Systemic Corruption Quotes

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

Should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price.

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

People already think the entire system is rigged against Donald Trump, and they're right, meaning, the corrupt, rigged system. The elections every four years are just part of that to them. They feel like they can't get a fair shake. It is the essence of the Donald Trump candidacy.

Democracy cannot consist solely of elections that are nearly always fictitious and managed by rich landowners and professional politicians.

The similarities are limited but real. They amount to a shared disgust with politics as usual in America. The Tea Party focuses on the federal government; Occupy Wall Street focuses on corporate America and its influence over the government.

Obama's primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created.

Good men and women come to Washington and get caught in a culture of corruption.

Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.

There is no way for people to vote against Goldman Sachs.

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.

The corporate takeover of America pre-dates Trump and it will outlast him. This president has revealed the rot of America. He has made it worse. It will take more than ousting him to fix it.

We have Russia, on a serial basis, abusing Interpol... The moral of this story is that if a country wants to abuse Interpol they can just keep abusing Interpol and it doesn't really matter how many times they do it.

The problem with Russia is not corruption per se, or even Putin per se. Russian government is not corrupt because Vladimir Putin has absolute power. Russian government has been corrupt and will always be as long as anyone has absolute power.

As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.

Organized crime has a corrupting influence on all Bulgarian institutions including the government, parliament and judiciary. In an attempt to maintain their influence regardless of who is in power, organized crime figures dominate all the major political parties. As these figures have expanded into legitimate businesses, they have attempted—with some success—to buy their way into the corridors of power….

Over the years, the government launched more than one 'war on corruption,' and they all failed. Why? Because they all started from the bottom up.

A world where Congressmen spend 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% is a world where that tiny, tiny fraction has enormous power. And it's that inequality in political power that enables this corrupted system to happen.

Politics is so corrupt that even the dishonest people get fucked.

Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."

The swamp is a business model. It's a successful business model.

Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America

The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.

When you get to political machines that can control a state, then you're really into organized crime - almost. You're fighting a political mafia.