Transparency International publishes an annual “corruption index”.

Apparently in 2010 they found no state in the world to be completely “clean”, but Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore are cleanest, with a score of 9.3 out of 10. The United Kingdom scores 7.6, the United States 7.1, China 3.5, and Russia  2.1. The most corrupt countries in the world are Myanmar (formerly Burma) scoring 1.4, and Somalia 1.1.

What is the United States doing to cleanse itself?

This comes from Newsmax:

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the House Republicans’ new chief investigator … who has called Obama’s administration “corrupt”, says he will hold hundreds of hearings as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

He has created two subcommittees to scrutinize policies defining Obama’s first two years in office: the $814 billion economic stimulus plan and the bailouts of banks and automakers. A third panel will oversee Obama’s healthcare overhaul. …

“These will be very fertile grounds to find waste, fraud, and abuse,” said Paoletta. “It will be a gold mine” that “goes to the heart of some of Obama’s signature legislative issues.” …

[He] has dropped one partisan issue. He has said he doesn’t plan to pursue allegations that the White House offered a job last year to then-Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak, a Democrat, in an unsuccessful effort to keep him out of a Senate race. Issa last year requested a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe and referred to the matter as Obama’s “Watergate.”

Issa has announced that he will investigate a list of topics that include a government program for helping homeowners avoid foreclosure, the release of classified diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, and Food and Drug Administration recalls.

He plans to look into the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the foreclosure crisis, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s failure to agree on origins of the economic meltdown, and corruption in Afghanistan.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – at last! The very kitchens where the sub-prime economic disaster was cooked. We suspect that those two could make even Myanmar and Somalia hold their noses.

But we’ll wait patiently with wide-eyed trust to see what the moral hygiene inspectors on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee will turn up.

Attention pro-choice euphemists, environmentalists who want to reduce population, and all ye whinging western feminists!

By Mark Steyn:

As readers may recall, I’ve been scoffing for years at theories of China as the 21st-century hyperpower. It has two huge structural defects — a) an aging population; and b) an ever more male population. This last is entirely owed to the Commies’ disastrous one-child policy which ensured the abortion of millions and millions of girl babies: A woman’s right to choose turns out in practice to be the right not to choose any women. Result: Millions and millions of young men who’ll never get a date. Not a recipe for social stability. A new report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences considers some of the issues:

According to the report, 24 million men reaching marriageable age by 2020 will never marry because of the sex imbalance. Think of it in these terms: what if the entire population of New York City or of Australia was never able to marry. Imagine the social implications in a city or nation that large where no one can marry. Imagine if that city or country is comprised solely of 24 million men; men with no homes to return to at night; men without the responsibilities of a family to keep them engaged in productive pursuits.

If that sounds like some futuristic dystopian thriller, there are more immediate problems:

While the number of baby girls being born has declined, the number of kidnappings and trafficking of young girls has risen. According to the National Population and Family Planning Commission — that’s right, the very organization responsible for the one-child family policy — abductions and trafficking of women and girls has become “rampant.”

Young girls are being kidnapped within China and also from neighboring countries (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand) by organized gangs who sell them to families with boys of a similar age. The girls will be raised by the families and given as brides to their sons as soon as they reach marriageable age. Others are shipped to brothels within China for a life as sex slaves.

In his schoolgirl paeans to totalitarianism, has the China-smitten Thomas Friedman of the New York Times ever addressed these structural defects? Or any of the ecopalyptic warm-mongers expressing barely concealed admiration for Beijing’s population-control measures?

And what a vast army China will have that will need to be put to use. To what use? Shouldn’t the leftist-pacifist  governments of the West be thinking about this?

Max Boot writes:

The Sydney Morning Herald reports, based on “evidence from key defectors,” that “Burma’s isolated military junta is building a secret nuclear reactor and plutonium extraction facilities with North Korean help, with the aim of acquiring its first nuclear bomb in five years.”

Just what the world needs to go along with the North Korean bomb and the (soon to come) Iranian bomb — the Burmese bomb.

I wonder what would lead the Burmese junta to think it could get away with such a dangerous and destabilizing move? Gee, perhaps Iran and North Korea suffering absolutely no serious repercussions may have had something to do with it?

This development shows just how dangerous the Iranian and North Korean programs are — not just in and of themselves but also for how they encourage nuclear proliferation in other rogue states.