LETTER: Government greed

Published 1:30 am Saturday, January 24, 2026

When traveling in an earlier life across Africa, the Middle East, South America and Eastern Europe, I always tried to leave the locals with a better impression of an American.

But, in political conversations in hotel bars or around campfires, I would speak of two basic ideological differences: guns and corruption.

Most understood that having no personal weapons meant governmental subserviency.

But the point I was most proud of was the degrees of separation we had between other governments’ greed, the unmitigated willingness to steal their countrymen’s commodities and taxes.

In my foreign conversations, I’d suggested corruption as high as 80 percent of GDP in most of the 193 U.N.-listed countries.

But I allowed a lonely 20 percent in the United States.

Now that the insidious cancer of greed has been proven, cultivated by such thieves as USAID, pharmaceuticals, NGOs and state welfare fraud, my humble ignorance of 20 percent is more like 50 percent.

I’m heartbroken and ashamed by the incipient decline of our native moralities, caused by past and present governmental leaders’ stupid alignment with medieval cultures; the seed that rots human dignity from the inside out.

Jan Richardson

Sequim