Professor Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security, wrote an article for The Nation on government accountability during the pandemic, wars on terror, recessions, and more.
Whether you consider the appalling death toll or the equally unacceptable rising numbers of Covid-19 cases, the United States has one of the worst records worldwide when it comes to the pandemic. Nevertheless, the president has continued to behave just as he promised he would in March when there had been only 40 deaths from the virus here and he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
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Still, the loss of accountability isn’t simply a phenomenon of the Trump years. Its erosion has been coming for a long time at what, in retrospect, should seem an alarmingly inexorable pace.
In August 2020, it should be obvious that America, a still titanic (if fading) power, has largely thrown accountability overboard. With that in mind, here’s a little history of how it happened.
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It hasn’t always been this way. In the past, when government policy or the officials making it have gone rogue, broken the law, and conspired against the basic tenets of American democracy, they have, at times, paid the price. Nearly a century ago, for instance, President Warren Harding’s secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, went to prison for accepting bribes from oil companies in the Teapot Dome Scandal. In fact, the list of former government officials who have been convicted and served time in jail is long.