JUSTICE MALALA: How bribery soured the American dream
If the poor start acting on the belief that the system is rigged we are all toast
Ben Affleck has a new movie out. It’s called Triple Frontier and he plays one of five former US soldiers who decide to rob a drug lord of his dirty cash. Affleck and his team get themselves to the drug lord’s South American home, infiltrate his fortress and get to the loot. The house is a safe: the walls are made of vacuum packs of US dollar notes. As they fill their bags one of them gleefully shouts something like: "Your kids will never have to study hard again because you will buy their way into Harvard!" I had to laugh. That quip is an encapsulation of what many ordinary people are beginning to think about the global business and political elite, really. They think politicians and business take, and take, and bribe and then take more. That quip is about just how the elite is regarded by the ordinary, hardworking, man and woman in the street: they think the elite are corrupt thieves. The level of distrust between the rich and the poor is so deep I am beginning to believe that if t...
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