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I'm sure that DJ Campbell's arrest for arranging special favors for gambling consortiums will engender all sorts of tut-tutting from everyone, basically everywhere. And with good reason - nothing corrodes the underpinnings of a sport faster than the suspicion that the outcomes aren't on the level. The entire game becomes a mummer's farce if the ref favors one side over another, or if the players want to lose, or if the midfielder's 10th-minute yellow card looks a propos of nothing.
But what if the whole game already was a mummer's farce? What if DJ Campbell was just ahead of the curve? A 19-month Europol investigation concluded that 'match-fixing is widespread in football.' We are told that money is the deciding factor in crucial, life-altering decisions every day. Here in America, the idea that people could die because they cannot afford food or health care is something we are told we just have to live with. So money is crucial enough, important enough that children have to go hungry lest those with become those with-a-little-less - how does match-fixing shock, then?
We have a financial sector filled to bursting with actual criminals, richer than Croesus, beholden to no one.
We have a political sphere unmoored from the people, philosophically inbred, suspicious of those whose ideas don't have crossed eyes.
We have a business class with the morality of a cancer cell.
How does match-fixing shock, again? How great should be our outrage?
