Breaking Corruption: Corruption Elimination
Corporate capture of government must be eliminated for progressive policy to work. Without breaking corruption, any new revenue becomes another extraction point.
Criminal Prosecution
Executives do prison time for fraud, not just corporate fines. Medicare fraud, contract fraud, securities fraud all result in prosecuting individuals. This creates real accountability instead of treating fraud as a cost of doing business.
Permanent Revolving Door Ban
If you regulate pharma, you never work in pharma. This is a lifetime ban with no exceptions and no cooling-off periods. If you regulate finance, you never work on Wall Street. If you regulate defense, you never work for contractors. This eliminates the incentive to serve industry interests while in government.
Radical Transparency
We create real-time public databases for all contracts. All government meetings are recorded and public. All lobbying contacts are disclosed immediately. Every dollar is traced publicly. This makes extraction visible and embarrassing.
End No-Bid Contracts
Competitive bidding is required with preference for worker cooperatives. If a cooperative can deliver at competitive price and quality, they win automatically. We use public employees over consultants. We eliminate sole-source justifications except for true emergencies.
Break Consulting Capture
We cancel McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture, and Booz Allen contracts. We use state employees instead. We build internal capacity. We accept initial messiness over permanent extraction. Government IT can be built rapidly when consultants aren’t extracting. The Alaska Business Network example shows a system built in less than one week versus 18 months and $5 million from consultants.
Single-Payer Structure
We provide direct government provision, not “government pays private insurance.” We eliminate middlemen completely. This removes the extraction point where private companies profit from public spending.
Why This Enables Progressive Taxation
Without anti-corruption, progressive taxation just creates new extraction points. Tax wealth, pay consultants, deliver nothing. This is the Democratic party pattern. With anti-corruption, progressive taxation funds actual services. Tax wealth, build public housing, provide healthcare. The same revenue either enriches consultants or serves workers, depending on whether corruption is broken.
Breaking corruption isn’t secondary to economic reform. It’s the prerequisite. Both must happen simultaneously to work.