Corruption

The longest serving Republican Senator in history, Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens had his house searched yesterday by the FBI and IRS two months after the President of Alaska’s largest oil services company pled guilty to corruption.

On Sunday 60 Minutes reported on how several congressman forced through a Medicare bill very friendly to the drug industry and then took lucrative jobs with the drug industry.

Several reports say that Iraqi corruption of American money runs into the billions of dollars.

Corruption is part of human nature. But some countries have pretty much avoided it.

In a ranking of 160 countries by corrupt practices as perceived by business people and country analysts, Iceland, Finland, and New Zealand finished 1-2-3 in being clean. It turns out that having “land” at the end of your country name is a pretty good predictor of low corruption. Of the nine countries ending in land, six were in the top ten and only one was in the bottom half: Swaziland, at 105. By the way, Iraq came in at 139. And the US? Number 17, just missing out on the top 10%.

On a sad note, would Bill Walsh have allowed this to happen on his watch? And where’s Tom Snyder when we really need him? Maybe all our corruption problems will go away if we just changed the name of our country to something like Americaland.