Last edited Thu Jan 28, 2016, 05:24 PM - Edit history (2)

*$8.5 trillion "missing" (embezzled) from Pentagon.

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part2

*$43 trillion in Wall Street bailouts - for engineering the most massive fraud in human history.

http://www.westernjournalism.com/obama-administration-facing-massive-federal-lawsuit/

(and no wonder the media treads carefully around those $43 trillion: http://vitalnewsaustralia.blogspot.com/2012/12/cnbc-execs-children-murdered-1-day.html)

The USA is in the top 20%, IIRC. That doesn't mean it's corruption-free, but it's better than most countries.

Treason doth never prosper: Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

private fraud. The supposed bribery link just has a blog post of a study that concludes wealthy people have more power than poorer people and says nothing about congress.

In most countries - particularly larger, advanced countries - private-sector corruption usually dwarfs government corruption by at least an order of magnitude.

As for the link, to wit:

Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

Last edited Fri Jan 29, 2016, 10:54 PM - Edit history (1)

DU might not be the place for you.

And the above list - incomplete as it is - includes plenty of gov't. corruption.

DU isn't going to change anything about that.

I think you missed the point of the article. They evaluated corruption on a continuum. They didn't say "this one is corrupt and the others lack any corruption", did they?

Plenty of sources to back up the existence of gargantuan amounts of money laundering through the U.S. banking system.

Or even, likely, that it's a private corruption problem on the part of the banks.

It's also likely factually inaccurate:

At least $1 trillion in annual money laundering by U.S. banks (inc. narco proceeds), with near-total impunity

Most estimates put the size of the entire illegal drug trade in the US at a tad under half a trillion dollars per year. That would make it pretty unlikely that more than twice that amount is laundered (let alone knowingly) by US banks.

By comparison... lots of those illegal drugs are sold by Venezuela as intentional government actions to bring in the stronger currency (and facilitated directly by government officials and their families who profit personally). That's the very definition of corruption... not whether or not some bank knows that a given cash deposit is related to the drug trade and let's it slide.

And while no one's denying it also goes on in Venezuela, to assert that laundering is not "a private corruption problem on the part of U.S. banks" simply flies in the face or everything we already know (no doubt just the tip of the iceberg).

http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2011/October/unodc-estimates-that-criminals-may-have-laundered-usdollar-1.6-trillion-in-2009.html

http://www.alternet.org/story/151135/american_banks_%27high%27_on_drug_money:_how_a_whistleblower_blew_the_lid_off_wachovia-drug_cartel_money_laundering_scheme

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-06-29/banks-financing-mexico-s-drug-cartels-admitted-in-wells-fargo-s-u-s-deal