It must be said America locks up a fair amount of its public servants for economic crimes. Corruption at one level of another seems an inescapable part of politics and power.
Yet when countries like Russia are considered their simply is no comparison to west of the level of graft and corruption to be seen there. The difference between the levels of corruption in the developed world and the developing world is simply incredible. Corruption is a way of life in many countries. It is not an aberration it is normality.
It is time that global corruption is looked at differently.
While the US has spent trillions fighting terrorism and drugs, if you dig into these impossible to cure dynamics you will find at the heart governmental corruption is deeply imbedded in them.
Look to the evils of the world, poverty, disease and war and you find an engine of corruption in all of them.
Government in many parts of the world is not about public service, it is about personal or family enrichment.
It is only in the last few generations that government anywhere in the world has been for the sole benefit of the people and not for the power elite.
So it is hardly surprising that much of the world is still ruled by people who do so for their own benefit. Most people live in countries riddled with corruption from the lowly cop at the bottom extorting drivers for bribes to the president at the top and their looted billions and feather bedded family members.
It is time that these economic crimes are considered crimes again humanity, because corruption kills as surely as a bullet.
The primary agent problem, where representatives conflict of interest leads to the agent damaging the very client the agent is meant to represent, is an economic problem of colossal difficulty and it is core to corruption and the pestilences that spill from it.
It drives genocidal wars for resources in Africa, invasions from Kuwait to Crimea, redirects untold billions from Africa to Switzerland, turns food for the starving and medicine for the dying into penthouses from London to Dubai. As investment and aid in poor countries become hidden deposits in the offshore bank accounts of corrupt nomenclature, so people die of want.
So while the world teeters on the edge of a new cold war and the economic consequences, it is time for the developed world to step down its war on drugs and terrorism and step up its fight on their main driver: the engine of political corruption.
Can these rogue and backward states exist without the oxygen of corruption? Corruption funds the very mis-government that plagues world peace, undermines democracy and represses the poor.
Would the chaos in Ukraine, Russia and Crimea be possible without the fetid morass of endemic corruption that pollutes those countries?
Can America with its all seeing NSA eyes not see the bank accounts of a million corrupt officials stuff with loot?
It is time for the US to change its global strategy as the policeman of the world and strike at the heart of the beast, the corruption that funds so many of the world’s ills and starves its progress.