Makes a little honest bribery look positively Utopian by comparison, doesn't it?

Despite a certain level of background cynicism in my general outlook, I do usually try to see the best in people. Specifically, it's a pretty bad idea to go along with the whole "everyone's in it for the money, especially the politicians" cliché, for a number of reasons: not only is it damaging to the democratic process and the political wellbeing of the country in general, it also fosters a suspicious attitude that will make you less trusting of everyone, feeding back into the paranoia that seems to be so pervasive at the moment. Not to mention the fact that even for a cliché, it's startlingly unoriginal.

However, it sometimes seems like the world is absolutely determined to prove me wrong. On a number of levels, corruption is not just tolerated, but practically encouraged. And we're not talking about former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa here. While obviously we can't excuse corruption in places like Zimbabwe, it is at least easier to understand in countries with crippling poverty and a war-torn recent history. No, we're talking about the countries that we're used to, the supposed paragons of virtue and defenders of democracy.

(Quick disclaimer - the examples I'm going to point to are all from the USA. I doubt that this is because the US is more corrupt than anyone else - it's just that online news sources are overwhelmingly US-centric. If you're willing to do some digging, I bet you'll find similar stories in most Western countries.)

On the personal and institutional level, we have the fine and upstanding Cops Writing Cops. The description of the site on Boing Boing summarises it succintly as "a site where cops (of various flavors) name and shame other police officers who have the temerity to issue tickets to their 'brother' police officers when said 'brothers' break the law," but that doesn't tell you the level of deception and bad feeling present here. The site is nominally aimed at police who penalise other police officers for things which a non-police officer would get away with. Frankly, that's not a bad idea - surely we should hold our law enforcers to a high standard of accountability? In any case, that aim is entirely subverted by the forums, where it becomes clear that many contributors are of the opinion that police officers shouldn't be given penalties for any traffic offence. In one particularly unpleasant post, a contributor (himself an officer) claims that he has deliberately never penalised another officer for driving while drunk.

I don't think I need spell out that this is an appalling breach of public trust. If this kind of behaviour is widespread, and if we accept obvious and endemic corruption in the police force, it's only a short trip to a force unaccountable to anyone. And we have a term for police like that - it's "secret police".

If some of the police are bad, that's nothing to some of the politicians. I present, for your possible amusement (but more likely for your jaw-dropping amazement), the antics of the Texas State Legislature.

If the actual behaviour of the politicians wasn't bad enough (and it's shockingly bad), there's also the attitude of the legislature as a whole to take into account. Despite the fact that these people aren't supposed just to be protecting democracy, but actually its main manifestation, and despite the fact that their actions are clearly detrimental to each other's agendas, they seem to be shrugging it off as some fact of life that isn't worth dealing with. The complex and expensive system that we have in place to ensure that the will of the people gets carried out is turned into a competition to see who can press buttons the fastest while everyone else is out of the room.

Sadly, that's not the highest level at which we find this kind of corruption. In fact, we see it at the highest possible level - international relations, in the form of the "Blackwater incident". Blackwater, if you didn't know, is an American private security firm currently employed in Iraq to provide security for US citizens. "Security firm", in this case, is really something of a euphemism, as the term "private army" or "paramilitary mercenary organisation" would probably be better. In essence, the US government has realised that having the world's largest military isn't much good if you've already deployed them all over the world. The problem - which, if we're honest, has really been present throughout history since the very first mercenary - is that paying heavily-armed people to kill other people isn't a great idea if you want to keep control over who they kill. Or keep any kind of control at all, come to that.

Inevitably, things got out of hand. The Blackwater employees allegedly embarked on a 20-minute shooting spree that left countless Iraqi civilians dead. If this had been the only problem that has surfaced with Blackwater, it would have been tragic enough - the fact that other incidents have occurred, such as a Blackwater guard drunkenly murdering one of the Iraqi Vice-President's own guards, brings it to the level of "so why are they in Iraq, again?"

On the bright side, the US has started to ask the same question, and has started an investigation. On the downside...the first Congressional report was written by a Blackwater employee. And let's not forget that many of the firm's top employees came from positions linked with the current US administration. They know that there's nothing anyone can do about it, short of Congressional action, and even that's not guaranteed to work. It's a free ride all the way to the bank, and people are dying in the meantime. Welcome to democracy, Western-style.