Public Corruption

There is an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the number of public corruption cases in China and how the high-profile military leaders are suddenly finding themselves in jail for accepting bribes or gifts in exchange for some favors.  Xi is cracking down on his seniors who persist in continuing their behavior even though they have been told not to do it.  In most instances I would not care about this one way or another about this kind of thing, but on this one I do have some sympathy for China's leader.  Nobody is exempt from the behavior of their government officials, but doing something about it is important to the future of a country.

The FBI is supposed to keep statistics on this kind of crime but doesn't seem to have them in a place where they can be easily found.  The IRS does a better job, strange as that might seem.  The level of these cases is considerably lower than the ones the Chinese are announcing - though there are probably a good many more happening than the ones they have announced.  We don't have the big cases like the ones China is having and that is a bad thing, not a good one.  I wish we had a better record in this area.

If you watch the news, you are unavoidably hearing a lot about the kind of things that make for public corruption.  Two governors of Virginia were being investigated, as was the former National Security Advisor, and a couple of people from the White House in the last two administrations.    Given the press coverage, we would think their could be several indictments at any moment.  Only, the track record is not very good when it comes to these kinds of cases.  Yes, we have a former Congressman, John Hastert, who was paying off someone, the head of an NGO who bribed the President of the U.N. General Assembly, some really messy State legislators involved in all kinds of things like weapons trafficking, a few government contractors who mostly were bribing government officials, and the government officials they were bribing.  Not the kind of thing that is of national interest, and most of you have already forgotten about the ones I mentioned here.  

So, just a matter of interest, this may be an area where the Chinese are ahead of us.  We can probably do better, but the politicians are a little nervous about opening the flood gates to do the investigations.  They are looking everywhere, except for where they might find something of interest.  The FBI will tell you they don't have the resources for all the cases that come up.  The same with State prosecutors.  Maybe that would be an area that could be included in the budgets for the future.  That would be nice, however unlikely.