They Told Me ‘Nothing Will Happen — Everybody Is Doing It (Lumuel Zerubbabel Baah on Facebook)

Others are saying no right now, walking away from $40 million just to keep their conscience clean.

In one of those cases, I also watched someone else win a job after bidding $5 million higher than we did — not because his proposal was stronger, but because he'd paid into the right campaign coffers.

What doesn't fade is a culture — quiet, procedural, almost boring in how normal it's become — where saying "no" is treated as strange, and "everybody is doing it" is treated as a legitimate defense.