> There's a huge difference between bribing a current politician and a former one, in that the current one can meaningfully look the other way or send you kickb

> There's a huge difference between bribing a current politician and a former one, in that the current one can meaningfully look the other way or send you kickbacks. Actually there isn't[0], because the former one can have looked the other way or sent you kickbacks while they were in office, in the knowledge that you would bribe them later, when it no longer officially 'counts' as corruption. This is the standard way that corruption works in the US, since there are laws against just directly bribing a politician the way you would in some other countries. 0: Edit: isn't a huge difference; obviously there is a little difference, just not enough to do more than slow down the development of corruption.