Corruption Part 2

Clean politics illusion

I was wrong (so what's new?) . It seems that, in fact, salaries for politicians are large enough that they don't need to be corrupt to recoup the bribes they pay to get nominated. Of course, that doesn't mean that they will stop being corrupt if they are elected. It's just that they don't really need to be.

How have the nominations for local elected offices become so pricey? The fact that local councilmen will receive fairly substantial salaries is just part of the reason.

So, what do these high salaries mean?

The price for the candidacy in a county, city and district chief election ranges from between 500 million won to 1 billion won, a provincial or special city council candidacy requires 100 million won and a county council candidacy comes in at about 50 million won, according to "estimates" by the authorities.

And the result is:

The Election Management Commission has so far detected more than 1,600 cases of election law violations and referred them to the prosecution. In addition, law enforcement authorities are receiving numerous tips from individuals, mostly members of rival parties or dejected insiders, about the sale of party nominations for the May 31 local elections.

Now, I would like to believe that there is hope because of all the whistleblowers. However, it seems that a lot of it is "members of rival parties or dejected insiders." Are these people just jealous?