A Full Body Scan of American Corruption

In the United States, if a policeman stops you for a traffic violation, and you offer him a $20 bill to forget about the whole thing, you’ll likely end up in jail.

But if you leave your Federal government job and go work as a consultant to the very industry you used to regulate, you won’t go to jail—you’ll grow rich. Very rich. 

Michael Chertoff

Michael Chertoff is the poster boy for this institutionalized corruption going on in America today. He is not unique. He is not an outlier of any bell curve. If anything, Chertoff’s form of corruption is average—it’s ordinary. It’s what everyone is doing: Everything within the law, everything that the law says he ought to be doing—yet the net effect is a blatant corruption that is personally despicable, and socially disastrous.

Michael Chertoff was the head of the Homeland Security Agency from February of 2005, to January of 2009. But after he left, he formed an outfit called The Chertoff Group—and was promptly hired by an obscure company called Rapiscan Systems.

The Chertoff Group, according to their website, “provides strategic security advice and assistance, risk management strategy and business development solutions for commercial and government clients on a broad array of homeland and national security issues.” 

That sounds . . . impressively vague. Slippery as a greased stripper’s pole, actually. So let’s approach this a different way: 

What does Michael Chertoff do?

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