Sadly, we’ve entered into a world where the word “corruption” has become inadequate to describe the many and varied practices of profitable abuse by the powerful and connected of their inferiors. Like the popular (and sadly apocryphal) accounts Inuit with their numerous words for “snow,” we need more refined and granular terminology to describe various types of corruption. Hugh uses “kleptocracy” but that’s a name for a system of governance, not particular behaviors within that system.
I’m reluctant to make an object lesson of a large scale and, within its limits, well researched report by Transparency International (see end of the post for the full report). It surveyed 114,000 people in 107 countries. The study concluded that corruption had risen in most countries since its last poll two years earlier (the countries reporting a fall in corruption were Belgium, Cambodia, Georgia, Rwanda, Serbia, Taiwan). On a scale of one to five, with one indicating corruption was not a problem at all and five signifying a very serious problem, the average response across all countries was 4.1.
Yet how did the survey define corruption? In practice, they only asked about two types of behavior: bribes and “when decisions to allocate public resources are distorted by money, power, access, or some combination of the above.” So in cruder terms, it’s pilfering of the public purse. But even then, the survey didn’t hone in crisply on the issue (for instance, question 3 was “In your dealings with the public sector, how important are personal contacts and/or relationships to get things done” and question 4 was “To what extent is the country’s government run by a few big interests looking out for themselves?”).
Now in fairness, these questions might be taken as reasonable proxies for corruption. But the focus of the report on bribery, which is a big issue in many countries (over 1/4 of the respondents reported paying a bribe in the previous year, including 7% of the people surveyed in the US, 5% in the UK, 5% in Italy, 7% in Switzerland (?). France and Germany appear to have been exempted from this survey.
The problem is that this model of corruption implicit in this survey appears to be a developing country model of corruption, in which you can have abusive local headmen running towns of local offices as personal sinecures, and various levels of organized crime either controlling certain services or competing with government in providing “protection” (not that we don’t have that happening in advanced economies too, but we see it as an anomaly). But in the US, we have institutionalized corruption, and it includes form that don’t even register on the Transparency list.
To name some:
1. The revolving door, which leads to outcomes like regulations not being rigorously enforced or wink-and-nodding through rent-extraction mechanisms being waved in during rulemaking. This isn’t a budgetary allocation, which is what Transparency worries about, but it’s often more valuable.
2. The erosion of property rights. If you can’t have your property rights upheld in court, you effectively don’t have property rights. Homebuyers learned in the bust that if they have a mortgage on their house, their ownership rights are in fact seriously qualified even if you pay your mortgage on time. The media has reported on cases where homes with paid off mortgages have been foreclosed upon, or where servicers have refused to correct errors in their records, or similarly sent back validly submitted, timely payment and proceeded to foreclose. I have a colleague, an attorney and securitization expert, who says 10 years ago he had a problem with a servicer where he sent in two months payment while on vacation and was sure to space them out a little. Even so, two were credited to one month and the following month was treated as a missed payment. He was able to get it straightened out (with some damage to his credit report) but he says if that happened now, he is certain he would have been foreclosed on.
And how about being compelled to enter into one-sided contracts? You can’t participate in society without having a credit card (if you have a job that requires travel, your employer will expect you to buy airfare and rent cars). How about a cell phone contract (you can semi opt out with a more costly prepaid phone).
And it isn’t just small fry that are getting the short end of the stick. Investors in mortgage backed securities effectively had no ability to get courts to enforce their rights. Servicers have been systematically looting MBS via refusing to do modifications and via excessive charges of every variety imaginable (the few investors who have tried suing have had very little in the way of success; the big exception is bond guarantors, whose had stronger rights to pursue certain types of litigation than mortgage bond investors). Similarly, the business press relentlessly spouts the myth of shareholder democracy when the academic literature describes public companies as a classic principal-agent problem (as in the principal, meaning shareholders, can’t adequately control their agent, so the agent does what is best for him, not for his nominal principal).
3. Government authority used to promote corporate interests at the expense of individuals, vitiating the right of free speech and peaceable assembly. I’m sure readers can add to this list, but here are some starters:
Government crackdowns on protests and surveillance of protestors, even when the issues at stake are still in play politically (Keystone is a classic example, or the criminalization of photographing of factories and labs where suspected animal abuse takes place). Remember the Bank of America chalk case?
Overzealous enforcement of intellectual property rights (Aaron Swartz is the case study here)
Despite the fact that their questions do allow for the idea of an oligarchical takeover of government, their remedies still assume the public has some sway. Transparency has a chipper section at the end where they say 2/3 of the respondents believe “ordinary people can make a difference” and 87% of the respondents say they’d be willing to “get involved” (I have to tell you, having done survey research, that this sort of question will elicit unrepresentatively positive responses. People are much more willing to say they’ll do something than actually do it). But how much do you think these types of action will move the needle in the US or other advanced economies?
People in the US still shop at Walmart, for instance, and predictably, the measure most Americans said they’d take, signing a petition, is the least effective.
Perhaps I’m being too cynical, but there is a failure to recognize that the fish here are rotting at the head. Whistleblowers, even with whistleblower protections a matter of the law, are as a matter of course fired on trumped-up charges. Their concerns typically are either ignored entirely or are treated by management as an warning to tidy up the records. Overwhelmingly, large companies view performance as paramount and don’t ask many questions of a manager or executive who delivers the goods. I’ve seen multiple examples of people who engaged in questionable conduct at Goldman and McKinsey back in the 1980s when both were seen as models of well managed, upstanding firms and the general standards for behavior were much more stringent than now. Looting and abuse have become pervasive and the only questions now seem to be of degree, not of kind.
At a minimum, I hope readers will help come up with more exact codification of the various flavors of corruption. Orwell was correct to focus on the debasement of language an important tool in subjugating a population. Confucius focused on exact terminology as critical to running a state well:
If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.
Or the more common recap of this discussion: The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names. We need to take our language back.
Transparency International's 2013 Global Corruption Barometer
86 comments
Comments are closed.
G4S faces fraud investigation over tagging contracts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jul/11/g4s-investigated-overcharging-millions-pounds
this type of corruption… “He has also taken action within the justice ministry after disclosing that his own officials became aware in a limited way of some of the problems in 2008 but failed to take adequate steps to address them.”
also includes Serco which I believe is the company behind Obamacare!
Corruption and language. “Orwell was correct to focus on the debasement of language an important tool in subjugating a population.”
Ireland and many other countries are great examples of this where the Occupiers knew that to destroy the local language was very important to their occupation. Even today, Ireland has its sell out, state RTE broadcaster to spout Elite propaganda.
Many kudos to NC for hitting on the important facets of the Great Deterioration. Corruption and language are two important elements of this period and are little understood and poorly described by the language we use. NC really sees the Big Picture and how health, nutrition, agriculture, corruption, language, finance, etc. tie in. Many alternative sites see only their particular issue and fail to see the connections and commonalities.
The most obvious example is to call Holder’s fiefdom The Department Of Justice. It is the exact opposite, The Department of Injustice (and Intimidation). Another obvious one, Department of Defense. USMC General Smedley Butler even wrote a whole book on this one and called it WAR IS A RACKET. So War Racket would be a good descriptive term for what we actually have. A USMC General twice decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor should know!
Another obvious one is Home Ownership. In the vast majority of cases, it is Home Debtorship. Simple enough. Or how about Froud Stamps. Food Stamps, as they call them, are not about either Food or Nutrition but Fraud in Food. Another one is Infernal Combustion Engine.
Maybe some enterprising blogger or alternative institution might consider setting up a site as a clearinghouse for a new language, the Language of The Occupation. Victims of the Elite could contribute their own creations to such a language. For instance, who better to describe the language of Foreclosure or our Industrial Prison System than its victims and inmates? If you are not already a victim, you soon will be so start describing it in your own terms, not Theirs.
As for corruption, the US must be the most corrupt country with the trillions stolen domestically and internationally. Then there are all the War Crimes and Racket. US number one!
The United States of Americaries.
Nice writing job, but I think it nearly useless to ferret out subspecies of corruption in an effort to evaluate the American system. We have a government operated for the exclusive benefit of large corporate interests. Every large corporation is operated from the exclusive benefit of its top executives. The actual passage and massaging of laws and rules is dictated by corporate interests, and corporation designated appointees handle implementation of the rules during lackluster sojurns from their business engagements. Individual people sink or swim in this cess pool, and the only protection available to any of them is whatever money they manage to accumulate. Show me a person who expects to be protected by law or have his interests advanced by any State or Federal Government or Department or Agency. You’d have far less trouble producing a dog with three heads.
What these Departments and Agencies actually do is systematically oppress helpless individuals ensnared in an endless array of traps for the unwary.
Certainly looks that way.
jc again makes come very cogent points!
And if I recall correctly, Transparency Int’l was originally financed/founded by the banksters (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, et al., the usual suspects).
Corruption is simple; if it benefits the super-rich to the exclusion, and frequent mortality, of everyone else, that be corruption to the max!
With the fix in for LIBOR, interest rate swap ratings, currency exchange fixed, oil/energy prices fixed, financial manipulation through naked swaps, naked shorting of virtual stocks through the DTCC’s Stock Borrow Program, and the fact that the banksters/oil companies own all the financial exchanges and clearinghouses (just check on the interlocking ownership of ICE, or InterContinental Exchange, the NYSE, the DTCC, etc., etc., etc.), everyone sure does appear rigged to this humble soul.
Beautiful!
Indeed this ability to understand the grammar of modern power-relations is essential and, frankly, avoided by the American left as if it was a carrier of the plague. The issue is that the left tends to accept the mainstream narrative almost completely.
The first thing to do is to deconstruct the media narrative which is largely false. It is no accident that the American populace is dazed and confused–it is a deliberate project by the mainstream media/PR nexus.
…human beings have been known in certain circles since 80’s at least, as, “fast food form consumption modules”…
(“Subliminal Seduction”)
I think the real problem is an underlying shift in culture fron one based on some sense of justice, i.e., ethics to which all are subject, to one based on power. We have become a Thrasymachian society, to borrow from Plato’s Repblic, in which whatever benefits the stronger is just. Or more recently, it’s the ethics of Ayn Rand.
In the Thrasymachian (Randian) world, property rights, governmental corruption, corporate theft all become meaningless: if it benefits the stronger party, it’s just. Since modern economics places consumption, and therefore wealth, as the greatest good, the rich can do what they want. Just look at the writings of Richard Posner and others in the “Law and Economics” crowd—parties can pretty much do what they want, so long as there is “economic benefit”.
Ironically, as Hannah Arent noted, the destruction of collective rights is ofen associated with a maturing of populist movements. She argued that political movements based on the rights of the masses often degenerate into individualistic movements that are ripe for transformation into fascism or corporatism. In a strage way, “left” and “right” have a way of meeting up. As Robert Maynard Hutchins noted, “In a contest between Hitler and people who are wondering whey they shouldn’t be Hitlers, the finished product is bound to win.”
The real problem is to move culture away from a myopic focus on economics to politics. We need to keep everyone (or the majority) focused on the values and behaviors that define democracy: justice, truth, and freedom. When we move away from that triad—especially worshipping freedom blindly—we weaken our commitment to democracy and drift toward tyranny.
We’re alomst there now.
In fact, the focus on economics is an example of how the system uses misdirection. Essentially there is no such thing as economics as separate from politics–it is a subset, and a minor one, of politics, i.e. it is the chief way of allocating power. You are powerful to the degree you have money not a bad political system as a system but it is a political system first and foremost.
When the system features “economics” it neutralizes politics–the misdirection is that people are all looking at the economic system to give them something while the real players are stealing from them because they know the score.
I forget the man who said this (a great Jewish-American thinker and popularizer of Thorstein Veblen), but economics is basically the institutionalization of the excuse as to the existence of inequality; why some are born with everything and most are born with nothing!
David Lentini: “I think the real problem is an underlying shift in culture from one based on some sense of justice, i.e., ethics to which all are subject, to one based on power.”
Ethics? Be honest — what is everyone’s feeling about this word? Hasn’t the notion been thoroughly spanked by a modern, mischiefmaking spirit? Do we ever the utter the word without a simultaneous apology or a cool aside?
What ethics? Whose ethics? Where are we going to get an ethics? Granted, it’s been lost. Where are we supposed to come up with a new one? Look, isn’t it inevitably going to be a rational ethics? Then whose to say power isn’t ultimately rational? If it isn’t rational, then its a rebellion, some sort of post-Christian thing, in other words, a bumbling adolescent, grasping for its enunciation, flailing about in its actions, throwing itself at first into this and then into that impassioned course. It screams at the world “you don’t understand,” but it sure as hell hasn’t learned to articulate itself. At least it would have to have a sense of justice; you have to give it that.
The only ideology left, the only ethics which hasn’t thoroughly run amok with humanity yet, is biology itself, now as ideology, as a codification. Maybe this will be what the pimple-ridden thing will grow up to be and finally finish itself and the lot of us off!
(It’s prophecy so it doesn’t have to be coherent.)
..blowing up Ayn Randism, in BBC documentary form:
http://www.amazon.com/Watched-Over-Machines-Loving-Grace/dp/161577730X/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1373691160&sr=1-1&keywords=adam+curtis
I wonder, is there any academic material on classification and categorisation of corruption in its plethora of forms? It would be highly interesting to move this discussion rapidly away from “mere” anecdotes (as if those didn’t matter to the people who suffer) and into the realm of wide understanding.
BeyondIntractability has a lot of academic and other research on corruption http://ow.ly/mUMEj, in particular corporate corruption http://www.beyondintractability.org/citations/26047 and political corruption http://www.beyondintractability.org/citations/26339
…you may be pursuing history-“Confessions of An Economic Hit Man” (Perkins)
“Killing Hope” (William Blum), BBC video documentaries by Adam Curtis:
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Adam-Curtis-Nightmares-Century/dp/1615774408/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1373691300&sr=1-2&keywords=adam+curtis
..I was sadly deficient to not mention Shaxton’s, “Treasure Islands”, Satyajit Das’
“Extreme Money”, “The Devil’s Derivatives”, Nicholas Dunbar, RT Naylor’s, “Hot Money and the Politics of Debt”…
A possible mistake in first line: Sadly, we’ve entered into a
wordworld(?) where…Love the quote from Confucius. I’ve known it for decades, but this post makes the meaning of “rectification of names” clear. Another way to say it is “call a spade a spade.” But in this situation we don’t have an adequate vocabulary for all the kinds of spades/corruption we are seeing.
…Confucious was an advocate for-of ruling class-“filial piety”…might find more relevance in the Lao-Tzu or Chuang-Tzu…(“Sources of Chinese Tradition”-
http://www.thriftbooks.com/viewdetails.aspx?isbn=0231086024
http://www.thriftbooks.com/viewdetails.aspx?isbn=0231086032
IMO, the root of the problem is wanton money printing ant TBTF.
The reason why you tax is to redistribute. When people pay taxes they get implicated.
The reason why you want to limit deficits is because it forces the population to evaluate what it really wants and use its resources efficiently.
The only country in the world that can generate deficits without quickly getting penalized is the US because it has the reserve currency.
But as we can see this position comes at a price. These deficits mean that there is no need for America to evaluate the merits of projects. If it lacks resources, it will just get another country’s resources by printing. This means that everything in its economy is misevaluated because there is no need to do it. Since taxes have been going down and the deficits are supported by money printing, this means the population is completely disconnected from the nation’s finances.
The US system is disenfranchising the people. It can probably keep on doing this for quite a while but it will hit a wall. The 1% will end up suffering because even they are out to lunch, have no clue and are out of control.
One example… while the real estate bubble was expanding, there could have been more investment in the court system. With a zero deficit policy this would have limited the bubble because building courts would have sucked money out of the real estate industry. With a deficit policy, you would have gotten even more growth because more than 1 sector would have seen soaring. But since taxes have been coming down, the court system is probably seen as a cost and economies of scale meant more population per court was a good efficient thing.
But too small is not good and too big is not any better. Our systems have gotten too big for he people and they are still getting bigger. If we had 100 companies instead of 1, there would be more middle class. Therefore, the economies of scale efficiencies are killing us.
Easy money promotes finance and its ensuing M&A that leads to jumbo firms. Without TBTF policies, firms outgrowing their optimal size would be forced to break up, creating more jobs.
IMO, all the other problems are derivatives of money printing and TBTF policies. But it will probably get worse because austerity will not work and we’ll start printing again without fixing anything.
With a zero deficit policy this would have limited the bubble because building courts would have sucked money out of the real estate industry. Moneta
Nope. Don’t forget that the Fed creates reserves as needed to support credit creation by the banking cartel. How about we eliminate that “money printing”, hmm?
And even raising interest rates might not work during the boom because speculators profit off the spread between what they can buy at and what they can sell at. Moreover, interest rate manipulation is a very blunt tool and is likely to damage non-speculators too.
zero deficits policies are a constraint or else they would not take them away.
Zero deficits are NOT good since deficit spending by the monetary sovereign is where new fiat comes from and some money creation is good.
What next? Are you going to suggest we return to a gold standard?
I would counter that money creation is amoral (at modest levels). It is neither good nor bad. The value judgment is in its distribution.
Given that the government-backed credit cartel DRIVES people into debt, the government has a moral IMPERATIVE to at least provide the INTEREST needed!!!
>> some money creation is good
In an electronic world where you can subdivide and where there are already trillions of electronically defined money, you no longer need to create more.
As for people hoarding capital, a progressive wealth tax would encourage them to spend it.
The banks only create the principal for loans, not the interest, which, if it does not come from the banks as even more debt, must come from the monetary sovereign as deficit spending.
And, btw, debt-free money is possible with both fiat and common stock.
And Federal taxation does NOT discourage hoarding, it makes it even more lucrative by destroying money and thus increasing the value of what remains.
I guess they are not good for the US because it stops them from consuming effortlessly.
Why waste time and energy analyzing and planning when it can print and plunder other countries while they sheepishly keep on devaluing their currency and depleting their assets to serve it?
IMO, MMT will work and will continue… until Wall-e comes to life.
And BTW, my intent was essentially to show how economies of scale and a focus on cost reduction all in the name of efficiency is leading to M&A, Big Corp. and then to TBTF.
Kill TBTF and firms will be forced to get to a more human scale… spin-offs and more jobs over time. The problem is that in the short-term the restructuring from spin-offs and bankruptcies would entail more layoffs or a recession… but you know, we can’t have one of those.
Economies of scale and efficiency are GOOD. The problem is that the profits thereof are not justly SHARED with the workers as they would be without the government-backed credit cartel.
“Kill TBTF …” Moneta
Of course. But one should do that according to principle. One such principle is that the monetary sovereign (e.g. US Treasury) ITSELF should provide a risk-free storage and transaction service for its fiat that makes no loans and pays no interest and NOT provide deposit insurance or a lender of last resort to the banks and credit unions.
I never said economies of scale are bad. I just said that they can only reach a limit. When TBTF policies are instituted, chances are we’ve past that point.
I think this position is too preoccupied with deficits. They just don’t matter.
12 months is such an arbitrary and short time period that it’s simply irrelevant.
What matters is how the money is spent, not whether cash flows net out to zero. The government doesn’t even use GAAP based accrual accounting. It’s a cash-basis reporting of revenue and expenses where the revenue (taxation) is completely unrelated to the expenses (spending). The government has an unlimited supply of the unit of measurement of the deficit (dollars).
I agree 100% that the important factor is how the money is spent. But deficits do matter as long as we are not spending it properly.
Furthermore, if they matter for other countries, they matter for the USA. Why? Because our global financial/monetary systems are still based on measures that care about deficits.
You can’t participate in society without having a credit card (if you have a job that requires travel, your employer will expect you to buy airfare and rent cars). Yves Smith
Actually, a debit card will do. And the US should have a Postal Savings Service to provide those for all citizens.
Um, that’s exactly what we did have for more than half a century.
http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/museum/1d_postalsavings.html
Note that one reason for scrapping the bank in the 60s was the enactment of reforms in the private banking industry. A century ago it seemed necessary to protect depositors from crooked and/or irresponsible banking institutions, especially customers of the socalled “immigrant banks” set up in big-city ethnic neighborhoods.
But thanks to tougher banking regulations, the PSB was–it appeared–no longer needed. Hoo Ha.
Thanks for the history lesson and a reminder that bank regulation is NOT the solution since it will eventually be repealed anyway.
I don’t know why people still think that despite 317+ years of trying without success that central banking can be made to work properly.
Hint: A money system based on usury for stolen purchasing power CANNOT be made to work properly UNLESS God is mocked and He isn’t.
Here’s what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has to say (in part):
The article is long and probably worth reading in full (I haven’t yet), but it doesn’t quite seem to get to what Yves is asking for. More research is required.
Great read.
The good news is I think most Americans ‘get it’ that whatever particular language is utilized, something is wrong. Public opinion isn’t driving public policy. Rather, the problem is that we haven’t (yet) figured out how to translate public opinion into political action.
Contemplating the flavors of corruption. They were once much stronger. We are all thieves descended from even more savage thieves. So naturally, over the course of our “civilization” we have tried to mitigate the slaughter. With legal code. When you’re bored surfing, go to your state government web site and browse your state statutes. It’s as fun as reading the dictionary! Therein you can find a description of every naughty act ever tried by our justice system. But you will not find the guts to actually prosecute.
We need a new certification. Like an organic food guarantee. Which nobody believes, but never mind. So far the only certification is for the felons – that somehow they will always be bailed out. So we need our own guarantee of a bailout. It can’t be based on being defrauded because the whole system is puffery. It could be based on minimum expectations without fine print exceptions. And backed by the taxpayer, since the taxpayer backs everything else. That would at least level the playing field.
A must-read for anyone trying to make sense of what is miscalled “corruption” in the supposedly “developed” world.
http://www.amazon.com/Oligarchy-Jeffrey-Winters/dp/0521182980/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373639644&sr=1-1&keywords=Jeffrey+Winter
From the book description:
It sounds like the author is deeply into materialist territory, along with folks like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, Michael Parenti and C. Wright Mills.
Some days I’m in that camp, but other times I find myself drawn to the more spiritualist theorizing of folks like Immanuel Kant, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt, and Joan Silk.
Both are camps are valuable, really. When I think about politics I think in Machiavellian and systems analysis terms. Why? Because it always works with only very minor exceptions.
Having said that the materialist perspective offers us nothing in terms of solutions only more of the same with different characters and a slightly different dynamic. What offers us a possibility of real change, particularly in this historical period, is spirituality–which I might define differently.
Banger: “What offers us a possibility of real change, particularly in this historical period, is spirituality–which I might define differently.”
Well, what do you mean?
Define. Hey, this site loves French! So, we say it means, “to the end.” So, you will define the new geist and this present historical geist will die. But maybe you kill it, not as you hope, by giving voice to that suppressed force of the new passion, welling up within you, but by speaking its name. Rumplestiltskin. Ack! If that’s right, by speaking the name of the new passion, you kill it before it is born. We are living in a stillborn era? The word hunter is on an abort mission. Maybe an idea is a twinkle in the eye and its utterance is its murder (downcast glance.) And more is being said than in any time in history? A genocide of thought!
Again, Today is prophecy, so it doesn’t have to make sense. Tomorrow is another day.
Scarlett O’Hara said that last one.
@ from Mexico
“Some days I’m in that camp, but other times I find myself drawn to the more spiritualist theorizing of folks like Immanuel Kant, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt, and Joan Silk.”
I do appreciate Yves blog, and the above post. … However, sometimes i need to try to formulate a broader vision of the context within which such illegitimate, illegal, immoral actions move with such impunity.
.
Has civil society lost the ability to imagine and entertain a vision of a time when the a real world context (pluralistic at that) , would mirror for ex., … Rene Forst’s ‘right to justification’, … propelled by free safe investigative journalists given global distribution in the name of transparency, accountability, and that master-word, democracy ? … The case of Michael Hastings is truly alarming ! … And yet the disenfranchised are demonstrating even though public policy furthers elite global neoliberal agendas maintained by the manipulation of different fear factors.
.
But, the reason for my response was just to share the name , and the work of, a cultural anthropologist … Arjun Appadurai, “Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization” (1996)
… “ The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries). Nor is it susceptible to simple models of push and pull (in terms of migration theory), or of surpluses and deficits (as in traditional models of balance of trade), or of consumers and producers (as in most neo-Marxist theories of development). Even the most complex and flexible theories of global development that have come out of the Marxist tradition (Amin 1980, Mandel 1978, Wallerstein 1974, Wolf 1982) are inadequately quirky and have failed to come to terms with what Scott Lash and John Urry have called disorganized capitalism ( 1987).The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics that we have only begun to theorize.’
I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship among five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes “
.
Arjun Appadurai’s writings are a recent find for me. I am very interested in the idea that visual culture has replaced print culture. I’m still working my way from Deleuze’s ‘control society’ of self-imposed censorship to a more current vision which Appadurai’s ideas are currently shaping. … Imagination, and aspiration unlock transformative motivated energy in me. … best regards ! … phrase
Please never mention C. Wright Mills, a real fraudster and redirection specialist if there ever was one!
Ferdinand Lundberg, in his classic book, The Rich and the Super-Rich, makes a highly valid point about Mills when he points out that Mills completely ignored the most important socioeconomic study of that time, and probably still is, the TNEC study (Temporary National Economic Committee study, major parts of which are still confidential to this very day, and was the causal factor for the lawsuit brought against 17 investment houses of Wall Street [US Government v. Morgan et al.]).
Nor, I believe, does Mills ever mention any of the studies undertaken in congress by the greatest populist and Real American from Texas, Wright Patman.
Anyone who read Mills in the Fifties or early Sixties was considered a Communist. He can’t have been all bad.
You will notice that often the trees that grow the fastest to be the biggest have distinct characteristics:
– In time, they destroy and/or crowd out other trees.
– As a whole, they are usually OK in their early days but get uglier with time.
– They get uneven quickly. Some branches are so big they create an imbalance that is sure to get hit with a good storm. Some branches are fine and others rot away or have no leaves.
– They become prone to lightning and other ravages from storms
– They become full of parasites
– Their life expectancy is shortened because they suck up the minerals too quickly.
– They are the ones the builders plant and other impatient types.
Now guess which country we can compare this tree to…
So what kind of tree would you like to plant?
Yves, sometimes you come up with some great articles that get to the heart of matters and this is one of them. This subject is very important and needs a lot of thought. The problem I have though is the question: what do we mean by corruption as a general idea? I’m not sure we can define it. The word itself comes from the Latin to destroy. So corruption is about destroying society and here I’m not sure we can say that the definitions you give actually destroys society.
I see things from a systems viewpoint. As I see it the system (which is society) actually works very well. All the things you cite here are things that contribute to the robust nature of the system. If you are familiar with Washington it bears a lot of resemblance to organized crime in a highly sophisticated way. There are operators, fixers, consiglieri, and even hit men along with the obvious actors covered in the mainstream media and all of them act to maintain the stability of the system. Each of them wax and wane in power depending on all kinds of external forces that they have, over time, learned to adapt to and game. Washington, from the point of view of Washington, works very well. And let’s speak frankly here, even though the public is now pretty convinced that there’s something very rotten in Denmark there is no real effective movement for reform or changing the system other than a strong nihilist component on the right that serves as an effective tool for the power-elite.
Even you, about as smart a commentator as we have on the internet, really has no clue on how to change things or what course to chart to move towards fundamental reform of the financial system that is pragmatic and not just a lot nice items on a bucket-list. Without thoroughly understanding the nature of this regime and how it enforces its will through various institutions including the entertainment industry and particularly the mainstream media we have no hope in countering the current system which remains, as we speak, utterly immune to real change.
Only by admitting our powerlessness can we begin to gain power first through knowledge (I think we are getting there) but very slowly–we still refuse to see the real lineaments of power in all its frightening aspects–you have to deconstruct everything, all the myths the state heaps on us through the various ways it has of manufacturing consent. I maintain that every issue we face from economics to external threats serve the function of controlling the public and have nothing to do with reality. This is easily discovered by the most elementary inquiry into the assumption of the mainstream narrative which crumbles into dust like the famous Wicked Witch scene in the Wizard of Oz.
there is no real effective movement for reform or changing the system other than a strong nihilist component on the right that serves as an effective tool for the power-elite.
———
Action-reaction. Maybe that is the accelerant.
Ultimately I agree. The whole situation has a aura of perfection–it certainly is cool as a human artifact. Nihilism leads to major social realignment–it is fundamentally unstable and may well be the crack we are all waiting for.
“The crack that we are all waiting for”– maybe. Certainly the corrupt elites have pretty much captured and neutralized all of the traditional methods of translating public outrage into meaningful political action. Here in the U.S., for example, participating in our two-party system (except in rare instances at the local level) is to maintain a kayfabe deception, cleverly supported by the MSM, that citizens actually have a meaningful “choice.”
The notion that Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell “oppose” each other on the senate floor is pure delusion. They both oppose the interests of most Americans, while steadfastly advancing the interests of the 0.01%
The MSM maintains an illusion of meaningful political dialogue by focusing on purely social issues, like gay marriage, that have no impact on the plutocrats’ bottom line. Plutocrats like the Koch brothers, wasting billions on trying to stop gay marriage, only help to maintain this delusion.
We need to focus on identifying the handful of plutocrats who control the system, exposing their vulnerabilities, and toppling them from power. They won’t respond to “political pressure,” except to make the politicians they own do a better job of suppressing the righteous anger of the people.
David Hume was correct when he said in 1742: “For so great is the natural ambition of men that they are never satisfied with power; and if one order of men, by pursuing its own interest, can usurp upon every other order, it will certainly do so and render itself, as far as possible, absolute and uncontrollable.”
The plutocrats’ power in our present system is almost absolute and uncontrollable. We cannot reason with them, we cannot vote for better and less corrupt politicians to “reform” the present system. The present system is beyond reform. This doesn’t mean that a constitutional republic couldn’t be restored here in the U.S.– it simply means such a restoration will never happen as long as psychopaths like Jamie Dimon continue to walk free.
The genius of the American system was the idea of checks and balances, i.e., that any one faction would have to overcome considerable practical obstacles to establish and maintain control. The great thing is that, for the most part, it worked pretty well despite some periods of considerable larceny and schemes. But because the interests in the country varied greatly with locality and sector combinations were difficult to establish and maintain.
That balanced approached has been gamed–in my view the deal-breaker was the growth of the CIA and related institutions that operate beyond all the three branches of government as a practical affair. Now a unified coherent and very robust system is in place almost unassailable in its power. At the same time, the people are becoming more skeptical of the media and their governments. When the Boston incident, for example, happened several people expressed doubt about the official story–this is very unusual because the mainstream media suppresses all alternative views on all major issues. Where do these ideas come from? As this skepticism spreads the power of the State will diminish thus encouraging a skeptical view of the mainstream narrative is more essential than advocating for individual issues.
Excellent point! Challenging the MSM “narrative” is critical.
The proper fulcrum is INHERITANCE.
If the Western Bloc redefined the rules of inheritance to serve the public commons instead of increasing concentration of wealth and power spreading over centuries. The social incentives would change dramatically in that process.
Are we an intelligent species able to adapt to a much different world than the 1500’s when the social organization that is now the Western Bloc formed?
I see a lot of good people trying to wake up the world. I hope we can learn to laugh our way into the future……which we stopped studying in the early 1970’s publicly because the plutocrats and American Empire were too exposed.
IMO, the Delphi consensus generating technique needs to be become an open source tool for all organizations.
IMO, we also need to computerize and publicly go through future study processes (like FAR) to improve the public conscious about the choices we face and the trade offs.
This comment is very perceptive. David Hume (1742) argued that “For so great is the natural ambition of men that they are never satisfied with power; and if one order of men, by pursuing its own interest, can usurp upon every other order, it will certainly do so and render itself, as far as possible, absolute and uncontrollable.”
Our first order of business, then is to determine who actually holds power today, and how they manipulate the rest of us into accepting a system in which we cannot escape their domination, or exert any sort of control over their abuse of power.
Here in the U.S., many still cling to the delusion that national politics is something more than a kayfabe diversion from the reality of pure corporate fascism. This delusion is fed by the MSM, who paint a plausible picture of people like Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell “opposing” each other on the Senate floor. The reality is that they are both very effective servants of their big-money masters.
The fiction, that the two major corporate parties give voters a real “choice,” is maintained by the MSM through emphasizing issues like gay marriage– that have absolutely no impact on the profits of the plutocrats. The fact that some plutocrats, like the Koch brothers, still waste billions trying to stop social advances– like gay marriage– only helps to foster the delusion.
I think that what most of us perceive as “corrupt,” then, are practices that violate the already low standards of behavior that we grew up expecting our elites to at least pretend to respect. Lying to Congress, forging signatures on mortgage documents, etc. were things we expected to trigger some sort of punishment for the perpetrators.
We perceive 2013 as more “corrupt” than 1973, because at least back then something like Watergate could actually create real negative consequences for the people involved. Now the powers that be are openly pissing all over the rest of us, practically daring us to do something about it. The recent, barely protested, unconstitutional “lockdown” of Boston was a moment to rub in our faces their “full spectrum dominance.”
Step one. But “powerlessness” over what?
Powerlessness over the system as a whole–it is very robust and interconnected system at this point the result of thousands of efforts. We(by that I mean the community of dissidents) cannot intrude into the government; we have no voice and no power at present because we are unable to make any section of the system feel pain by our efforts and indeed we don’t even have real community as, for example, the African American community had in maintaining the Montgomery bus boycott. The power-elite don’t, right now, even need our support or consent–they can, in my view force almost anything down our throats using already established techniques. You know, if things get dicey, just create enemies and external threats.
As I’ve said many times, the essential work is to de-legitimize the system, question their version of reality and point out the fakery that is at the heart of our political discourse. Unless that is done rigorously at every chance we will remain powerless.
‘Every issue we face … serves the function of controlling the public and has nothing to do with reality.’
Exactly right. You can filter every propaganda and PR message through that filter, and you can be sure every bit of every one of them is a lie with ulterior purposes.
This is why I stopped reading newspapers over thirty years ago, or watching news reports either. All I may have missed is misinformation and celebrity self promotions.
When you do this, and then suddenly tune in to the confident ooozings of some expert, you immediately realize what he says is the farthest thing from truth and easily see what reaction he is really after.
“The original idea behind this volume was to examine only the Progressive Era, but Americans began grappling with corruption long before the 1890s.As it turns out, Progressive Era reformers and twenty-first-century economists think about corruption in a way that is, in one critical dimension, 180 degrees removed from the concept of corruption that prevailed until the mid-nineteenth century. The title of McCormick’s essay, “The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics,” captures the essence of the modern concept of corruption, or, as Shleifer and Vishny define corruption, “the sale by government officials of government property for personal gain” (1993, p. 599)….
What I define as systematic corruption is both a concrete form of political behavior and an idea. In polities plagued with systematic corruption,a group of politicians deliberately create rents by limiting entry into valuable
economic activities, through grants of monopoly, restrictive corporate charters, tariffs, quotas, regulations, and the like. These rents bind the interests
of the recipients to the politicians who create them. The purpose is to build a coalition that can dominate the government. Manipulating the economy for political ends is systematic corruption. Systematic corruption
occurs when politics corrupts economics….
Title: The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American
History
Author: John Joseph Wallis
URL: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c9977
Lobbying and campaign finance are two forms of legalized bribery. Citizens United legalized political corruption for corporations and showed the complete corruption of the Supreme Court which decided it. Astroturfed political organizations, the manufacture of “popular consent”, are another form of corruption in politics. The hiding of contributors to these and other groups gives cover to their corruption.
The media are corrupt, even a lot of the blogosphere is. It is all propaganda all the time, just segmented and tailored to different audiences of rubes.
Universities are corrupt. They no longer fulfill an educational mission rather they are purveyors of the status quo. They are corrupt in their corporate structure, in their alliances with other corporations, and in their foisting of debt on to their students.
Academia is corrupt. There is the whole publish or perish thing that results in most of academia’s research product being worthless and useless. This is even before we get to the quack sciences like economics. Academic economics is completely corrupt. The dominant politico-economic system of our times is kleptocracy. Yet almost no academic economist will acknowledge it let alone make it central to their point of view.
The judicial system and the judiciary are corrupt. How else to explain our two-tiered justice system? The great criminals of our times, the largest frauds in human history, are not only not prosecuted, they are not even investigated. And how can anyone take the Supreme Court to be anything but corrupt? This is an institution that except for a couple of decades around the Warren Court has, for more than 200 years, always been on the side of the haves against the have-nots, for the powerful, against the powerless, pro-slavery, pro-segregation, and anti-worker. How can anyone take decisions like Bush v. Gore or Citizens United to be anything other than corrupt, politics dressed up as legal thinking?
In a kleptocracy, all the institutions, at least those controlled by the rich and elites, are put into the service of the kleptocrats to loot or justify and defend looting and the looters. So corruption is endemic and systemic.
A related question (and one that is more interested to me) is how the ground was prepared for today’s corruption over the last 20+ years. Over that period, our society seems to have drunk a toxic cocktail of selfishness (consumerism/careerism/cronyism) and fear. Is it any wonder, then, that we now have a unhealthy respect for power along with (quelle surprise!) an abusive hierarchy/neo-aristocracy that claims legitimacy – with a straight face – through a transparently corrupt pay-to-play/vote-with-your-money faux democracy.
Don’t overlook the manipulation of statistics as a means of corruption. For example, the official rate of unemployment in the USA is about double what the government claims. And that’s because what’s considered ‘unemployed’ is very selective. Those people who have given up looking for work are not even counted. Likewise across many US government agencies statistics are broadly manipulated to portray best scenario interpretations, when the realities are almost always much worse.
When statistics are broadly manipulated, the real facts of any social issue become twisted and deformed. Misguided policies can then be implemented by those in power.
This is not a minor issue about fudging the numbers. This is about deliberate and broad scale misrepresentation that can directly damage public interest. Government manipulation of statistics is a one of the most standard types of corruption; it just varies on a scale of how broad are the lies, and how much social damage is done.
Words to this crowd are maleable tools, and thus having a conversation with them is as meaningless as playing Scrabble with an opponent that has all blank tiles. Take Obama’s ‘transparency’, for example. If Obama can say with a straight face that the super secret FISC is transparent, then the word has lost all meaning. You may think it means something; but to him it means “Don’t worry, trust me.” Or the abuse of the word ‘relevant’, of which redifinition into its opposite meaning “legally” allows the NSA to secretly spy on everyone’s communications. Or the attempts to redefine ‘journalist’. Or the redefinition of toxic carbon fuels as ‘clean’, to enable one to bless that which we should condemn (fracking, etc.). When this happens all pretense of good faith are gone; you have a better chance arguing with an adolescent. I don’t know of a single word that describes this pervasive rot. Perhaps ‘Orwellian’.
One thing that we could do is stop participating in this charade. Stop voting for Democrats because they are not Republicans, & vice-versa. Any attempt to fix this problem from within this thoroughly corrupt, rotted system is doomed to failure (thanks, Obama, you really drove that point home). Deny the institution its veneer of democratic legitimacy. That would be a start.
Yes!!
In general this is the right direction–but the focus ought to be on the single institution that allows this situation to persist, i.e., the mainstream media in which I include the entertainment media. They all need to be rigorously critiqued and challenged. They are the ones who are a conduit for the PR firms who represent the major corporate oligarchs and K Street hustlers.
What combination of generosity and cruelty is necessary to take down a corrupt regime?
It seems like a difficult task to get that mixture right.
What roles do vengeance, anger, ressentment, selflessness and love have in this process?
I doubt I’d stop a bankster lynching Jim. But this alone would only service some emotions, perhaps justifiably. Humans have a poor record on leader displacement, forgetting that without system change the same type of leaders form again.
“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names. “ Yves Smith
Actually:
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; a good understanding have all those who do His commandments; His praise endures forever. Psalm 111:10
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 1:7
“The beginning of wisdom is: acquire wisdom; and with all your acquiring, get understanding. Proverbs 4:7
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. Proverbs 9:10
But yea, let’s call the banks what they actually are – a government-backed usury for stolen purchasing power cartel. But that’s not easy to do in our usury-soaked, credit-swilling so-called “society”, is it? Unless one understand which side the Angels are on?
Susan has us all as thieves descended from more savage thieves. True – but we can do better. 2.5% of UK males between 16 and 64 will have been a high-rate offender at some time and a third of us get a List One conviction by 30. Having nicked a fair few ordinary criminals I’m pretty convinced we don’t handle the stupidity and lack of opportunity plus mental illness of many of these at all fairly.
The goon my dog could outsmart who nicks your television to get a fix for his girlfriend (he takes your hoover from his mum too) eventually gets prison. The bank clerk who lies to you about PPI or just adds it to your loan account without asking gets her bonus – the same being true of the restaurant manager who recycles unfit food that gives you food poisoning. The list of petty corruption is very long and punishments and the way we deal with such very unfair long before we get to the mega-corrupt we knight for running banks.
Wittgenstein would want us to define corruption through our many uses of the term in its forms of life. I could nick ‘Finn the tea-leaf’ more or less at will, but no one has been arresting ‘Brenda the bank clerk’ en masse, or the poisoning floozie putting two-week out of date food in front of her customers to get her bonus for two week in Ibiza (two victims die in agony).
A key feature in Wittgenstein is that our enquiries create complexity even as we think we are unraveling the knots we think are the problem. I’d suggest our banks and many other sales outfits create a culture for corruption and law that ensures this cannot easily be regarded as criminal. I believe trying to define corruption is likely to miss what an established definition will do in the embedded confusions of practice unless we free practice from presupposes of its immensely manifold connections, regrouping the entire language (Big Typescript 423 – sort of).
Most of the law concerning our corporations, banks and politics has been written so as to be of no account to those who can cover their tracks and practice psychological rationalisation. Hardly surprising when our money system is designed to legalise theft. Our question marks are not in deep enough. Corruption is embedded in us by what is there to soak up in practice.
‘Finn’ doesn’t do burglary dwelling these days. Instead he does borrowing from shops and other commercial premises – this is as a result of him weighing the likely penalties and risk of being caught. I am not sure Obama or Cameron do any more.
allcoppedout said:
Here’s what the Rev. Martin Luther King had to say on the subject:
Few people realize that besides being a clever and inspiring leader MLK possessed a first-class mind. He was, as J. Edgar Hoover maintained, the most dangerous man in America.
I have a problem with the purifying power of faith component. Faith in who? Faith in what? More man made BS built around patriarchy?
I really can’t fathom how people are more comfortable with obvious religious myth than the awe and humility of not knowing. We currently think the cosmos is made of 4.9% matter, of which we claim to have some “knowledge”, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy, which we claim to have some theories about. Within that context, how blatantly stupid is it to believe that some man made myth of religion should be a cornerstone of social organization.
I will struggle with reason any day over the tenets of faith that should have been relegated to myth in the 1500s instead of propping up the global patriarchal plutocracy and class system we have had since then.
I really can’t fathom how people are more comfortable with obvious religious myth than the awe and humility of not knowing. psychohistorian
Because it isn’t obvious as anyone who has read much of the Bible knows.
Language is critical to those who prefer exact meanings and is frustrating when others casually abuse it. It’s incredibly difficult to manage anything unless everyone involved is speaking the same language with the same meaning.
On the cell phone contract vs prepaid comparison, I have to question that as a fair example. Due to financial difficulties after my unemployment exhausted leaving me with no income for 18 months, I had to move from a contractual relationship with Sprint and chose to go with Virgin Mobile prepaid. I have never regretted that decision as my bill dropped $30-$40 per month, the service quality is comparable and I have unlimited everything. That same plan with any contractual carrier today would certainly be over $100 per month instead of the $55 per month with Virgin Mobile – and is difficult to find as most contractual carriers don’t offer truly unlimited data packages.
This is an excellent idea and important, IMO. We need to take the wherever-we-turn corruptions out from behind our eyes and lay them on the table in rows so we can see them. A sense of humor might provide a smidge of distance so we don’t feel like we’re constantly drowning.
The comments here kept sliding back into descriptions and prescriptions, which shows our befuddlement ruts. So I hope you propose this again. Skeptic suggestion could work: set up a page for promotion of a Language of The Occupation. A Dictionary of Clarification for the Weary Wary. Etc.
Not feeling particularly clever tonight but I’ll think about it. If nothing else, we can take back our language. Surely we can despeak the doublespeak, which I experience, every single time, as an insult with a sneer.
On another site someone proposed, “Yes we scan!” for Obama’s NSA. I don’t know where clever/snide overtakes precision, but maybe with a pot of potentials, that will be sorted out.
I like your ideas.
I like the neo-Orwellian term for the current phase of our society and I think it fits with what you are saying.
Maybe Yves will start a Neo-Orwelling/Winston Smith glossary as an adjunct to her site to collect such humorous and insightful descriptions of the currents LIES told us with Neo-Orwellian vocabulary.
Yves and Winston Smith could be a real pair to draw to….grin.
Great post. One quibble: ” … not that we don’t have that happening in advanced economies too, but we see it as an anomaly).”
I disagree. In New York, New Jersey, possibly Dade County and Chicago, the corruption model of a village headman running a big crony racket with public funds and assets is all too ordinary — except here in the US it’s the municipal, county, state, etc. politicians/elected officiasl and surrounding lackeys giving away our public goods (taxes, land, contracts) to a circle of crony payers of kickbacks.
And on the federal level, as Hugh points out, what is lobbying or PAC money but legalized bribery, embedded at the center of our entire political system?
As to the notion that “kleptocracy” is merely the description of a political system — that may be, but its main features are looting schemes whereby the powerful strip the powerless of wealth and well being. Isn’t this exactly the mechanics of the corruption that we now appear to be cloaked in like a surroundsound movie?
A few semi-ideas, FWIW:
Bubblespeak: lies that people in the inner circle tell each other.
Flubberspeak: such as Microsoft’s “Privacy is our Priority”, whopping lies that bounce back on them.
Troublespeak: inciting insecurity
Traditional doublespeak: Skeptic’s “Dept of (In)Justice”
I love Skeptic’s “Great Deterioration”. They haven’t permitted anything more than a “Great Recession” as we wind our way down. (Do they even allow that we remain in recession?) They scupper numbers on and on, until it seems we’re floating just above ground on a cloud of pure gas.
So maybe “number scuppers”?
Poll-looting: polls skewed for political points
mediated media: corporate and gov’t captured msm
Eh, not great but added to Skeptic’s better stuff, maybe a start.
My experience as a cop involved a lot of ‘noble cause corruption’ – much of which was about ordinary people trying to cope in impossible circumstances to get some kind of justice – some was much more dire. Academe, frankly, was little different and management worse.
One of Frederick Soddy’s books can be found free here:
http://archive.org/details/roleofmoney032861mbp
I feel a lot like him. This work is highly opinionated – obvious to a critical eye – though attempts to disguise this in third person polemic. I am the same (though not as good a chemist) cranky old scientist 100 years later. We could all say this now:
“Even more remarkable, almost incredibly so to those who
have been hitherto lost voices crying in the wilderness, is the swiftly growing volume of agreement that it is the obsolete and dangerous monetary system that, primarily,
is at fault. It is this entirely empirical and defeatist body of rules and conventions, that has grown up along with the scientific expansion of the means of life, that is responsible not only for the present paralysis but also for the Great War itself. All are agreed that here at least change is inevitable, the only doubt indeed now being whether any part of the system, which through a lack of imagination as to what might have been is still apt to be described as having ” worked well in the past “, can survive into the future.”
Yves has hit a lot of the right nails, but we need to remember Plato wrote 7 books on taming corruption and felt it inevitable. Soddy was big on honesty, suggesting we’d be better off with an honest adding machine than the banksters. That we don’t have honest, transparent accounting with today’s ‘machines’ is inexplicable unless honesty is not the best policy and ‘someone’ is relying on cheating. This is the essential corruption of “noble cause”. They have developed a system in which most people can lie, commit fraud and so on and rationalise it (psychology has good descriptions of this – Dan Ariel would be a ‘name’).
How could any of us sell PPI to anyone else in here? I have no doubt each transaction was fraud and a classic one of selling insurance that could rarely pay out and was massively over-priced. How, incidentally, did the banks fix this high price? We can bandy terms like crimogenic culture about – but essentially some of my students were “selling” this muck and were generally as good as you or I.
I want to stop private money, but as Soddy says of the socialists of his day, I don’t want a nationalised-internationalised system that runs like the old one only with government bureaucrats in it. We can’t expect Yves to provide a tour de force on all the psychology, sociology and social-organisation theory on corruption – but we do have to try and understand the’dark forces’. The first thing we seem to forget is that corruption is a default in the human system and it doesn’t have to be the only one.
Thanks for the MLK quotes Mexico.
Thank you for this article, Yves.
It is key. And you are a treasure.
Liah
We also tend to think of bribes being a one-way transaction as in giving a Saudi Prince a bung to take our over-priced ‘cost plus’ contract. My experience was that this was not the case and I could trace a network of kickbacks to our own worthies. No point in proving any of this in terms of putting it before a court. The department concerned was merely gleaning commercial intelligence to help in future deals and establish who the best players were. The few actual police investigations tend to be run by low rank detectives and are not difficult to prove. It reminded me of the old supergrass days when crooks would grass competitors to expand their own business. Former colleagues tell me nothing has changed and they can only investigate after political approval and this comes only after one group falls out of favour.
I suspect we have a deep hold on corruption and interest in maintaining it such that if a developing country had leaders wanting real free trade we would depose them. One finds a good match between clamor by politicians against offshore and bribery and growth of the same.
Scientists are good at measurement – economists, politicians and accountants do something else.
If equality, rights, and regulations are replaced by wealth, cronyism, and payoffs, is it still corruption? Or does it just become the normal way the system works?
«Investors in mortgage backed securities effectively had no ability to get courts to enforce their rights.»
Those right will NEVER HAPPEN! Because the big deal is that *essentially all derivatives contracts have a clause that says that when the underlying securities are based on fraud, the originator of the derivatives has to buy them back at their face value*.
Therefore all USA banks would go bankrupt, because the core USA banks originated trillions of derivatives based on fraudulent securities.
Since nobody in the circles of power wants that, then no securities, in particular no mortgage securities, must be legally recognized as fraudulent.
That’s one reason why USA bank CEOs (and not just USA ones) have had complete legal immunity from prosecution: if they are convicted of fraud, then the buyers of derivatives based on that fraud can bankrupt the whole USA bank system by demanding to be reimbursed at par.
That is also another reason why the Fed has been buying enormous amounts of mortgage based securities: because the Fed obviously would never do such a vulgar thing as sue the issuers of those derivatives based on fraudulent securities, or demand that they be paid back at par if the fraud became a legal fact.