ON CORRUPTION IN AMERICA

From the prizewinning journalist, internationally recognized expert on corruption in government networks throughout the world, author of Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, a major, unflinching book that looks homeward to America exploring the insidious, dangerous networks of corruption of our past, present, and precarious future.

Now, bringing to bear all of her knowledge, grasp, sense of history and observation, Chayes writes in On Corruption in America, that the US is showing signs similar to some of the most corrupt countries in the world. Corruption, as Chayes sees it, is an operating system of sophisticated networks in which government officials, key private sector interests, and out-and-out criminals interweave. Their main objective: not to serve the public but to maximize returns for network members.

From the titans of America's Gilded Age (Carnegie, Rockefeller, JP Morgan, et al.); to the collapse of the stock market in 1929, the Depression and FDR's New Deal; from Joe Kennedy's years of banking, bootlegging, machine politics, and pursuit of infinite wealth, and the Kennedy presidency, to the deregulation of the Reagan Revolution, undermining the middle class; the unions; the Clinton policies of political favors and personal enrichment, to Trump's shocking hydra-headed network of corruption, systematically undoing our constitution and our laws, Chayes shows how corrupt systems are organized, how they enforce the rules so their crimes are covered legally; how they are overlooked and downplayed--shrugged off with a roll of the eyes--by the richer and better-educated, how they become an overt principle determining the shape of our government, affecting all levels of society.

Sarah Chayes's remarkable trajectory has led her from reporting on the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan for National Public Radio, to opening a soap factory in downtown Kandahar in the midst of a reigniting insurgency, to advising the topmost levels of the U.S. military. She is an internationally recognized expert on corruption in government networks throughout the world and is one of the architects of America's foreign anti-corruption policy. She has served as special adviser to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen and two commanders of the international forces in Kabul, Generals David McKiernan and Stanley McChrystal.
Sarah has been a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance program, where her work explored how severe and structured corruption can prompt international crises such as revolutions, violent insurgency and environmental devastation. Her current work analyzes the implications of today's hyper-monetized society in which money has become the dominant measure of social achievement, and the need for the restoration of societal values.
Sarah is the author of THE PUNISHMENT OF VIRTUE: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, THIEVES OF STATE: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize that inspired Steven Soderbergh's recent film, The Laundromat.