Corruption

With the recent revelations regarding insider trading by members of Congress, citizens expect an explanation and disclosure of lawmakers' financial records ("Keeping Congress clean," Nov. 28). I cannot find words to describe how despicable I find lawmakers' actions. If lawmakers would eliminate the fraud, misappropriation of funds and corruption that goes along with all the money they are spending and wasting, that would be a step in the right direction. Richard LaCourse, Forest Hill

For the past three years, Maryland has experienced an unprecedented crime wave of political corruption. The only comparable period in memory would be the 1970s, when a governor was jailed and a sitting U.S. vice president (who had served as governor and Baltimore County executive) resigned in shame. The current offenders have been high-ranking elected officials, and the offenses have been far more serious than simple lapses in judgment. They have involved a level of hubris and ethical depravity that are shocking by any standard.

In your editorial "Questions for Mr. Karzai" (Nov. 9) you make the case that if corruption isn't purged from the Afghan government, the United States should discontinue the war there against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Frankly, I don't understand how one has anything to do with the other. If what we're doing there is making certain the people of Afghanistan have a stable government, and building the instrumentalities and infrastructure of a free and open society, then the corruption of the Karzai government would obviously need to be mitigated.

School personnel bully a child. Classmates bully a teenager on Facebook. Pushed in a locker, beaten on the street, assaulted by strangers, clergy or schoolmates - these are horrible stories depicted in newspapers, novels and movies, or whispered tearfully to friends and family (if ever told at all). Lawsuits, suicides and untold psychological damage result. Americans are worried about bullying, and large anti-bullying campaigns have been launched. Is it enough to start a campaign against these bullies?

SOMETIMES, when I read the stories from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union about how the corruptions of capitalism have set in after the fall of communism, my mind is seized with memories and with wonderment.The stories are all true, I know, and should be told. And there will be many more of them that will have to be reported.But the stories present me with memories of the couple of years I spent living under a kind of corruption that I had not known existed.It was corruption not as a sometime thing but as the sum of society.

Leslie Johnson walked into the Prince George's County Council chambers Tuesday morning, and began her usual routine — joining her colleagues in prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Although most of the council didn't know it, she had just handed in a resignation letter. Minutes later, she left through a back door. It was Johnson's first appearance in public since she pleaded guilty last week to destroying evidence in a federal investigation of county government corruption. At the time, Johnson said she would stay on the council until her sentencing in October, prompting vociferous objections from fellow politicians and the public.

Endemic corruption in Afghanistan amounts to a virtual tax on poverty-stricken Afghans, robbing them of the equivalent of a quarter of the war-racked nation's annual gross domestic product, a new U.N. report states. The report, released Tuesday by the United Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime, found that nearly 60 percent of Afghans regarded corruption as their biggest worry, outpacing concerns about the insurgency or joblessness. As President Hamid Karzai's government prepares for an international aid conference in London on Jan. 28, it likely will face tough questions about measures under way to battle corruption.

"Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics," by Larry J. Sabato and Glenn R. Simpson. Times Books. 430 pages, $25.Just in time for the United States' quadrennial orgy of presidential and congressional elections, a political scientist and journalist have teamed up to take a close look at how the electoral system is working.As their title suggests, Larry Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia, and Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson conclude that the system isn't working well at all and is in immediate need of reform.

Paris.--- There is a crucial difference between the politico-financial scandals now devastating the political classes of Italy and Japan. That in Italy is cathartic, leading toward a reform of public life. That in Japan is demoralizing because there is no evident solution.The sources of scandal and corruption are much the same in both countries. Japan and Italy both have been governed since the war by conservative parties or coalitions, essentiallyunchallenged and unchanging over the years.

Until the Sea Shall Free Them, by Robert Frump. Doubleday. 304 pages. 24.95. It was a frigid February night and the waters off the Virginia Capes were in full froth when the old cargo ship pulled away from the pier in Norfolk with 25,000 tons of coal in its creaking belly. The ship was the Marine Electric, a converted World War II-era tanker -- and it was falling apart at its rust-rotted seams. Six hours after setting sail in 1983, the vessel capsized in rough seas, broke into three pieces and sank.

William N. Jackson, a decorated World War II veteran and retired Internal Revenue Service group supervisor who assisted in the criminal investigation of 1970s political corruption cases, died at Sinai Hospital on Sunday after falling at his home. He was 86 and lived in North Baltimore. Born at his parents' Montford Avenue home in Baltimore, he was a 1944 graduate of Patterson Park High School. Family members said he was drafted into the Army that summer and sailed to Europe in early 1945.

Apparently it is OK for Prince George's County Sen. Ulysses Currie to accept $250,000 from the grocery store chain Shoppers Food Warehouse, and nothing really happens to him if he fails to report it on his financial disclosure form. The FBI charged him with bribery, but the good ol' boys in Annapolis thought it was just five years of clerical oversight. This shows that we get what we deserve when we refuse to vote incompetent incumbents out of office. Dan Griffin, Perry Hall

With the recent revelations regarding insider trading by members of Congress, citizens expect an explanation and disclosure of lawmakers' financial records ("Keeping Congress clean," Nov. 28). I cannot find words to describe how despicable I find lawmakers' actions. If lawmakers would eliminate the fraud, misappropriation of funds and corruption that goes along with all the money they are spending and wasting, that would be a step in the right direction. Richard LaCourse, Forest Hill

The editorial "To dumb to be corrupt?" in Wednesday's Baltimore Sun really does more than just cite the total lunacy of the defense for Sen. Ulysses Currie, it also raises questions about the entire General Assembly. Have they all succumbed to the rising tide of selective ethical behavior seemingly swelling within public office holders? This is the very type of behavior that is the foundation for "it's only wrong if you're caught" mentality. I don't for a minute believe the senator is dumb, stupid, inept, or incapable.

In response to your editorial about state Sen. Ulysses Currie's bribery trial ("Too dumb to be corrupt?" Oct. 19), I say: Right on! The Maryland Senate is both bumbling and corrupt, and Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller is the chief corrupter. This is confirmed by the state Senate's passage of Governor O'Malley's gerrymandered — read corrupt — redistricting map. Marie Mullen, Joppa

Just when it seemed that the trial of state Sen. Ulysses Currie couldn't possibly lower the public opinion of the General Assembly any further, a former state delegate and highly respected member of Maryland's legal and political firmament has now testified that the man who has been given tremendous responsibility for steering the state through billion-dollar budget deficits for the last nine years is too dumb to be held accountable for his actions....

ROME -- The U.N. World Food Program said today a growing number of Rwandan children were going hungry in Zaire's refugee camps because food distribution was controlled by corrupt Rwandan leaders.The agency said the situation is especially bad in the Mugunga camp in Goma on Zaire's border with Rwanda, home to 200,000 refugees.The WFP blamed the rise in malnutrition on those who distribute the rations."The more vulnerable groups do not receive enough food because of corruption and food leakages at the distribution level," the WFP said.

THERE is always a tendency, following politics in thi history-haunted region, to read every big event as if it were the end of a Civil War novel or some kind of biblical coming-to-pass. But as the curious story of Guy Hunt and the change of power in Alabama illustrates, history doesn't account for everything.Hunt's conviction on state ethics charges, and the ascension to governor of Jim Folsom Jr. is being cast as a morality play in which Hunt's fall represents a rite of passage for a state that has been, as one news story put it, "highly tolerant of political corruption."

As state Sen. Ulysses Currie faces trial this week on federal corruption charges, his lawyer is expected to argue before a jury that the legislator's work on behalf of a grocery chain in Annapolis didn't constitute an illegal bribe but merely an ethical lapse. "The difference is very subtle sometimes," the lawyer, Joseph Evans, said at a recent hearing. "It's hard to know sometimes what the difference is. " Currie, a Democrat and former chairman of a powerful Senate committee, is accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from Shoppers Food Warehouse over five years in exchange for securing meetings with top state officials and pushing favorable legislation for the company, headquartered in his Prince George's district.

The Baltimore Police Department's announcement that Maj. Nathan Warfield has been removed from his post as commander of the internal affairs division doesn't quite add up. The department issued a news release about the move last night, after The Sun's Justin Fenton had asked questions about photos on Mr. Warfield's Facebook page showing him at a party and at a basketball tournament with Officer Daniel G. Redd, who is under indictment on drug...