Chapter one The Crannied wall.

It is often the small acts of corruption that herald the giant ones to follow. 作者用clintons和小說all the kings men等例子說明公職權(quán)力總是伴隨corruption儿惫。雖然還是有一部分公職人員出淤泥而不染，但是這個(gè)群體正在衰落朽褪。此處作者點(diǎn)名批評了progressivism, 他們一邊宣揚(yáng)著要給政府更大的權(quán)力去做好事华临，減少社會(huì)不公，另一邊自己卻在以權(quán)力謀私利快鱼。與其看他們的口號和講演败砂，不如看他們究竟是否濫用自己的公共權(quán)力们妥。作者批評媒體應(yīng)算作罪人症歇，沒有起到真正監(jiān)督的作用郎笆，全部內(nèi)容只是刻意營造一種hourse race的氣氛，因?yàn)檫@遠(yuǎn)比深挖背后錯(cuò)綜復(fù)雜的故事要簡單忘晤，可以概括為”appreaing to be scrutinied without revealing anything significant”. 同時(shí)提到了trump宛蚓，現(xiàn)在聚光燈都在trump身上絕不意味著其他人不需要被公眾審查和監(jiān)督

權(quán)利的濫用主要分為以下：

sweetheart deals，也就是國際賄賂德频。

income generation苍息，是直接把權(quán)利轉(zhuǎn)換為金錢，比如elizabeth warren就這么搞壹置，洛杉磯市長eric garcetti批準(zhǔn)房地產(chǎn)工程獲得利益竞思。

Bending the law，對特殊的人在法律上進(jìn)行包庇钞护。

Legislation盖喷，立法使得相關(guān)大企業(yè)受益。

Publicity, 讓自己和家庭得商業(yè)價(jià)值更高难咕。

Chapter 2 Kamala Harris

There are several pages introducing the bio of Harris, her rise to prominence is complicated while her way to leverage her power is disturbing. She basically stays close to her politically powerful ex-boyfriend Brown(who is 33 years older and has a legal wife!) to start her politician career. Ironically, known as a representative and protector of victimes, she actually never pursued cases against Brown’s friend. There are real cases such as the sexual abuse of children by priests, which finally is covered up mysteriously and ended abruptly, even though Harris’s predecessor Hallinan had already alleged to release all the documents. Perhaps that contributes to the failure of Hallinan, as the priest tried so hard to manage him out. By the way, Harris failed to prosecute a single case of priest abuse in 15 years tenure as chief prosecutor of SF district attorney, WHAT! Harris even went after the law firm that represented Epstein, naming them as the shame of the legal system, however, she gladly took campaign donations from the same firm, HOW!

What is astonishing is that those prosecutions against Brown’s allies were dropped for no reason and it was actually obvious corruption or cronyism(in favor of friend), but there are no following charges at all against her, thus she has no scruple in doing this over and over again.

The way she actually got elected was manipulated and controlled by Brown, actually my thought here is that if one person is conducting his job correctly as like a district attorney correctly, then it is almost certain that some party’s interest is being threatened, unfortunately that party is likely to be powerful because it is those powerful institutions that are tended to gain interest with its power, even if it creates unequal competition or at the cost of breaking the law, the bad money is driving out good.

There are other cases such as not investigating the company who has connection to her husband, not approving transactions of non-profit hospitals because of her donator. To conclude, Harris has a habit of executing prosecutorial power selectively to protect corrupt allies and dealing with problems by covering them up.

One interesting point is that I found the political contribution is traceable and it has its limit. If we consider the trade between power and money(or sex) as human nature, it is actually not as bad as it looks like, even if it is not surprising to discover that politician always use the campaign money(mostly from allies and come with corrupt or cronyism, of course).

After this chapter I started to question the integrity of the entire legal system of the USA, although I did not expect it to work perfectly at the very beginning.

Chapter 3 Joe Biden

Biden's family has been leveraging Joe’s political power to their financial benefit since he was elected to the Senate in 1972, and it is brought to another level after Joe entered the White House with Barack Obama. Though Joe is rarely personally involved, there is solid evidence that multiple family members benefit financially because of the close tie to Joe. This chapter just listed many of these leverages, person-by-person, summarized as below.

It was a dream of this family that Joe would be president, and all the family members have always endeavored to achieve that. Joe’s brothers and sisters contributed their effort during his run for the Senate, however, Joe publicly claimed that he never discussed business interests with family members. From my personal view, it is a lie.

Joe’s son Hunter has business connections with the government of countries of highly corrupt political cultures such as Ukraine, Russia and etc. Unlike chapter one the total campaign money was barely 260k, Hunter’s company has deals with Bank of China(owned by the state) worth over 2 billion, so yes, the son of the vice president of USA is a business partner of Chinese government, in his trip to Beijing abroad Air Force Two, he introduced his Chinese partners to Joe. Besides the banking industry, he has several other connections to Chinese government worth billions of dollars in real estate and etc.

There is a Ukrainian energy producer who is a friend of Hunter, when the founder Zlochevsky was engaged in illicit enrichment in Ukraine, Joe gave him a hand and later bragged that he had the prosecutor fired by threatening to withhold 1 billion dollars in U.S. aid to Ukraine. There are also appropriations of taxpayer’s money to facilitate Hunter’s business.

Joe’s brother Frank is involved in a car accident, they were at 70+ mph in a 35-mph zone, hitting a father to death. There is a fine and he never replied, actually the guardians of the victims family never found him. When being reached out, Joe wrote back in cold stating Frank has no money to pay, knowing Frank was earning money and owned the IRS $30k. Noted that Joe’s first wife and daughter were killed in an accident right after his election to the Senate. However, Joe was helping Frank accumulate wealth in Costa Rica.

I do have a feeling that the politician can still stay safe and even prospect, no matter what he does to leverage his power for financial interest, even if he has broken the law brazenly. For example Hunter leveraged the financial aid from the U.S. to Ukraine for business interest, but Joe is still running for the president. Kamala Harris had cronyism boldly but she went from district attorney to California’s Attorney General and now a Senator! Literally everyone knows that they are corrupted, but they still prospect in their political career.

I have an epiphany that the political system of China and the U.S. are essentially the same with 2 classes, the ruling and the rest. The ruling class might fight each other for financial interest, but they would put aside disputes and work together when necessary, and they usually do not play the only-1-man-lives game, because the inter-connection between them is complicated and they likely have common allies/interests. As a result, the ruling class is united with a consensus to stand together to exploit the rest of the U.S. or even the whole world.

No matter what the rest of the world thinks about them, the ruling class would not care because power is absolute, and yes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is no control/limitation over the ruling class at all, thus they are not afraid of being prosecuted, it is still in the game as long as it has capital and can be useful to ally. This is a game started since the birth of human society. The players are the ruling class and they play by rule, build up connections and allies to gain more safety. The ones that are not smart enough to play the game have been wiped out.

As our society evolves, more wealth keeps flowing into smaller groups of people, i.e. the ruler. I think it is an unavoidable inclination rooted from human nature.

The author said that “l(fā)oyalty to family is a virtue until it becomes an execute for unethical use of public power”, I would definitely agree, but it is almost impossible to stop it from happening because of the way humans are programmed.

I am not sure whether it is because of the fact that I am from China and I have witnessed this all along, but my idea is the author of this book just blindly picks all the dirty(with solid evidence) or suspicious(without solid evidence) of the progressive politicians, and try to incite people’s hatred toward them. This is pure stupid, because I am sure there are similiar if not more abysmal stories on almost every single politician on this planet. Nobody does anything better in certain, Republician, Communist, you name it.

In my opinion, corruption happens, period. However, for the best interest of human future, we need to find a political model that is as productive as it can be, while it sustains a certain level of corruption and have a monitoring system prevent the corruption from collapsing the whole system.

To conclude, this chapter gives me some detail about stories that I already know, it would be boring if it keeps going like this.