> Corruption purges in Leninist states are always political... How aggressively CEOs get prosecuted, does depend on the executive investigating and prosecuting

> Corruption purges in Leninist states are always political... How aggressively CEOs get prosecuted, does depend on the executive investigating and prosecuting offenders, and whether Congress wants to pass stricter laws Do you have a source for these ideas, or are they your own? I can't speak for everyone of course but for myself and any of the many people I've had in-depth conversations with, none of us generally wonder how embezzlement happened in the first place, regardless of length, instead we marvel at the utter lack of any consequences for the convicted individual. In this way the state's power is far, far more illegitimized by the fact that it's apparently fine with people stealing incredible sums of money either from itself or from it's citizens and seems content to levy meaningless fines on the perpetrator after the fact, if even that. (or, in my leftier and more conspiratorial groups, that the weakness of the state to prosecute financial crimes is a direct result of the system being designed by rich people to facilitate the activities of other rich people, but I digress) The only ones in recent memory I can recall are Sam Bankman-Fried, which is still ongoing, and Elizabeth Holmes, both of whom seemed to have committed the proper crime of stealing from other rich people, whereas the ones who steal from the working/middle class are left largely untouched. A coincidence I'm sure. Where Government funds land in terms of "is this rich people's money or poor people's money" is up to the reader of the comment to determine, that one's prosecution rate does seem to trend more political, as tons of incredibly wealthy people are milking the government cow for absolutely mind-bending amounts of money and delivering basically nothing. > One interpretation, is that the American state, does not feel the need to demonstrate its authority in such a dramatic way. Maybe it should feel that need, since the lion's share of it's population on either side of the political spectrum thinks of the government as largely a joke. But they've also dis-empowered us to such a degree that our opinion on them largely doesn't matter anyway, so, on it goes.