Americans don't understand what corruption, let alone open corruption, really looks like. Circa 2008 I was pulled over by a cop in Mexico for "speeding", even t

Americans don't understand what corruption, let alone open corruption, really looks like. Circa 2008 I was pulled over by a cop in Mexico for "speeding", even though I was in tight traffic driving the exact same speed as everybody else around me, which was half the posted speed limit on account of the cop conspicuously parked in the unobstructed median. After pulling me over, he explained that I needed to pay him $500 on the spot if I didn't want to go to jail. This was a demand to pay "la mordida" for which Mexico was infamous, but by this time had (AFAIU) become much more rare in practice except in this particular region (Monterey), notwithstanding that the infamy among Americans remained undiminished. He even offered to take me to an ATM! It took me a good 10 minutes on the side of the road to talk him down to $20. (I would have preferred to go to jail just for the story, but this being modern Mexico we both knew he'd get in trouble if he tried to bring me into the station.) A few years earlier something similar happened to me when crossing a rural border station near Organ Pipe National Park in Arizona--the officer demanded I pay an "import tax" for the stuff in my car. (I was moving from DC back to SF, taking the more scenic routes wherever I could. The American border guards were sitting in lawn chairs a mile up the road.) I think I talked him down to $10 after 5 minutes of haggling, at which point his supervisor walks over, smiling, and tells him to leave me alone just as the money was about to exchange hands. The supervisor had been peeling an orange while enjoying the spectacle. I guess he must've been bored that day. Now that's open corruption. And where there's any amount of open corruption, it's a good guess that hidden corruption is extremely pervasive. But if there's not such open corruption (and it's exceedingly rare if not non-existent in the U.S.), we can't make any wild assumptions about hidden corruption. If you look at the data, actual corruption is quite rare in the U.S., relatively speaking. As mentioned elsethread, in global terms we're near the tippy top. It didn't used to be this way. Even open corruption was once not uncommon in the U.S. At the turn of the 20th century, as civil service reforms gained momentum across the country--municipal, state, and Federal--some elected politicians openly defended kick-back schemes as being democratic. But they lost. This removed much of the opportunity and incentive except when privately and discretely dealing with elected officials or public-facing servants (e.g. cops, inspectors, etc). Later, private rights of action that permitted people to sue municipalities, and the creation of FBI criminal units to proactively investigate corruption schemes even among high-level elected officials, helped to dramatically reduce remaining corruption by creating very real costs at all levels of government. Your example is literally an example of why the U.S. doesn't see much corruption--it comes with very real risks. The FBI and DoJ are still beyond repute when it comes to corruption, even if state-based enforcement officials still too often look the other way. Every politician sweats even the prospect of drawing attention from the Feds. Instead, Americans now call "corruption" whatever policies and decisions they disagree with if they don't understand the motivations behind them. It's pure cynicism and, ultimately, fatalistic. (And being illegal doesn't ipso facto make something corruption either; no more than violating copyright turns you into a willful criminal.) That doesn't mean things couldn't be better. Or that real corruption of the type normally implied by the term doesn't actually exist--the cited conspiracy among some LA councilmen is classic corruption, albeit not open. But like with the term "racism", in order to sustain the same prevalence of accusations people have had to dramatically expand the scope of the term when forced to defend themselves. That doesn't mean what's now being referred to isn't unfair, wrong, or otherwise illegitimate, but we've long since descended into word games. Which is unproductive as within this expanded set of problems, there are no common ways to address and resolve them (e.g. simple, across-the-board reforms or related measures); by equivocating we're hurting our ability to identify causation and meaningfully mitigate and remediate actual, substantive issues.