Careful there. The Transparency International page you link to is the perception index.
It measures what a set of people perceives corruption to be like in each country, and composits results from a number of different surveys in a way that as far as I know is not benchmarked against other data to verify if survey results actually matches reality.
You can not use it as a measure of how corrupt a country actually is. It's likely that it's an indicator when the numbers are very far apart, or that it can be used to spot trends in a country over time, but the relatively small difference between France and the US seems unlikely to be sufficient to draw any conclusions.
7% of people who interacted with the police report paying a bribe to them? 11% for education I could believe, but 15% to the judiciary, 17% to "land services"?
Maybe I just need to step my bribe game up, but that seems significantly higher than I would have expected.
[1] http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013/country/?country=united_...
Yes, because corruption has been legalized through corruption.
You can, as a rich person, or an enterprise, legally bride politicians so that they can pass laws for your own profit.
"low crime, low corruption".
Also remember that "no crime" has been committed in the 2008 financial crisis.
What has changed in that time, is now the government has vast economic controls at its disposal. If the government doesn't control the economy, you can't buy economic favors from them. When the US was still a very Capitalist nation at the start of the 20th century, in which the government had little control over the economy, political bribery would not get you very far when it comes to passing laws for your own profit.
To sum it up: political bribery is far more difficult today than it was 100 years ago, but now it can buy you a lot of things whereas before it could not, because of the substantial expansion of government control over the economy.
When it comes to the financial crisis, Western Europe committed many of the same financial 'crimes' you're referring to that, that the US did. The financial, banking and real estate boom and bust hit countries from Britain to France to Germany to Spain. What happened in the US was not unique to the US, the same things were going on in a lot of 'first world' nations.
The Fed stepped in and bailed out tons of European banks for example, the same as they did US banks.
It may not be legal to give politicians money, but it's totally legal to donate to their old expired campaign, and for them to then have the campaign repay the loan they gave it.
But the quid pro quo inherent in election financing ("If I make choice A, PAC #1234 will fund $5m of ads in my next campaign ... if I make choice B, I'll get a couple hundred checks from constituents at $50 each and PAC #1234 will run those $5m of ads against me") is much more insidious.
The practice of civil forfeiture on people who can't defend legally, like this guy, sure doesn't indicate that.
Maybe for the HSBC guys who laundered $378.4 billion over several years there will be a small fine, their profit for a few months. But no bank was forfeited. No board members were sent to jail for it. It seems property rights are solid, if you are rich.
The reason the US still ranks high on the low corruption index, is because you have to take the value of the whole, not just one small problem such as this.
It impacts an extraordinarily small percentage of Americans today, and the dollar sums are extraordinarily small in such a large economy. Put another way, on that 100 point corruption scale, the DEA program would represent a negative deduction of 2 or 3 points.
What's actually important here, is stopping it before it gets larger. If they don't stop it, it will get much bigger, and graduate from being a small problem to being a serious threat to the average citizen.
If we're talking about rights violations, civil forfeitures are a joke compared to the war on drugs for example and the incarceration that has been going on since the 1970s.
The title system is weak and outdated, and the mass fraud of "robosigning" (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/false-affidavits-fore...) has not been adequately addressed.
The civil forfeitures problem is non-trivial, but you're drastically exaggerating. The whole of the US has a very highly functional, low-corruption judiciary system, and a mostly still intact and strong property rights system.
Most of America is low crime, low corruption, the opposite of what you're implying. In fact it's because of that, that most Americans are unaware of what organizations like the DEA are doing.
The US is less corrupt than France for example:
https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results