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To Stop Corruption, Fight the Power, Not the People
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and in a world where the gap between the powerful and powerless grows wider each day, corruption in political and economic institutions spreads much faster than shame.
Political power is abused wherever it exists—with scandals ranging from political graft in India to white collar crime on Wall Street to bribery of government regulators in China. Nonetheless, some communities seem especially vulnerable to the cycle of corruption, repression and impunity. And lately, we’ve seen many of them getting fed up with living under regimes that have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Corruption has been one of the major issues driving the unrest across the Middle East and North Africa, and it has catalyzed a Gandhi-esque movement in the streets of New Delhi.
Indian activist Anna Hazare has inspired huge demonstrations in support of his hunger strike to promote a strict, controversial anti-corruption measure known as the Jan Lokpal bill. The government’s recent crackdown on Hazare only steeled protesters’ resolve under the slogan “India is Anna, Anna is India.”
Yet not all have been swept up in Hazare fever. Author and activist Arundhati Roy boldly challenged the public framing of the corruption issue, arguing it has been whitewashed by a bourgeois, nationalistic political class.In a commentary in The Hindu, she describes the obsession with the Lokpal bill, which would institute a “draconian” bureaucracy to monitor officials, as a well-managed charade, designed to absorb popular grievances into a more palatable but no less hierarchical concept of “accountability”:
Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality, or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?
Rukshana Nanayakkara, senior programme coordinator for South Asia with the watchdog group Transparency International, told Colorlines that although the Indian and Arab uprisings may voice the outrage of citizens who feel “helpless and hopeless” about their rulers, their protests won’t necessarily articulate a solution:
While it is an important task to highlight corruption issues or to drive a grassroots movement based on this to overcome barriers to bring change, the real impact would lie within systemic changes and sustained ethical environments.
We can agree that corruption is bad, but can’t agree on what corruption really is. And when those who already have power are allowed to define and regulate corrupt practices, they’re empowered to permit the most dangerous form of impunity—the kind that is ingrained in the very edifice of the state.
Corruption Near and Far
Corruption may be a universal scourge, but media portrayals and civil society surveys suggest that the problem is especially acute in the Global South, which in turn invites facile “cultural” explanations for greed and graft (pointing to, say, gift-giving traditions or inborn backwardness and tribalism of sub-Saharan Africa).
Yet North and South are both plagued by breakdowns of institutional integrity. The banking collapse and everyday machinations of government reveal that the malaise reaches up to the highest offices in Washington. Indeed, much of the dirty money that floods into the Global South trickles down from above, according to a Transparency International paper:
The North also carries part of the responsibility for the situation in the South due to its role as the bribe-payer. After all, it is largely Northern corporate interests that supply the bribe payments. Until recently, governments of the North not only tolerated these corrupt practices, but they even rewarded them with tax deductibility.
The public’s mental map of official immorality around the world reflects political blindspots: we tend to indict obvious crimes without interrogating structures and historical inequities.
“Corruption in the Global South is much talked about as it is part of day-to-day lives of people, as opposed to grand level corruption, which is normally opaque and harder to uncover,” Nanayakkara noted. At the same time, Transparency International says public perceptions of corruption are rising in affluent countries, in part due to the financial crisis.
But official transgressions do cut especially deep in impoverished communities, where rules are slackened to attract private investment or “development aid.” In the Haiti earthquake, for example, Transparency International observed that the extreme death toll could be traced in part to “alleged corruption in the construction of public buildings, including schools and hospitals.” And in the aftermath, suspicions of profiteering continue to swirl around the reconstruction process, now being directed by a shaky national government and the corporate-friendly coffers of the Haiti Interim Recovery Commission.
Environmental disasters can aggravate government malfeasance. Activists warn that policy responses to climate change may create unprecedented opportunities for exploitation and profiteering, particularly in much-hyped development projects for green energy and forest preservation.
The idea of corruption as culturally endemic offers convenient justification for outside intervention in poor countries. In an analysis of public myths about corruption, development scholars Ed Brown, Jon Cloke and Mohammad Sohail argued, “rather than seeing corruption as a complex socio-political phenomenon linked to global processes and specific national cultural and political economies, the issue is often reduced to a kind of political backwardness which needs ‘treatment.’ ”
The potential side effects of this medicine have manifested in neoliberal financial interventions like the IMF restructuring plans that pauperized Haiti and stoked chaos in Greece. The authors point out that so-called “anti-corruption programmes” imposed by free-market experts sometimes aggravate economic damage and ironically end up reaffirming stereotypes of poor countries as innately incompetent.
Symptoms and Causes
Sometimes the popular fixation on officials’ ethical transgressions distracts from the political malaise of which they are a symptom. And political elites are wise to this. In the U.S., the right evokes the canard of “waste, fraud and abuse” to militate against any form of income redistribution by blaming the economic hardship that “deserving” citizens face on imaginary “welfare queens,” patients who use too much Medicaid, civil servants collecting extra disability pay, and other social parasites.
Is corruption just the cost of doing business in a society that traffics in injustice? A recent public opinion study suggests people’s lack of trust in government institutions isn’t just tied to perceptions of official malfeasance, but the degree of social inequality they experience, along with the perceived failure of policymakers to address it.
The rebellions unfolding in North Africa, the Middle East and India reflect righteous resentment at rulers who have made careers out of betraying public trust. Of course, ultimately, Indian officials may fail again to police themselves, and the Arab Spring uprisings may be hijacked by new political orders that just rebrand old patterns of tyranny and kleptocracy. Whatever emerges from the unrest, fundamental inequalities will still reign, as long as entrenched hierarchies remain intact and governance hinges on tiers of privilege.
Our disgust with rotten politicians and Wall Street kingpins is in part anger at their impunity, but maybe there’s a streak of latent jealousy, a dog-eat-doggedness that pervades any competitive capitalist society. Still, even if humans are hard wired to exploit, we’re also hard wired to keep trying to harness power, however naïvely we deploy legislation and revolutionary rhetoric. In the debate over fixing crooked leaders, the definition of corruption often leaves out the root: not the people who misuse authority, but an excess of power itself.
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18 Comments so far
Show AllI think we should politely ask the evil war criminal psychopaths to stop what they are doing.
That will work. :~D
Ha ha- very good! This article some how makes me think of the line from The Wizard of OZ: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain"...
Yeah, Archbishop Oscar Romero tried that.
evil war criminal....hero on 9/11
film to come out here:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/08/25/303774/newscorp-911-bush-promo/
"News Corp Set To Air 9/11 Documentary Glorifying Bush;
Producer Says He's not interested in 'FACTS'.."
The article is well-written and sadly accurate. It seems we can often identify the problem, but rarely have concrete ideas on how to deal with it.
Would it surprise you to know that the ultimate abuse of power is going to culminate in the largest genocide in the history of the world?
The present orgy of sucking the liquidity out of today's economy, which has been going on for the past decade, is but the prelude to the depopulation of the earth in the name of fiscal house cleaning.
Here in the United States, it will be accomplished by the abolishing of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the rest of the entitlement benefit safety net.
The world has but a four day supply of food. All that has to happen is for those wealthy elites, who have been preparing for this greatest crime ever, to just pull the plug on the computers that distribute the funds to the poor, ill, and elderly, and then disappear. The United States will fold like a house of cards. The equivalent things will happen in the rest of the world.
An orgy of chaos and anarchy will follow and last till there are only about two billion people left in the world. Then and only then will there be made available enough money to once again have a stable economy.
And where will that money come from? From those who have been stockpiling it for the last decade. Need I tell you who THEY are?
Mark my words.
MEL
Don't sugarcoat it like that.
I disagree with author. It is time for candor and accountability and criminal indictments and freezing of assets of big banks/WS/international bankers, among others, for required restoration of the funds stolen and misappropriated. That represents our lives and the lives of our children.
Cycles of abuse from excessive power and thefts from frauds/swindles occur throughout history, roughly every 100 years. Eventually those responsible are removed from excessive power, if not expelled or jailed, and in this case, the massive misappropriations must be recouped----even if everyone in DC has to be replaced !!!
for elder..
"News Corp Set To Air 9/11 Documentary
Glorifying Bush; Producer Says He Is Not Interested In 'Facts'"...
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/08/25/303774/newscorp-911-bush-promo/
film to come out on the Republican Hero on 9/11.
As the Assad family in Syria, and the dictatorial families of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have shown, if you have modern military weapons, the populace must submit. The wealthy know this. In the USA, the military and the militarized police forces would turn on the people in a minute. The cops do it every day in every big city, what difference would it make to do it on a larger scale.
We can talk about an Arab Spring and revolutions in India, but have we seen actual change? In Egypt, the military seems to have entered the equation in a big way. That always works out well for democracy. In Libya, we will have some oil dominated kleptocracy in the name of freedom. In India, a farmer commits suicide every 30 minutes.
I agree with Arundhati Roy that it comes down to equality. A world where a few have billions and billions have nothing is not a just world. We have created social structures that demand these inequalities. We have to change them.
I agree with you about Arundhati Roy's comment. I tried to post something along those lines, but it never appeared. That seems to happen about once a week these days.I think CD still has a few glitches in its system.
Regarding Roy's comment, someone once told some Kung tribesmen about the social inequities in western society (that some are very rich and some starve). The response was shock. One of them said "Lions could do that, but not men." For their sake, we can only hope that "civilization" never reaches that group.
Northern kapitalists are not just paying bribes in the south. They are manipulating public policy in the south. And their so-called "legitimate" business deals in the south are just as destructive as the bribes because almost none of the value "trickles down" to the people of the south. From the point of view of the people of the south, the elites who occupy their land are in absolute solidarity with northern kapitalists. This global fraternity of elites is full of infighting, for sure, but ultimately they share a wicked exploitation impulse, and they share the booty, all at the expense of the people and the planet. While the people of the south may not share the petro-conveniences with their peers in the north, you can be sure that konsumption slavery is waiting in the wings for them. In a nutshell, the imperative to ostracize global elites and their stinky kapital from all continents is far more urgent than most so-called progressives will admit.
*Comment deleted by site administrators for spamming*
see: http://www.commondreams.org/comment-policy
washington think tanks including so called left leaning and "nonpartisan" are going full force to eliminate the mortgage interest deduction from the tax code
this is also a tax on renters since landlords expenses to maintain the property will increase accordingly
this is a clear increase in tax on the middle class
they are making false arguments that only 25 percent of people benefit from the mortgage tax deduction
they don't include renters as benefitting when clearly they do because landlords expenses are less
they fail to analyze who benefits over a lifetime
for example a young person may not yet be a homeowner because they are saving up and developing their career, and are not making that much yet
but they will in future be able to take the deduction when they are in position to be a homeowner
and older people who have paid off their homes don't take the deduction, but the deduction damn well helped them acquire and pay off the home in the first place
etc
all to prevent us from taxing the super wealthy
Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority?-- Author and activist Arundhati Roy
”a dog-eat-doggedness that pervades any competitive capitalist society”—Michelle Chen
in a very real sense to capitalize means to take advantage. each and every corporation begins as a contract, signed sealed and filed for the singular express purpose to continuously maximize profits. therefore, the terms “good and evil” for the corporate entity translates into credits and debits on the quarterly p & l. should debits outpace credits, top stock values suffer while the ceo and cfo tremble at the prospect that “my head is on the chopping block.” every evening millions of people tune in to hear how the events of the day affect the confidence of wall street investors. we place our hopes and fears in the financial well-being of about twenty percent of the world’s human population. recently i read that that 64% of americans would be wiped out if some emergency require an unexpected $1000 outlay. we hear almost under the radar that each year since 2007 a new million families face foreclosure. we learn of massive layoffs, thousand upon thousands of people showing up to compete for some few hundred job openings. fortunately, these human tragedies have little affect on the investors nerves. in fact layoffs help streamline and reduce the company’s cost of doing business. however, the remaining skeleton crew takes up the slack, working harder for less. wall street “breathes” a sigh of relief because layoffs decrease the cost of doing business. when investors feel safer, the media delights us with tales of a jobless recovery. "remain calm," they tell us, " and wait patiently for the good news to filter (trickle down) on main street." we discuss “puppet governments” where corrupt dictators or committees work in consort with american interests. i guess that lures us to self-identify with the slogan “richest and most powerful” either in pride or shame. our political parties attract and groom bribable candidates whose personal standard of living depends on continuously maximizing profits of goldman sachs, exxon mobile, walmart, etc. doesn’t that tell us that our own government has become another puppet giving a human face to the international chamber of commerce? we cannot assume constitutional protections will soon come into play because “citizens united” respond only to contract law.
"even if humans are hard wired to exploit, we’re also hard wired to keep trying to harness power"—Michelle Chen
you’ve really put together an informative article which touches so many points to consider, but we need to stop anthropomorphizing the fantasy personhood of corporations. i disagree that we, a highly developed social primate are hard wired to exploit, however our human society has been created in the image of the ruling corporate oligarchy. the american dream of continuously progressing toward a free, self-actualizing, productive community has become corrupted into an elimination derby, redefining the human race into the paper chase. our value to the corporation depends on our ability to consume, the oil, the munitions, the media hype, the trinkets mass produced by the cheapest labor the world has to offer. we look for a caring heart in the corporate entity, but those who successfully scratch and scrap their way to the top cannot allow concerns for life and environment to interfere with the almighty profit goal. after all, the vampire can always entice another human to serve that the corporation might survive. heard this line in a recent teevee drama, “how do you not know that you’re disposable?”
Really excellent article, Michelle Chen. Keep writing. Your voice is strong and bringing us essential perspectives. Arundhati Roy one of our great treasures.
Only when we realize the real terrorists are our own government will we stand a chance. Until then we will be abused, lied to, extorted from, imprisoned, pushed aside, ignored, called terrorists, cheated, and ridiculed. Our government is nothing less than an organized crime ring, they're not beneficial to anybody but themselves.