July 18, 2006

Is there some state-of-the-art anti corruption tool we do not know about?

Sir, Patti Waldmeir, Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Richard Water’s report “Google campaign tests power of cash versus votes in Washington”, July 18, will have many of us from developing countries scratching our heads, for the umpteenth time, trying to understand how all that “money-talks” is not corruption when in our corrupt countries it would definitively be considered so. Of course money-talks, we all know that, but a legislator or any other government official is supposed to be above it and resist the temptations, but here you speak so brazenly open about it, without even the slightest effort of hypocrisy, so we must be missing out on something. Might there be a special state-of-the-art-legislation that permits this to happen and that we could copy since that sounds like a fresh though perhaps somewhat strange approach for getting ourselves out from the awful corruption trap we sadly confess we are in.