Charles Brown notes:
It MIGHT be true, but it would be foolish to rely on that witness only if you really wanted to know the truth. Why rely on this person's word alone ? Chuck Grimes frames it as "he believes this guy". So, now we proceed to draw major political conclusions from a source that we know has reason to bias the reportage.
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Guys,
Look, I put in the background and proviso about Loi so you would be in more or less the same position as I was--under the theory, if you can't report accurately, at least note the source with qualifications. This is just antedotal and close enough for my speculations on the problems of founding a civilian political structure under extreme duress after fifty years of colonial and revolutionary war. This is e-mail, not a journal. I didn't propose Loi as a sociologist. He is a mechanic.
So, for the record, no I don't expect Vietnam is completely corrupt, but I would be fairly sure, those kinds of problems are out of control. And this illustrates not the evilness of the vietnamese or whatever communist planning they have managed to pull off. It does indicate to me that creating, staffing, and running a relatively clean and representative judicial/legal system is very difficult and was probably not a top priority.
And, no, I am not particularly convinced that capital is the fundamental source of all crime and corruption (apriori), although clearly such problems are supercharged under capital exploitation.
Chuck Grimes