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corruption
Crime of the Century: An Old Soundtrack to Our Current Nightmare
How Supertramp’s 1974 prog-rock anthem foreshadowed 2025’s catastrophe.
Mar 16, 2025
Listening to Supertramp’s album Crime of the Century in 2025 is like dusting off an old diary and realizing you were right about everything.
Supertramp’s 1974 prog-rock anthem was not meant to be trapped in a decade drowning in idealism. Rather, it was a collection of elegies that resonate with me more now, in our current nightmare, than when I first listened to it. The mournful melodies and plaintive lyrics (by Richard Davies and Roger Hodgson) speak of the crises of vague spiritual thirst, self-loathing, money culture, schools churning out compliant citizens, and unabashed corruption.
It came to a head in the 2025 inauguration of an American president with the grand unveiling of a well-worn power system but with a staggering level of audacity. Near the president and out of the shadows, there stood magnates of seemingly incurable hubris who reached their bliss points, invited to take reign of sensitive policy and firing authority and gain access to the country’s secrets and public money. A new administration wasted no time unveiling a “billionaires’ row” of insatiable elites who aren’t just playing the game. They own it. Collectively worth $1.35 trillion, they have become brands in human flesh, more recognizable than the corporate empires they built.
The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture.
And somehow, it’s all there… in the album.
Four years after its release, I came across Crime of the Century in a used album store on the main strip of Carbondale, Illinois, during my undergraduate years at Southern Illinois University. Every other week or so, I’d walk to the music store that always smelled like stale cannabis and was managed by a large man with cannabis-stained teeth and a lot of opinions. He was clearheaded enough to have promised me that he’d keep an eye out for Supertramp cassettes and vinyls.
Back in the apartment, I had Crime on repeat for longer than I will confess. Somewhere in the silage of existential angst, I decrypted the pangs that augured the coming of a novel strain of corruption and indifference capable of shaking the moral foundations of anything in its path, including a nuked-up, power-bloated country, exulting in its hegemonic dominance, yet hanging on to conceits of global moral leadership.
There were plenty of suspects to point fingers at back in the 70s, but the hardest part—which the album still dares us to do—was staring down ourselves, we the self-satisfied searchers, critics, and activists with bell-bottoms, inebriated by our magical thinking of independence and convincing ourselves that we were above the detritus and contributed nothing to the collective rot. You’ll find this indictment in the concluding lines of the title track, “Crime of the Century”:
Who are these men of lust, greed, and glory?
Rip off the masks and let’s see
But that's not right, oh no, what’s the story?
Look, there’s you and there's me
I can’t say I saw today’s condition coming when I was 20. But it does seem close to a kind of Bayesian reasoning, where you have an initial, under-substantiated certitude about something and then see new evidence that confirms your most primitive claims and worries.
The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture. Former President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and Vice President Kamala Harris have exited the stage, but their hollow-point scruples remain contagious, repurposed by their successors. What we are witnessing is not a change in direction but a seamless handoff, a continuation of the same imperial prerogatives, now dressed in different rhetoric.
The Oval Office openly covets resources and land that belong to other people. The perverse logic of supremacy and strange level of entitlement (epistemic assumptions of Empire) are rubber-stamped by compromised elected and appointed men and women of Pharaonic arrogance, who have narcissistic visions of taking Gaza’s seashore and gas fields, Greenland’s minerals, Canada’s lumber and oil, Ukraine’s massive rare earth reserves, and Panama’s canal.
So do we need more proof of active colonial appetites?
The existential dread of Crime of the Century should have shown us an imp squatting on the chest of a defeated counterculture that my generation thoughtlessly held on to. The costumes and performance of rebellion ultimately became products themselves, mass-packaged and sold back to consumers, as the edited book Commodify Your Dissent painfully argued a bit too late in 1997. To identify with grunge or goth moods, for example, subsequent generations purchased the look from fashion brands who created inventories, price points, and a market that preyed on real feelings of alienation and disillusionment in youth culture.
At the heart of Crime of the Century is a troubling accusation: We’re complicit in the corruption we claim to despise. It’s easy to cast blame on political elites, but the rot runs deeper. Media personalities, especially the high-profile journalists of broadcast celebrity and late-night comics, make their careers selectively criticizing these very figures and what they represent—only to rub shoulders with them at off-camera galas, clink wine glasses, invite them onto their shows, and turn critique into entertainment.
Each day, the celebrity reporters and broadcasters spew hundreds of thousands of words to demonstrate their erudition, apparently depleting their allotment of verbiage for the day, leaving no room for “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”
The oligarchs of influence thrive because, in part, we fund them. We engage the platforms, consume and share the storylines, and chase virality. We freely give away the inventories of our privacy. We do this knowing that the details of our inner sanctums are the products that social media giants are trafficking for great profit. The hard truth is, no one’s fully off the grid. We’re entangled in the wires we trip over and then curse at them like podcasters.
So, what do we do? Keep spinning the album and nervously thumb prayer beads (misbaha, in colloquial Arabic), cowering in the album’s pastel and gloomy brilliance?
With the exception of those who dared to speak truth to power (mainly through alternative presses that captured the right kind of radical), my generation watered the tillage that sprouted our current conundrum. One of the tracks of Crime exposed many for what they were: “For we dreamed a lot / And we schemed a lot / And we tried to sing of love before the stage fell apart.” That’s right, we were cantors of phantom ideals that were about to fall apart early in the 1980s, when John Lennon was murdered in New York City and Ronald Regan sired trickle down economics, which “foolishly trusted the collective greed of a people” to care for the needy and marginalized.
Songwriters like Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, and Rick Davies, along with scholars like Christopher Lasch, sounded the alarm early, but most of us dismissed it, assuming the warning had to be for someone else. In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch saw through the cracks of idiot-proof idealism and noticed the shape of social and psychological narcissism that soon enough would be given the key to the Oval Office.
My generation’s surviving tenants need to stop lecturing and stop recounting imagined glories of the past. It’s time to move out of the way, especially for the generation of young people now whom we bitterly complain about, but who actually are better positioned to succeed where we failed. They have ideals but are not idealists, and they are jaded, but not overly so, just enough. Former and current students of mine, they are not content with just listening. With hunger and the right kind of impatience, they will write new songs. Can’t wait to hear them, for if we’re still noticing the crimes of 1974 in 2025, it can only mean the crime never stopped. It just learned to dress better.
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'Disgraceful': Trump DOJ Guts Unit That Targets Corruption by Public Officials
The president, said one expert, "is for corruption and is undermining any federal efforts to combat it."
Mar 12, 2025
Weeks after the Trump administration pressured the U.S. government's top anti-corruption prosecutors to drop charges of bribery and other federal crimes against New York Mayor Eric Adams, the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice is set to be almost entirely dismantled.
As NBC Newsreported late Tuesday, the office tasked with investigating and prosecuting allegations of corruption by elected officials will soon be disbanded, with only a few Public Integrity Section employees remaining and the unit no longer directly handling investigations and corruption cases.
Prosecutors will be reassigned elsewhere in the DOJ and pending cases will be moved to U.S. attorneys' offices across the country—signaling that partisan political appointees instead of civil servants who have worked under both Republican and Democratic presidents will now oversee corruption cases.
The move was denounced as "disgraceful" by political scientist Norman Ornstein and as evidence that President Donald Trump is "for corruption" by Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
Last month, several officials resigned from the Public Integrity Section after objecting to what they said was a proposed "quid pro quo" under which Adams would assist with the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts if charges against him were dropped.
Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, gathered the unit's attorneys and pushed them to sign a filing asking for the charges to be dismissed. Edward Sullivan, a senior litigation counsel, signed the filing to save his colleagues' jobs.
The Public Integrity Section, which also oversees election-related crimes and campaign finance offenses, has prosecuted both Democratic officials, including former Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, and Republicans such as former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.
Trump has claimed the Justice Department under former President Joe Biden conducted politically motivated investigations into his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results—even though the cases were handed over to Special Counsel Jack Smith when Trump announced his 2024 campaign.
Now Trump's dismantling of the anti-corruption unit, former DOJ counterintelligence official David Laufman toldNBC, raises "serious questions about whether future investigations and prosecutions will be motivated by improper partisan considerations."
"The only reasonable interpretation of this extraordinary action," said Laufman, "is that the administration wants to transfer responsibility for public corruption cases from career attorneys at Main Justice to political appointees heading U.S. attorneys' offices."
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Trump Stages Tesla Car Show at White House After Berating Americans for Boycotting Musk
"While Trump cuts programs you need to live, he's turning the White House into a car dealership to advertise his unelected shadow president's failing company," said one critic.
Mar 11, 2025
With Tesla's stock plummeting since the electric carmaker's CEO, Elon Musk, arrived in Washington, D.C. and began slashing federal jobs and programs, U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday was intent on helping his "special government employee" as he spent part of the afternoon inspecting five of the company's cars on the White House lawn.
The president declared the cars "beautiful" and expressed hope that his purchase of a Tesla will help the company's financial position.
More Perfect Union, the labor-focused media organization, cast doubt on Musk's claim that he will double production due to the president's interest, "given declining demand for his cars."
"This is just two corrupt oligarchs scratching each other's backs," said the group.
He also joined Musk in condemning protests that have broken out at Tesla dealerships over the CEO's work at the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE), which has pushed to dismantle agencies across the federal government and overseen the firing of about 30,000 federal employees.
"It's really terrible that there's so much violence being perpetrated against people at Tesla, Tesla supporters, Tesla owners, Tesla stores" said Musk after thanking Trump for displaying the cars. "These are innocent people who have done nothing wrong."
There have been at least 10 acts of vandalism reported against Tesla vehicles, charging stations, and dealerships in recent weeks as outrage has grown over the unelected Musk's enormous influence at the White House. No injuries have been reported in any of the incidents.
Shares of the company plummeted 15% on Monday—Tesla's worst day in four and a half years. Since peaking in mid-December after Musk poured nearly $300 million into Trump's election campaign, Tesla's shares have lost more than 50% of their value and the company has lost more than $800 billion.
Before parading Tesla's products in front of the press at the White House, the president took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to lambast "Radical Left Lunatics" for "trying to illegally and collusively boycott" his ally and benefactor's company.
"Why should he be punished for putting his tremendous skills to work in order to help make America great again?" asked Trump.
Podcast host Matt Bernstein called the scene at the White House "jaw-dropping."
"While Trump cuts programs you need to live, he's turning the White House into a car dealership to advertise his unelected shadow president's failing company," said Bernstein. "Dystopian levels of corruption."
At the White House, the president also suggested he may label any attacks against Musk's dealerships as domestic terrorism.
"Those people are going to go through a big problem when we catch them," said Trump. "And let me tell you, you do it to Tesla, and you do it to any company, we're going to catch you and you're going to go through hell."
Murtaza Hussain of Drop Site Newsprojected that with the Trump administration pushing to deport visa holders who have participated in pro-Palestinian protests—with at least one abducted by immigration agents and detained in recent days—"we're maybe two years away from people deported for terrorism for keying a Tesla."
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