Is it really more corrupt that the current g0vt of the USA?
Apparently, the world is big. The moment you thought you’ve seen it all, you find yourself staring at something worse.
YES, massively more corrupt. NOT everyone in the United States is named 'Clinton'...
Yes.
Until Americans have lived in non-Western cultures, most of us will never fully understand how radical the Anglo-American concept of “Lex Rex” (i.e., the law is king, not the king is the law) really is. For much of the rest of the world, laws, business contracts, and even national constitutions are often guidelines, not hard and firm guarantees, and insisting on the written words is often considered undue “legalism.”
There are places where official government corruption is worse than Asia. I'm quite aware that Confucian ethics has provided a helpful corrective in Asian countries that is in some ways comparable to the Judeo-Christian ethics which, along with Greco-Roman concepts of law, is the root of the Western concept of loyalty to written laws rather than personal loyalty to individual rulers.
However, in countries such as North Korea where residual Confucian ethics have been replaced by aggressively atheist devotion to the leadership, truly horrible things can and do happen which are multiple orders of magnitude worse than things got in Communist nations of Europe. One would have to go to the Communist regimes of Africa to find places which are as corrupt as North Korea.
The problem is more than Communism, although Communism is certainly a big part of the problem. Once a government has encouraged active overthrow of the older social order, taken over private property, and encouraged the covetousness of the "working class" against those who have more money and property, and attacked any culture-based religious belief that one's actions will bring eternal consequences, all sorts of bad things can happen. While European Communist regimes could be brutal and vicious in their enforcement of government authority, government corruption in European Communism never got as bad as what happened in Asian or African Communism, and there are reasons for that.