California: The State of Corruption
By Brianne Burr, Marketing –
While no state or country is completely immune from corruption, some are worse than others. The state of California, for example, has seen significant government corruption in recent times. This corruption can drastically affect the lives of its leaders, but more importantly, citizens are impacted directly.
Three state senators in California have been found to be corrupt by federal officials. These state senators were suspended from attending sessions of the California State senate. And while their corrupt voices are banned, the people they represent have no voice at all.
Sadly, this is only true of those who are caught. Former mayors and current city officials have been arrested for political corruption, and still the problem remains. There are governmental structures in place that enable and indeed, encourage corruption in our public officials. And because of it, far more engage in corruption without getting caught and punished.
How Much Corruption Should We Tolerate?
In an article published in City Watch LA, Clinton Galloway asks us, “How much should we tolerate?” He indicates that if the same ratio of corruption were to exist in the city of Los Angeles, roughly 50K would be felons and 100K would be federally indicted for major crimes.
“While we will not tolerate anarchy in the streets, we will tolerate it in our legislative bodies,” he says.
Galloway’s poignant question alludes to a greater problem than corruption in our government. Yes, there is structure in place that fosters corruption and fails to dissuade it. But the people allow these things to happen. We do not do much to call corruption, generally speaking, but simply voice our distrust our government.
Integrity to the Law
One final question posed by Galloway asks us, what does law even mean if we do not have integrity to uphold it? We see politicians creating laws and breaking them. We see politicians make oaths to uphold the law, and yet they behave as though they are above the law.
And what of those public officials who strive to honestly and judiciously govern? Each day, their numbers seem to diminish as corruption spreads to more of our governmental bodies.
What to Do?
With this in mind, how could the government manage corruption? It doesn’t seem probable that all public officials could be screened for ethics, but still, we could use a method to weed out those in key positions.
EyeDetect™ could provide a solution to that potential problem. The ongoing testing of public officials could be done quickly and in a nonintrusive way to filter out those involved. If we allow unbiased technologies such as EyeDetect to assist, we could more easily deter bad behavior.