At an Anti-Corruption Summit in London recently, Secretary of State John Kerry lumped in the U.S. electorate along with others around the world who are “angry” because of a “sense that the system is rigged.” Kerry said that the “extremism that we see in the world today comes in no small degree from the utter exasperation” people have with the “system.”
While Kerry was addressing a global audience, he did not exclude the U.S. from the “corruption pandemic in the world today… [that] attacks all of our states.”
While Kerry did not refer directly to the candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, he appeared to be alluding to them when referring to “anger manifesting itself in different forms in elections around the world, including ours.”
Kerry’s words may seem an indictment of the Obama administration for its apparent failure to rein in this culture of corruption in the last seven and a half years, though he did refer to two initiatives the administration has floated to address corruption in this country:
According to Kerry, the summit was an attempt to produce ideas and actions that “will [give] people across the planet a sense that leaders at the highest level are not, in fact, part of the problem; they’re part of the solution.”
