In America...

We are not safe from the virus nor our dire political crisis.

The truth is the virus of autocrats and criminal elites.

The truth is the virus of autocrats and criminal elites. They cannot stomp it out, and they scramble to keep themselves from being exposed. They do this by commanding the mechanisms of power and, once in office, rewriting the laws so they’re no longer breaking them.

In the United States, they were able to do this because officials refused to enforce accountability for the crimes of the wealthy and well connected. That’s why you see the same names – Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Bill Barr, Jeffrey Epstein, Rupert Murdoch, John Bolton – repeating throughout decades of horrific American scandals. Watergate, Iran-Contra, the war in Iraq, the 2008 financial collapse, and the illicit foreign interference in the election of Mr. Trump share many of the the same participants.

But it’s not solely the GOP that’s to blame – it’s everyone who looked the other way, everyone who waited for someone else to sort it out, everyone who settled for false stability over real justice.

Avoidance is a dangerous strategy. It doesn’t actually keep the peace; it turns elite criminal impunity into elite criminal immunity, as the corrupt pack the courts and order their own exoneration. These tactics have been most blatant during Mr. Trump’s rule, as he dispensed with even the pretense of serving the public good. But it was true of every administration of my lifetime, dating back to the Reagan era. The 2020 election offered a fleeting chance to tackle institutional corruption. But it’s uncertain now whether that election will even be held. As election integrity experts push for voting by mail as the safest method to employ during the pandemic, the Trump administration is trying to shut down the post office.

The other day, I looked across the street at the community centre where I cast what may have been my last vote. My neighbourhood was silent. Missouri spring in all its beauty – the blooming dogwood trees and wildflowers make my downtrodden region a hidden treasure. You’d never know death was in the air.

Corruption is like that, too – invisible until it shatters your life. My comfort in this time is that the same can be said of truth. Truth is still out there, hiding in plain sight, and its revelations can rearrange the world.

There are people to blame for these crises of corruption, but there’s a difference between vengeance and justice. To tell the truth is to try to bring justice to the vulnerable, to protect people from further harm. These days, the vulnerable is all of us. No one is immune – not from the crisis of public health and not from our political crisis, because they are one and the same. What was predictable was preventable, and no one deserved this fate.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-in-america-we-are-not-safe-from-the-virus-nor-our-dire-political/