reddit上有一个异常强大的自爆贴How real-world corruption works，看看米帝gov和军火商的patronage, insider dealing, nepotism, misuse of taxpayer money, and outright corruption是怎么回事

The US Department of Defense (hereafter DOD) has put in place a ton of procedural protections to stave off corruption. And God knows they need protection: only in the DOD can you find a 20-something purchasing officer who knows nothing about the stuff he's buying, who makes around $30k per year, and who is in charge of a half-billion-dollar budget.
For starters, low-paid people with large purchasing budgets are the easiest to corrupt outright. Find someone makes $30,000 per year but who has a $10m budget, and you have struck gold: it doesn't even require outright bribery.
Just show up at their office and mention that you might have some product for them to take a look at... "Can you spare some time this weekend? I have tickets to the playoffs if you're free... Whoa!? You're a fisherman? Let's forget about business: why not have the family come by the beach house? I just got a new boat and the stripers are running... we'll talk business later..."
Take a guy living in a military-base trailer out fishing on a yacht or to courtside seats, take him on a golf weekend, or to front-row seats at an A-list concert, hell, even just take him and his lady to a swank restaurant, and you've made a new best friend. And if he happens to be in charge of a $10m budget, that lavish night might be about to pay for itself 100,000 times over.
And all that assumes that you did not actually have a stripper with a cell-phone camera waiting in the car after the concert... we haven't even talked about blackmail, so why bring it up? Especially considering that these days, you don't even have to blackmail someone to blackmail them-- just linking your pics to their facebook, or setting up a "my party with Joe Blow" web page can ruin their life without malice or legal consequence... We're just posting our own party pics!
The DOD grades proposals with a color-grading system that is basically equivalent to letter grades.
The way it works is: the purchasing officer or whomever writes the spec ("request for quote"-- in normal business this called a "request for proposal" or "RFP". The DOD calls it an "RFQ". Whatever.). The spec is written as numbered sentences/paragraphs. Companies write bids that answer each number, with a bottom-line price.
A technical review committee sees the proposals with the price and supplier blacked out, and "grades" each proposal based on how well it meets the spec. The purchasing officer then sees the "grades" from the technical review, with the prices alongside (but not the complete proposals). Depending on his instructions, he may be required to either sign for the best overall value, highest overall grade, lowest acceptable cost, etc.
All of this seems very official and corruption-proof, until you realize that the original request for proposal came from, say, a 65-year-old Naval Admiral who knows everything about Oceanic warfare but nothing at all about computers, who assigned his 20-something first mate to write the spec and request for funding, who knows nothing about purchasing and who in turn wrote a spec (two years ago) that required Core2duo computers with 2GB ram and Windows XP and who required computers that meet the spec...
By the time Congress approves the funding, the spec is obsolete, and it costs far more to buy a bunch of obsolete Core2Duo machines with 2GB RAM than it would have cost to buy more-powerful computers at Costco.
The over-technicality and protectiveness of the DOD actually makes it one of the most vulnerable purchasing systems anywhere. As a technical officer who was interested in my product told me: "Don't worry about the review process, we'll just let you guys write the spec". If the military wants a Mercedes, they just issue a spec that requires a hood ornament with three lines trisecting a circle, and see whichever car company meets the spec at the best price-- surprise! They get the contract. Which means that the DOD is probably the only buyer in the world paying sticker price.

我觉得和本朝相比还是小巫见大巫了。。。特别是我朝这种只向上级负责的单向结构。。。。。

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