fletcher, governor of New York from 1692 to 1698, took protection money from pirates, stole from the public funds and cheated on customs duties. "To recount all his arts of squeezing money both out of the public and private purses would make a volume instead of a letter," wrote one of Fletcher's critics.
According to the Reader's Companion to American History, "systematic smuggling, graft, extortion and bribery in the colonies cost the British Treasury 700,000 pounds a year. Attempts were made from time to time to clean things up, but defiant juries and mercenary judges -- one of whom remarked 'that in his opinion the Nicetyes of the law ought not to be observed' -- invariably got in the way."
Read entire article at Jennifer Hunter in the Chicago Sun-Times
Can it ever be fixed? Barack Obama has been a champion of improving government ethics at both the state and federal level, but he faces a long history of improbity among our elected officials.
Benjamin Fletcher, governor of New York from 1692 to 1698, took protection money from pirates, stole from the public funds and cheated on customs duties. "To recount all his arts of squeezing money both out of the public and private purses would make a volume instead of a letter," wrote one of Fletcher's critics.
According to the Reader's Companion to American History, "systematic smuggling, graft, extortion and bribery in the colonies cost the British Treasury 700,000 pounds a year. Attempts were made from time to time to clean things up, but defiant juries and mercenary judges -- one of whom remarked 'that in his opinion the Nicetyes of the law ought not to be observed' -- invariably got in the way."