....most longtime creatures of the Beltway, only sees "corruption" in terms of elected officials breaking the laws written by…elected officials. But that will always be only a bit of the very tip of the iceberg, such a small part of the problem as to be essentially irrelevant. Washington itself is corrupt. All of it. Every elected official wins office through an elaborate system of legalized bribery called campaign donations and quid pro quo, and every single law passed or not passed and signed into law by the federal government is the product of the judgment (and both political and monetary interests, which are basically interchangeable) of the people amoral enough to have already been bribed into office. Most of whom are focused from the moment of that election on raising money for the next election, often from the same corporations and industries they oversee, write bills for, and vote on other bills regarding.
It's hard to imagine a more corrupt system. It's far worse than wheelbarrows full of money, because they don't make wheelbarrows large enough to contain the sort of cash that gets someone elected to Congress (let alone the presidency). We live in an electronic age, and compared to the amount of money a corporation can make from favorable legislation -- sometimes billions of dollars -- wiring money to buy a few Congressmen is astonishingly cheap.
That's corruption....
He is, of course, correct and as he says both parties are guilty. When any politician has to raise as much money as our present system requires to be elected in the first place, and then get reelected, corruption will raise its ugly head.
We, the people, must demand a solution and be willing to support it. The only viable one is public financing of election campaigns. We have to take the corrupting influence of big-money out of our political system so politicians can pay attention to the people rather than the dollars.
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