But at the highest levels the opposite prevails, up there with France or even the US. Not Kleptocracy by any means, but bad by OECD standards. Because it’s so institutionalized it doesn’t really appear in those “corruption index” reports that NGOs like to produce.
You don't know how good you have it. The low level corruption is the thing that eats away at your soul and poisons your day to day life.
High level corruption? Awful, but we have that too.
But having to bribe the nurse so that your grandma gets painkillers (or toilet paper!) in the hospital? Having to bribe the police officer to get your driver's license? Having to bribe the lady at the counter working for the City Hall, so that you can actually get papers you need this year, not 2 years from now?
That really messes with your head!
And if you think Romanians are somehow content:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%932019_Romanian_p...
They were in the news everywhere, from Deutsch Welle to the New York Times.
I find your comment dismissive of those down the ladder, maybe I'm misinterpreting it. It also seems unaware of history or recent news.
Most ngos and corruption indices focus too much on lower level corruption instead of both.
Bringing a bottle of expensive vodka to smooth over some bureaucratic procedure is nothing compared to what goes on in the big leagues.
Something to keep in mind, corruption indexes like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index are actually about the perception of corruption. After all it's the only thing that's easy to measure.
Is there a "usual fee" for your driving license?
Please explain your definition of “neoliberal” to us.
"Everything I hate", same as everyone else.
My bet is that isn’t true.
It's akin to a strange alien weapon for most Americans, that goes off near you, putting you in a state of trance, and you don't even know what's happening.
There is brazenness and blatancy to it, as in "yeah, I did it, what are YOU going to do about it?"
In many other countries the remedy is torches and pitchforks, but here in the U.S. the crime syndicate infesting Washington D.C. is protected by a thick layer of laws and "norms". That's why William Barr can go on TV and say things like "winners write history". Try that shit elsewhere and see what happens.
In the developing world, corruption is quiet, it's subtle. No one is supposed to know you have 5 summer houses, because that makes people jealous and very very stabby. And that's the difference.
I only see it because I grew up in post-Soviet Ukraine. Americans don't have that unfortunate experience.
Right now that's not happening. Why? Because there is no money in it. You can't get a kickback from a school, you can't get a lobbying gig, you can't get a board seat. There is nothing to gain.
> That's pretty standard corruption. But the Bush administration, as rotten as it was, would at least provide schools with resources to open.
By what measure is killing half a million people, standard corruption?
(and you didn't really mean to say that's okay when they would at least provide schools with resources to open ... did you?)
The corruption we see in DE is similar to that of US and even Canada - and it's of a different kinds.
It's not corruption in the classical sense, it actually is rational for the state to prefer copper, if the state has investments in copper - in a kind of perverse way.
Less rational and borderline corruption if an individual state actor has personal investments in copper.
'Big Business' is often done on the basis of relationship, of the advice of consultants, and it's far more of a systematic thing than an overt thing.
For example, there is quite a lot of oversight for things like insider trading, and such shenanigans. People are not taking bribes.
It's rational for congressional members to 'fight' for the big government contract to be located in their district, even if it's not the ideal outcome.
This kind of network/influence dysfunction is a huge issue, and it deserves it's own name, because it operates in a different way, has different results and is way more nuanced.
That said it can have major impacts and it is a big deal, it should not be ignored, but it should be recognized as another category.
FYI - if contractors, suppliers etc. all did a really good job, it would matter less. There may or may not have been shenanigans in the allocating to CGI for the big Healthcare.gov project, but the worst part is that it was a failure. If CGI had of done a great job ... well that reduces the issue of how contracts are awarded.
The city of Montreal had some serious problems with low-level 'corruption' when handing out city contracts - as it turns out, it was partly bad acting, but partly because there was no concept of transparency, bidding, no proper systems and checks for how procurement is made, leaving the door open to city officials getting to go to expensive dinners etc..
It's an issue, but of a different kind.
A country preferring copper internet because they have large stocks of copper (which makes the project cheaper) is arguably the right thing to do. If it turns out it's a bad decision in the long run (because the negative impact of slow internet outweighs the savings brought by the cheap copper), that's just a bad investment. At worst, it's a mismanaged government.
An individual doing something to gain personal benefits (i.e. Cheney) is more regular, high level-corruption.
Somewhere in between the two, you get regulatory capture.
Then you have things like Old Boys' Clubs where you can't get hired in high-paying jobs unless you went to school with the right people. I'd call that an unequal society.
These are different types of problems which require radically different solutions.
So cash in hand is a bazillion times worse than a board seat.
This is a bazillion times worse than cash in an envelope, because it's straightforward larceny of public resources, papered over with some thin PR nonsense about "efficiency".
This current government isn't even pretending to do anything else. There have been so many no-bid contracts for "PPE supply" handed out to cronies with no PPE experience - and no PPE delivered, while lethal shortages continue - that there are are now formal legal challenges working their way through the courts.
The current government in the UK is uniquely poor compared to every UK government that has come before it. The situation there does not extend to "western nations" in general - just those run by incompetent/malignant (take your pick) populists.
We don't eliminate corruption as we 'advance', but instead we just keep abstracting it away until the less observant don't see it as corruption but instead some form of 'networking'.
This is obviously not true. There have been numerous uncovered political scandals in Germany that have led to politicians and managers loosing their job. Christian Wulff (Former German President), Guttenberg (former Defence Minister), etc.
I'm not saying there's no corruption in Germany - I think there's always going to be some level corruption at a certain scale of state - but there's no need to go as far as China or Russia for comparison. Just come to the South of Europe for a taste of what grand-scale corruption in what are otherwise (seemingly) high-functioning democracies...
I remember watching a Brazilian high government official (Justice minister?) on Anderson Cooper mentioning that Lava Jato had seen ~3 USD billion disappear, as Cooper reacted with a wide-eyed grin... And I thought to myself, huh, that's arguably the largest national corruption scandal in Brazil in recent history, and it's about the same size as the "EREs case" [1] in Spain, which was a regional affair, and where ~3 EUR billion also disappeared. One of many perpetrated by both main political parties in the last couple of decades.
Like I say, I don't think Germany is without corruption, but it's a matter of gradation - it's hard to label it as an "insanely corrupt" country seeing what's out here.
[1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_ERE_en_Andaluc%C3%ADa
But if you look "up" the amount of corruption rise to the astonishing levels. Just remember Stuttgart 21 or the Berlin Airport, Hamburg Elb Philharmonic, Battleship Gorch Fock. Germany is full of such corrupt projects, it's obvious and everyone knows about it, but nobody yet went to jail because of it.
None of those are examples of corruption, unless you have an almost unlimited understanding of what constitutes corruption.
Fun fact, for a very long time German companies could declare bribes paid abroad in their taxes. Legally. Seems that a lot of people didn't get the memo that bribery was, indeed, illegal now.
Surprisingly realistic policy, considering that bribery is simply part of everyday business in some locales.
I dont think there is any amount of money i could offer to safely escape a drunk driving ticket, however the ceo of my company was the head of the board for an security company, and we were forced to use their products despite an unimaginable amount of flaws.
The second the security company was sold we were allowed to drop every aspect of that company, 10 huge enterprise products, and the entire IT and Security organizations both agreed that throwing out the whole years roadmap and working to switch vendors as soon as possible was the best use of our time.
Thats a small example of pure and utter -yet legal- corruption. There is no world in which that vendor was the right choice for a single product let alone 10. Except the world where the CEO could make the productivity of one company fungible with the revenue of another.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-buy-new-york-citys-get-out-of-...
If a guy owns a company, I don't doubt that he believes it's the best at what they do. The one thing most CEOs I've met have in common is they ridiculously overestimate how great their companies are. This guy probably genuinely believed his security company was the best choice. It's "not invented here" on the scale of companies instead of git repos.
A classic problem parties have is that they need to take care of their party militants and their families. This typically creates economic activities (insurance, banks, investment funds, charities, community organizations, ..) that are aligned on party lines.
These companies are part of the party infrastructure and are used as power-bases to influence the party as well.
It's called patronage and is rampant in western democracies.
Sadly (luckily?) this wasn't corruption but plain out retarded levels of incompetence...
It’s like Putin - you could call him a democratic asshole, but you would never call him incompetent in politics - because if he was, he wouldn’t be alive by now.
Is this an idiom wherewith I'm unfamiliar?
The client was constantly allowed to adjust plans.
I've worked as architect on similar sized projects. You can't allow clients and esp. committees to change direction at all. This a breach of contract. With hospitals, universities, concert halls and airports you need to be strict to the local government, which is the client in such cases. They are no experts, they change every 4 years, they exhibit irrational behavior sitting in a committee.
Looking at our current Minister of Transport 'Andi Scheuer', this does not seem to be the case any more. He is still in office after burning more than € 500M in the recent toll scandal [0].
[0]: https://www.dw.com/en/german-transport-minister-blasted-over...
Andreas Sheuer is still in charge of transport as a federal Minister, despite the 500,000,000 € heavy corruption scandal.
Von der Leyen got even "promoted" to EU-lead position after heavy corruption scandal last year when she was a Defense Minister of Germany.
Not only Germany, but in the whole EU commission leadership it would be hard to find someone without corruption scandal, accusation or conviction.
The guy is corrupt and comically incompetent, but he just seems invincible. Why is he still in office? My theory is, that it has something to do with his dialect and his overall slightly idiotic appeareance. Though not on the same level as Trump or Boris Johnson, still that seems to give him some sort of protection, because people do not expect anything from him in the first place.
But then again, like OP correctly said: Europes leader has a corruption scandal at home, deleted evidence, the whole thing, but just keeps doing her thing.
The answer to that question is called the CSU. But they are losing ground in Bavaria so there's hope.
You can't arrest someone on account of them being an idiot.
It's the responsibility of the other party members and especially the opposition to demand him being removed from office.
Funnily enough the Green Party demanded exactly that, but then again that's the same party that wants general speed limits...
So yeah, of course any party that wants to get reelected in Germany will stand behind that clown, as long as that clown fights for "Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger!" and lets them keep their drivers license, because 21 km/h above the speed limit is just a trivial offence...
I think it should be. You get the power over large sums of money and for that you’re liable with your life.
We're all just human after all and making mistakes is part of the human condition.
There’s so much that comes with the power that it’s a very shallow argument to make.
No but you can sure fire them, in the private sector at least.
The 21 km/h above the speed limit would probably not make the auto industry very happy. What good is a Porsche if one needs to drive slowly?
that seems an exaggeration, off the top of my head Gentiloni[0] (economics) has not been involved in any corruption scandal or accusation that I know of, nor was Timmermans[1] (VP).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Gentiloni [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_Timmermans
This would involve stripping immunity first, which doesn't happen all that often and involves approval from the parliament.
Naturally, this is a partisan issue and members of the ruling parties would obviously vote against it, making it very difficult to achieve in practise.
This is common practise in most democratic countries, though and isn't unique to Germany at all.
If a politician is being caught stealing (e.g. embezzlement), criminal charges W I L L be put forward and immunity will be stripped from them.
The problem here is that unethical behaviour and gross incompetence simply aren't criminal offences.
Are they to be tolerated? No! But that's a question of changing laws and legislation accordingly, not one of being "untouchable" - because even politicians aren't and that's the point.
There's a difference between conflict of interests/unethical behaviour/incompetence and criminal actions.
The consequence of scandals like this should be a call for tighter laws, increased responsibility of all involved parties and better financial supervision in both politics and private enterprise.
Simply getting out the pitchforks, shouting that all politicians are corrupt criminals and demanding heads to roll doesn't change anything and isn't constructive.
This is why legislation and regulations need to change, because that's way easier than trying to change people.
If you don't like the rules of the game, demand to change the rules instead of shouting "You're all cheaters!" and stop there. That's just cheap and not helpful at all.
The solution is that politicians need to be held to a much higher standard than the letter of the law, by their voters. It boggles my mind how many politicians have such obvious conflicts of interest that manage to retain approval of their constituents.
Feel free to disagree with that. I stand by my point on account of the lack of transparency (e.g. no obligation to make ancillary income public) and the legality of the "Revolving Door"-effect.
Government officials in Germany are free to leave office for private enterprise with no restrictions. Public officers have to report lobbying jobs to their former office for 5 years, but the worst that can happen if they don't is loosing their pension.
The latter is not much of a problem, though, if the new employer just pays well enough...
This leads to CFOs of DAX companies becoming government officials in the ministry of finance; public officers serving in the ministry for radiation protection who dealt with interim storage facilities to leave office for (nuclear-) energy companies, and so on.
Holding politicians to higher standards than the law is delusional. Politicians are humans, too. None of them are Jesus Christ incarnate and none of them should be either, because in a democracy they should represent The People, not some Utopian ideal.
> It boggles my mind how many politicians have such obvious conflicts of interest that manage to retain approval of their constituents.
That's because in Germany, nobody knows that there even is a conflict of interests, because politicians aren't obligated to make additional income public.
A reasonable first step would be to make that mandatory (you don't even have to disclose exact sums of money, but it helps knowing that your representative has a paid seat in some board of directors on the side).
That is an assumption on your part. In the absence of thorough investigations that would condemn or exonerate them, it is difficult to say. Of course, it would be very twisted to say that the lack of investigations is proof of real corruption. Still, it should also not be taken as prrof of no corruption.
Guttenberg's public image rested on the idea that he was a morally upright, well composed, competent businessman, along with his noble lineage and family castle. The revelations about his thesis destroyed his credibility.
This is rather different from financial corruption of the sort hinted at in this article.
Francisca Giffey, the Family Minister, never resigned when her doctor thesis was found plagiarized.
Also von der Leyen, former German Defense Minister and current European Commission leader didn't resign when she was found that she falsified her official CV.
> Ich bin gerne bereit zu prüfen, ob bei über 1200 Fußnoten und 475 Seiten vereinzelt Fußnoten nicht oder nicht korrekt gesetzt sein sollten und würde dies bei einer Neuauflage berücksichtigen
> I am perfectly willing to check whether in any of the over 1200 footnotes and 475 pages individual footnotes were not - or not correctly - inserted, and to correct this in a new edition.
Guttenberg kept to this position for a week, while Angela Merkel and most of the government supported him.
In the end, though, the extensive plagiarism (93% of the pages have at least one known instance of plagiarism) in his dissertation was so well documented that it was impossible to deny, and his statements about possibly having made a few mistakes here and there also looked more and more like outright lies. Nobody plagiarizes to that extent by mistake.
Years ago I did a high level IR/HR course at BT where this sort of low level corruption was one of the most common types of serious misconduct.
Of course getting investigated by BT Security is not a happy fun experience.
Guttenberg was even the main candidate to direct some sort of "Internet security/ethics" department (don't remember anymore exactly what it was)? What kind of joke is that?
Von der Leyen was involved in the story about spending a lot of $ for external contracting companies & other stuff, then she got "promoted" to the EU-level => another joke, for me.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-ex-spy-chief-maassen-to-join-la...
I hope the revolving door didnt hit him in the ass.
None of these two served any prison sentences. Wulff was acquitted after he refused to pay 20k € to make it instantly go away and even had damages paid.
Guttenberg was caught plagiarizing for his doctoral dissertation, which is a rather common thing among German politicans. As a consequence he lost some public clout, but instead wrote a book for even more publicity, afaik right now he's doing some work for Springer in the US, biding his time for a another comeback in German politics.
Meanwhile to this day even Kohl's donation scandal, hasn't seen any proper investigation, nor the Amigo-scandal, NSU-scandal, nor the countless others, particularly on a local state level.
Heck, just look at people like Mehdorn and projects like the BER construction site: He, being such a highly renowned and well paid manager, was supposed to fix that mess. Nothing was fixed, the whole thing is still a massive mess, political consequences for anybody actually responsible? Pretty much zero.
The thing is: We Germans are very good about keeping up appearances, as a result of that inconvenient truths and topics often fall by the wayside.
How you can mistake this obvious corruption for incompetence is beyond me.
This is normal procedure. There is a rather short timeframe between appointment and becoming a minister. Of course did he sold it only after he know it would be a problem.
> How you can mistake this obvious corruption for incompetence is beyond me.
He had no benefits personally, so it's not corruption.
This is just a nice story you tell the kids to give them a scapegoat, ignoring the historical context. This happend 1982, when Internet did not even exist yet. And fiber at the time wasn't really great as today. Copper probably was indeed the better solution, consicdering that survived the decades, where fiber from that time has already become useless long ago.
Politics aside, isn't that the problem? Copper survived so it didn't need to be replaced. Fiber would have been replaced with newer one because otherwise it would not work at all. People put up with slow Internet, but they wouldn't have put up with no Internet.
And those stock sales would have been much less profitable.
Not direct cash bribe but definitely far more motivated than just incompetence.
OTOH, it doesn't preclude a mutually beneficial understanding, which the exchange points to. Maybe he had a deal, or wanted to keep the good stock between friends.
A decade later those OPAL installations were replaced again by copper as they could not handle high speed Internet.
Is that also not corruption but incompetence?
Since he signed off on this, it's on him to be investigated.
That's what corruption is.
Of course, if you want, you can cover it up in red tape and make it look like incompetence.
First sentence:
> Corruption is a form of dishonesty or criminal offense undertaken by a person or organization entrusted with a position of authority, to acquire illicit benefit or abuse power for one's private gain
That's what corruption is.
And experts are also no argument, as there are always experts saying this and that which you can call on later for eny kind of complain.
Neither you nor me are informend enough to say whether it was corruption, biasment, incompetence or something else. We don't even know whether it was good or bad for history. 30-40 years are a long time for technology and infrastructure.
In practice, when such "incompetence" involves millions (of Euro, dollars, etc.) - and those involved stand to gain from it - we ought to scrutinize it as a possible symptom of "malicious competence".
For me, "incompetence" sounds like an excuse or smokescreen, when there are those who profited from it. After all, numerous real-life cases suggest that corruption is endemic, if not inherent, in our institutions of politics, business, and public decision-making process.
Personal financial gain by abuse of power.
For quite a while early on in the internets history we are talking 1990's the German Telcos still wanted to use IDSN
However, they made the mistake of burying active components along with the fibre strands that only spoke ISDN. And of course no tubes. For upgrades they ripped it out again and built copper when DSL was en vogue... If they hadn't fucked up this badly, probably due to corruption, Germany would have had 20% broadband fibre coverage instantly 20 years ago
The UK could have had much better fibre if back in the 90's Mrs Thatcher's government had given BT a 20 year payback and allowed BT to implement its Fibre plans.
It set every industry in the country back decades. Medicine, education, everything. It makes my blood boil. I have to avoid thinking or reading about it at this point.
Nothing good can be expected when central gotv starts to "innovate".
> Sure, it's not like Russia or the CCP and you're not in danger of being suicided if you uncover some high level dirt but nobody really ever gets punished when obvious corruption gets proven so I have no idea how they always manage to looks so good in the corruption statistics.
That's the thing. The statistics are not untouched either. It's a rather pervasive thing, this corruption.
I also agree with the sentiment, that they do not really get punished. When have I read the last time, that some politician with hundreds of thousands of € of unregistered side-income is put in jail, like any merely normal citizen would for such a hefty sum? Oh wait, never.
- Vatican Inc. - https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/vatican-inc/
- Holy Money - Vatican City Corruption
Gustl Mollath [0] would probably disagree with that notion, just like the death of Jürgen Möllemann [1] left more questions unanswered than a proper investigation of him would very likely have answered. Similar situation with Wolfgang Hüllen during the CDU donations scandal.
Similarly the NSU process saw a lot of witnesses die under rather weird circumstances [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustl_Mollath
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_M%C3%B6llemann
[2]https://www1.wdr.de/fernsehen/aktuelle-stunde/startseite/nsu...
Seriously, it’s not Russia.
He wasn't imprisoned, they sent him to the asylum for 8 years because claiming German banks could do criminal things is just such crazy of a thing to do.
Which has quite some similarities to what happened to Hessian tax investigators [0] that were too successful for their own good: Using psychiatric assessments to discredit people who blow the whistle on corruption.
In that context it's quite cynical how nearly every high-profile suicide in Russia is framed as some kind of political hit-job ordered straight by the government, while in other countries people are looking for any reason to deny the existence of foul play.
The head of the regulator should have resigned weeks ago.
The main corruption measurement I know of is the CPI: Corruption Perception Index. It doesn't measure how much corruption there is in any given country, it only measures how much visible corruption there is. I'm sure there are other gauges but that's the one that gets reported and made comparisons on.
For a long time Finland tended to be either the top dog on that list, or at least hold firmly its hold in the top-3. As a Finn, I always found that rather depressing, for a simple reason. The top spot on the CPI list tells nothing about how well things are in a country. It merely tells how shitty they are even for the runner-up.
Where resources are low and there is not enough to go around for the most ambitious and driven, there "punishment" for wasting each others time and resources is more extreme.
If Facebook or Google or Twitter, one day in the future is sophisticated enough to label the most "corrupt"/"corruptible" individuals in a population based on all their data how would you "punish" all of them if it is 30% the population?
Corruption is crime, not vaguely acceptable opportunism. It has very direct negative social, political, and economic consequences. The fact that someone is robbing people using a company and/or a political organisation instead of guns and knives isn't an excuse - especially not when the sums involved can be so large.
It's all about definition of corruption isn't it?
In European politics and press we describe "outright deliberate corruption" with innocent deceiving descriptions such as "lobbying" and "failed government IT projects".
Is Northern Europe less corrupt than the South? Or is the Northern corruption just more institutionalized (aka: more competent at corruption)? I wouldn't know where to start to get an answer to that.
Is it corruption if the public never finds out?
This generalizes to damn near every government (or any big powerful organization to some extent as well) ever. The only difference is that more money enables some governments to abstract it away and reduce the visibility of it better than others.
That's why "complaining on a high level" is a rather German thing.
No surprise there is so little critical reporting, despite the 9 billion euros yearly budget.
Trust me, we know.
I speak for central/eastern Europe: where Deutsche Telekom has a big market share you can bet they formed a cartel and the prices for phones are higher than in western Europe.
(edit) Also: basically nothing of relevance happened in Europe after Volkswagen diesel scandal... I wonder why.
You really lost me there. The gap is civilizational. Russia and CCP are systemically corrupt, those countries must collapse for there to be a chance to uproot that disease. Pretending like it’s even meaningful comparing them to Germany on linear scale just creates suspicion in my mind that you’re part of somebody’s propaganda machine.
Replace the DAX with Nasdaq and America is basically the same. We just have different names for it like lobbying.
Compared to what? The ideal 100% angles? Because compared to reality and the rest of the world Germany sits very well in that regard.
Don't they lock people up in mental hospitals for that, though? That's classic USSR tactics.
If you're on the DAX or a politician, you're untouchable in Germany and lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insanely corrupt the German government and their corporate buddies are.
Sure, it's not like Russia or the CCP and you're not in danger of being suicided if you uncover some high level dirt but nobody really ever gets punished when obvious corruption gets proven so I have no idea how they always manage to looks so good in the corruption statistics.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/deutschland-warum-unsere...