The Issue of Our Time is Corruption

That's What We Need to Fight. And it's winnable, because the people who want to get rid of corruption vastly outnumber the people who really benefit from it.

A Specter Haunting Democracy

“There is a specter haunting democracy in the world today. It is bad governance—governance that serves only the interests of a narrow ruling elite. Governance that is drenched in corruption, patronage, favouritism, and abuse of power. Governance that is not responding to the massive and long-deferred social agenda of reducing inequality and unemployment and fighting against dehumanizing poverty. Governance that is not delivering broad improvement in people’s lives because it is stealing, squandering, or skewing the available resources.” - Larry Diamond

Corruption is “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain” and a lot of corruption is so brazen and so widespread that it is not considered corruption anymore.

There is plenty of handwringing and pearl clutching in the U.S about “guardrails” and “norms,” when the problem is serious, widespread, entrenched corruption. It is not new.

To take just one example from the incoming Trump administration: the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a kind of task force being run by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, which will supposedly find $1-trillion to cut out of the Federal Budget.

Republicans are vying for Musk’s attention, Democrats and even Bernie Sanders are saying they’ll work with Musk. Fareed Zakaria was talking about DOGE and how Musk and Ramaswamy were “brilliant”.

It should be clear from the get-go that Musk’s conflicts of interests as a government contractor should disqualify him from the position.

His companies receive billions of dollars in government revenue. So do his competitors. It is a colossal conflict of interest for him to be making recommendations that could either result in benefits to himself by sparing his own company cuts, or by recommending cuts that could undermine a competitor to his benefit.

Will Musk reveal all of his interests? Will he step back from his companies?

That’s one of the least of the conflicts of interest. Many of Trump’s other appointees are billionaires, which means they also have conflicts.

The other area is directly related to the regulation of markets, including the SEC and other regulators, where cryptocurrency is a colossal concern, because it has often been associated with scams where investors have lost billions, as well as crypto being the vehicle of choice for criminals and terrorists to pay their bills and launder money.

As 60 Minutes reported, dozens of politicians in the U.S. were elected thanks to donations from cryptocurrency investors.

There are lots of problems with cryptocurrency, one of the main problems being that it has replaced cash as a means of payment for criminals, laundering money for drug traffickers, human traffickers, terrorists, and even for financing North Korea’s nuclear program.

In late November, the Department of Justice reported they were investigating Tether, a major cryptocurrency network whose cryptocurrency, stablecoin is pegged to the U.S. Dollar.

Howard Lutnick, who is the head of Trump’s transition team, is also the head of Cantor Fitzgerald, a firm that works with Tether,

There have been ongoing concerns over Tether for years. It’s not clear that it has the reserves to pay its bills. In 2020, Bloomberg reported that if it collapsed, it could be a “systemic” risk.

Even as the Trump administration threatens Mexico and Canada with tariffs because of concerns about illicit drugs flowing over the border, Tether has been used used to launder money for Mexican drug cartels.

Unsealed court documents highlight how drug cartels from Mexico and Colombia are leveraging cryptocurrency, particularly Tether USDT/USD and Bitcoin BTC/USD, to launder tens of millions of dollars…

Cantor Fitzgerald, led by Howard Lutnick, has been a key custodian of Tether's reserves.

Lutnick is reportedly planning a multi-billion-dollar program involving Tether, offering dollar loans to clients who pledge Bitcoin as collateral.

In January 2024, the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODOC) warned that

“Tether has fast become the platform of choice for money laundering and fraud operations across East and Southeast Asia, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warned in a report on organized crime and illicit banking in the region.”

Its popularity is illustrated by the “surging volume” of cyber fraud, money laundering and underground banking cases, the UN said, including schemes like “sextortion,” a form of blackmail threatening to post sexual content or information about a person, and “pig butchering,” a socially engineered romance designed to “fatten up” targets before extracting money.

The UN said financial authorities and law enforcement have reported a rapid uptick in the use of “sophisticated, high-speed money laundering” teams specializing in tether in recent years, with criminals advertising their services on social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Telegram.

Online gambling platforms in particular have “emerged as among the most popular vehicles for cryptocurrency-based money launderers,”—especially those using tether—the report said, warning they are “fueling the intensification” of the region’s “rapidly growing illicit digital economy.”

This is a chart from the Financial Times. The green diamond-shaped logo with a T is tether.

The other cryptocurrency of choice for money laundering, with the involvement of Chinese organized crime and the Chinese government, is TRON, whose owner recently bought a famous piece of fine art recently for $6.2-million - a fresh banana taped to a wall with duct tape. The buyer, was TRON CEO Justin Sun, who was charged last year by the SEC for violating marketing rules - paying celebrities to promote his crypto without disclosing they were paid. TRON also just purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, a new crypto venture backed by President-elect Donald Trump.

In the U.S., the politicization of the Supreme Court is in itself a form of corruption. ProPublica has reported that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have both received gifts and trips with billionaires who had cases before the court, and they failed to recuse themselves. It’s not just a legal or a national scandal, it’s a global one.

The problem is much deeper, because legal theories have been corrupted as well. Richard Posner developed the idea that the law should not be enforced if it’s economically “inefficient,” which has the unintended consequence of leaving profitable businesses that thrive through fraud or crime untouched. And indeed, there have been colossal financial crimes in the U.S., including during the Global Financial Crisis, where not a single person was jailed.

The entire idea of being a “constitutional originalist” is intellectually bankrupt. It’s Supreme Court justices live-action role playing as Founding Fathers, based on fundamentalist principles that are applied only when convenient.

Hypocrisy And Arrogance Are Corruption

In the U.S., virtues and values associated with religion have been used as a Trojan Horse to inject these corruptions of justice into the system, often backed by supporters who are either Catholic or Evangelical Christian.

Hypocrisy, strictly defined, means holding others to a standard from which you exempt yourself. Christ was often reminding others of their hypocrisy. When a crowd gathers to stone a sinner, Christ defies whoever is without sin to cast the first stone. In Catholicism, the deadliest sin of all is pride, because it was pride that drove Satan’s decision to reject the authority of God.

The New Testament - and a fair bit of the Old testament is replete with attacks on the hypocrisy and corruption of sacred principles by money. “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

The deepest irony here is Christians who say they believe in the literal word of the Bible insist on interpreting passages as metaphorical or as spiritual, when they are demanding action to address people’s spiritual needs with worldly action.

Fighting corruption is difficult, because “corruption fights back,” because people who have secured and maintain their positions through corruption are loath to give it up without a fight.

This can seem all the more difficult in an era of record inequality, with record wealth in the hands of a few - but those who benefit from corruption are always greatly outnumbered.

It’s also common for people to side with predatory scammers. Aside from “buyer beware” people pile on by suggesting or assuming that their worst qualities are to blame: greed or stupidity - when conmen exploit the best in people. Being trusting, open, helpful, hopeful or kind.

When people look around the world in dismay today, the dominant issue is corruption - which is not even recognized as corruption, because we have become so inured to it.

The Rule of Law & Power Tending to Corrupt

Lord Acton.

When people say that they are concerned about the rise of authoritarians, or that democracy is in retreat, the deeper problem is the threat to the rule of law. Preserving and ensuring the rule of law with an independent and effective judiciary is essential (though not sufficient) to justice and keeping corruption in check. It is not just a question of punishment after the fact, but the deterrence ahead of time.

Many people may have heard the phrase “Power corrupts,” which, like so many quotations, is wrong. It is “Power tends to corrupt” and even then, the greater context provides much greater meaning.

The quotation is part of a letter from Lord Acton, who was a politician, historian and writer in England in the 1800s. He was born in 1834 and died in 1902. He was writing to Church of England Archbishop Mandell Creighton, and Acton was criticizing Creighton for glossing over or justifying the crimes of historical figures.

Creighton objected to what he saw as a modern tendency to be unnecessarily critical of authority figures. Acton disagreed. Although he was Roman Catholic, he could not ignore popes' corruption or abuse of power.

He argued that all people -- past or present, leaders or not -- should be held to universal moral standards.

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers' lifetimes].

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which . . . the end learns to justify the means.

You would hang a man of no position, . . . but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science.”

Acton manages to crystallize one of the core issues in corruption - that people resist holding persons in authority to account for violating rules, laws and norms that apply to everyone else - that the rule of law is being ignored.

The “rule of law” does not just mean that everyone should obey the law.

It is not “might makes right” it is not “rule by decree” or “rule by birthright.” It means that we are ruled by laws, not people, and the laws apply to everyone.

That is the idea expressed in the idealistic commitments fundamental rights and freedoms that are spelled out in foundational documents - Declarations of Independence, constitutions, and Charters and Bills of Rights and Freedoms, dating back to the Magna Carta.

That includes the presumption of innocence, due process, the right not to be detained without cause, the right not to self-incriminate, to face your accuser and know what you are being charged with, and the application of justice that requires confirming beyong a reasonable doubt that a person committed a bad act with a guilty mind.

There can be no question that many of these basic rights have been under pressure, and direct assault in the last decades, as they have been routinely through history. Progress is not a line, and rights have been gained, lost, and regained again.

The rule of law is grounded on the rights of the individual in a democracy.

U.S. political polarization has reached the point that in order for Republicans to distance themselves from Democrats, people have been arguing against the words “liberal” and “democracy” and claim that the U.S. is a Republic, not a democracy, when what defines a republic is the lack of a monarch.

The “liberal” in “liberal democracy” is because liberal is attached to the liberty of the individual. Liberalism is not an economic philosophy. It is fundamentally about trying to achieve freedom, dignity and protections for the individual against unjust demands, whether those demands come from government or from oligarchs and corporations.

When we talk about the “political spectrum” of left and right, it is considered entirely in the context of economic ideologies, not the rights of human beings.

Communism, socialism, capitalism and libertarianism are about ordering people for economic purposes. When JK Galbraith said “Communism is man oppressing his fellow man, while capitalism is just the opposite,” it’s because Galbraith was a liberal.

The reason for the injustices associated with these economic ideologies is that extremists and radicals refuse to submit to any authority except their own.

This is incompatible with the rule of law, which requires that everyone submit to the same rules and laws.

During the pandemic, persons who felt they were being targeted by public health measures who challenged them in court, routinely lost, because they were not being singled out, since the laws applied to everyone.

The liberal focus on the rights of the individual recognizes that there are limits and balances, and that collective rights are still indispensable, because in addition to being individuals, our membership and shared values with our communities define who we are, and how we are treated.

Religious rights are fundamentally rights that are related to the shared values of a collective. Labour rights and the right to create communities and organize, family rights. Corporations are collective endeavours.

One of the reasons it is essential to focus on the rights of the individual first, while still valuing and enforcing collective rights, without crushing the rights of the individual out of existence.

A number of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the last two decades have placed collective rights over the rights of the individual in ways that defy the rule of law. The Citizens United case, with allows corporations unlimited spending in political campaigns; overturning the Voting Rights Act; overturning Roe v. Wade; granting immunity to the President for committing crimes in an Official Capacity.

The reason for the liberal focus on individual rights is not to put individuals on a pedestal as heroes. It is because unless you place limits on the collective, and treat individual rights are having primacy, the collective and its leadership can extinguish individual rights or make them impossible to access.

Individuals have those rights because they are a legal person under the law. Whatever shared beliefs and bonds define their community identity, those should not be a factor when it comes to individual rights, where the duty of the system is to hold all to account and respect the rights of all.

People will immediately recognize that this is not the system we have, as there are major scandals, where people of influence and wealth were and are able to get away with crimes for years on end.

We need to recognize that discrimination, or a failure to hold people to account for violating the law in the name of collective solidarity, is a form of corruption. These miscarriages of justice are because the law is not being applied as we are all promised it will be.

It must also be said that justice is not the same thing as punishment. There are other ways to hold people to account in ways that are effective and have integrity. You can have justice without punishment, just as surely as you can have punishment without justice.

Failing to apply the law equally, and ensure that everyone has access to justice, is in and of itself, a form of corruption.

In addition to corruption due to conflict of interest, there is also corruption due to conflict of loyalty.

As the old saying goes, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Money is morally neutral, but its use is not. It’s a tool of corruption when it seeks to influence or buy things that are not supposed to be for sale.

Fundamental rights are not supposed to be part of any market: they exist outside of it. Your individual human rights can’t be transferred or sold to anyone else.

Buying votes is corruption. Paying police to investigate or look the other way is corruption. Bribing prosecutors, bribing jurors or judges - this is moral corruption and a clear injustice for the reason that rights are not for sale.

We also recognize that there are other transactions that are not considered moral: slavery and trafficking in human beings; child labour; trafficking in

It’s also the case that extreme concentrations of wealth and income in the hands of a small part of the population readily leads to corruption, even if the wealth was obtained honestly and legally. (The French writer Balzac once wrote “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.”)

Once they are powerful and wealthy, people and instituions have more resources to shield themselves from consequences as well as doling out both rewards and punishment.

People say “information is power” or they may equate high status with power, but power is fundamentally about control.

It has to be said that power and control are morally neutral. Anything that is powerful is powerful for good or bad.

However, the control that is exerted is all-important, because the basic structures that maintain order in society are also control structures.

Wealth provided the means to control others’ lives, because many individuals will be dependent on a wealthy individual or organization, if revealing or rooting out corruption is seen as threatening their own security, people can be persuaded, pressured, or may voluntarily comply with silence - being corrupted themselves.

The Banality of Evil: The Corruption of Standards and Morals is Just as Deadly as Malicious Intent

It’s also important to understand how people are corrupted, and how “normalized deviance” mean that breaking the rules becomes common practice.

When a terrible event occurs, people always ask how it could possibly have happened. Usually there are official denials, where it is argued that no one could have seen it coming, when catastrophic failures are usually preceded by a string of near-miss events.

“Murphy’s Law” is the idea that “Whatever can go wrong, will,” but this often isn’t the case. The repetition of close-calls and near-disasters is taken as a reprieve, and people think that if it hasn’t happened by now, it never will. Hence, the surprise when it does.

J.E. Gordon was an engineer and innovator who wrote two brilliant books for laymen explaining engineering and structures. He was also an expert witness who was called to investigate catastrophic collapses of bridges, ships cracking in half and sinking, planes exploding mid-air. He wrote

“In the course of a long professional life spent, or misspent in the study of the strength of materials and structures, I have had cause to examine a lot of accidents, many of them fatal. I have been forced to the conclusion that very few accidents just ‘happen’ in a morally neutral way. Nine out of ten accidents are caused, not by the more abstruse technical effects, but by old-fashioned human sin, often verging on wickedness.

Of course I do not mean the more gilded and juicy sins like deliberate murder, large-scale fraud or sex. It is squalid sins like carelessness, idleness, won’t-learn-and-don’t-need-to-ask, you-can’t-tell-me-anything-about-my-job, pride, jealousy and greed that kill people.”

This is often glossed over as “human error.”

The old saying “the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference” is important here.

When we consider people who do harm, they are dehumanized. There are charismatic but very nasty leaders who are “larger than life,” where we imagine them to be the kind of public, posturing villains from fiction throughout the ages - cartoon villains who are actively venomous and revel in cruelty.

How corruption happens: Good, Smart People Being Bad

Some years ago, I came across a fascinating study of bad practices becoming standard in the provision of healthcare services by John Banja, “Normalized Deviance in Healthcare,” which provides deep insights and applications well beyond medicine.

I came it across it here, where it was described as:

"The normalization of deviance" is a sociological term describing how groups of people become accustomed to ignoring safety rules and best practices, becoming plagued with (sometimes fatal) problems that no one can seem to fix.

Banja writes:

Over the last decade, hospital safety personnel have gradually become disabused of a long-standing but incorrect belief: that harm-causing medical errors, such as wrong-side surgeries or retained surgical instruments, result from a single individual doing something inexplicably stupid. Rather, contemporary research on mega disasters—for instance, Chernobyl, space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, Bhopal, and any number of patient care catastrophes—has consistently shown that major accidents require (1) multiple people (2) committing multiple, often seemingly innocuous, mistakes that (3) breach an organization’s fail-safe mechanisms, defenses, or safety nets, resulting in (4) serious harm or frank disaster. In other words, mistakes such as failing to check or record a lab finding, ordering the wrong drug, or entering a lab finding in the wrong patient’s chart are usually not enough to guarantee an occurrence of harm. The recipe for disaster additionally requires these errors, lapses, or mistakes to go unattended, unappreciated, or unresolved for an extended period of time.

Remarkably, the failure of health professionals to comply with standards, rules, or regulations is a fundamental cause of such breaches.

This article will examine such compliance failures, especially in instances where rules or standards of care are established, are easily recognized, and are widely disseminated, but professionals consistently and even brazenly disregard them. Worse, intentional deviations in care standards are often practiced or condoned by an entire group; for example, all the nurses or technicians on a given unit. What begin as deviations from standard operating rules become, with enough repetitions, “normalized” practice patterns. At this juncture, personnel no longer regard these acts as untoward, but rather as routine, rational, and entirely acceptable. These latent errors become entrenched in the system’s operational architecture and dramatically enhance its vulnerability when a future, active error is committed.

Before getting to the examples, which are frequently horrifying, the fact that this is occurring in health care is significant.

First, the people who are making these decisions to ignore rules are individuals with years of education and training who take their jobs seriously and who are subject to intense professional regulation.

Second, as Banja emphasizes, the corruption of standards that takes place happens in a way that is essentially the same as corruption in business or corruption.

However, there is a key difference: “the health professional’s “deviance” is virtually never performed with criminal or malicious intent.”

In discussing the normalization of deviance, two things should be kept in mind. The first is that while the normalization of deviant practices in healthcare does not appear substantially different from the way corrupt practices in private business evolve and become normalized, the health professional’s “deviance” is virtually never performed with criminal or malicious intent.

Second, health professionals typically justify practice deviations as necessary, or at least not opposed to accomplishing their ethically unimpeachable objective of relieving their patients’ pain and suffering. Nevertheless, just as the phenomena of socialization, institutionalization, and rationalization enable corrupt practices to evolve in white collar organizations, those phenomena are similarly at work in the evolution of deviant behavior among health professionals.

The harms that Banja lists as a result of standard practices being ignored are horrifying:

• The wrong leg being amputated because of mislabelling (a “wrong-side” surgery)

• Performing a procedure or operation on the wrong patient

• Infections and cross-contamination because staff did not follow basic hand-washing, gowning, and masking protocols

• Deadly mistakes and overdoses of medication (10 x the dose asked for) due to bad handwriting on prescriptions, or not getting approval before acting as required.

• An incident where a patient who needed an X-ray mid-surgery was supposed to be temporarily disconnected from a ventilator, and was not reconnected. “It was later discovered that the anesthesia alarms and monitoring equipment in the operating room had been deliberately programmed to a “suspend indefinite” mode such that the anesthesiologist was not alerted to the ventilator problem. Tragically, the very instrumentality that was in place to prevent such a horror was disabled, possibly because the operating room staff found the constant beeping irritating and annoying.”

The challenge in addressing these failures is profound.

• Socialization - (Rewards or punishes deviance) - pressure to conform.

• Institutionalization (You do it too)

• Rationalization (I didn’t mean to)

The reasons given for not following the rules are that:

• “The rules are stupid and inefficient.” Hospitals have to restrict access to many medications because they are dangerous, addictive, or both. To prevent “drug diversion” (health care personnel stealing and using medications) they set up a password protection for people who are accessing drugs from a cart. The nurses were supposed to mark when they took out medication, if there were leftovers, and as the medication was put back, another nurse had to observe and record. Instead of only select people having the password, they just shared it.

• Knowledge is imperfect and uneven “People don't automatically know what should be normal, and when new people are onboarded, they can just as easily learn deviant processes that have become normalized as reasonable processes.

  new person joins
  new person: WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF
  old hands: yeah we know we're concerned about it
  new person: WTF WTF wTF wtf wtf w...
  new person gets used to it
  new person #2 joins
  new person #2: WTF WTF WTF WTF
  new person: yeah we know. we're concerned about it.

  
  The thing that's really insidious here is that people will really buy into the WTF idea, and they can spread it elsewhere for the duration of their career.”

• “I’m breaking the rule for the good of my patient.” “A phlebotomist [a specialist in putting needles in veins] in a neonatal unit would slip on her gloves to do a blood draw, but then immediately tear off the index fingertip of one of them (thus violating an infection control rule). She would use that exposed fingertip to detect the baby’s vein, which she would then stick. She claimed she had a very hard time feeling the baby’s vein through the latex glove, and she didn’t want to miss the vein and subject the baby to multiple sticks. It took three rather direct confrontations with her supervisor before the rule violation stopped.”

• “The rules don’t apply to me/You can trust me” People think, “This rule is for bad people. I am a good person. So I don’t need to follow it.”
  
  “Administrators should appreciate a psychological finding that has been replicated in various forms throughout the 20th century: most human beings perceive themselves as good and decent people, such that they can understand many of their rule violations as entirely rational and ethically acceptable responses to problematic situations. They understand themselves to be doing nothing wrong, and will be outraged and often fiercely defend themselves when confronted with evidence to the contrary”

• Workers are afraid to speak up: “The likelihood that rule violations will become normalized obviously increases if persons who witness them refuse to intervene. Yet, a 2005 study of more than 1,700 healthcare professionals found that “it was between difficult and impossible to confront people.””

• Leadership withholding or diluting findings on system problems, AKA

  “Politics triumphing over safety”

There is a temptation in all of this to treat human beings as the problem, and that the solution is to remove human beings from the process and replace them with machines instead.

Eliminating the human factor for the supposed purpose of “safety” is routinely used by tech salesmen to argue for everything from self-driving cars to AI. Banja offers a chilling warning that should be required reading for every single tech entrepreneur and everyone looking to solve a problem with tech:

“When new technologies are used to eliminate well-understood system failures or to gain high precision performance, they often introduce new pathways to large scale, catastrophic failures. Not uncommonly, these new, rare catastrophes have even greater impact than those eliminated by the new technology.” (Emphasis mine).

By their very nature, novel technologies and clinical interventions disrupt existing knowledge and behavioral patterns, and can greatly increase the probability of frank disaster.

Technology usually means doing something much faster and cheaper than any human can. This does not apply to benefits - it also applies to mistakes. While humans make mistakes slowly, machines can make millions of them and send them around the world. The benefits and profits of information technology mean that real harms are swept aside. Programmers end up working on projects that are unethical and can harm people, by concealing safety information. Machine learning models amplify existing inequities.

People also use new information technology to commit crimes and exploit and ruin people’s lives in new ways - blackmail, extortion, threats, ransom, psychological harm, surveillance and control.

The reason I emphasize all of this, is that this describes the mechanics of how corruption takes root, and no human organization is immune.

Understanding how good people end up being corrupted by bad standards is essential to grasping the nature of how corruption corrodes morality, like creeping rust.

These “bad practices” can and do happen in every human institution. It is how people who think of themselves as good end up doing the wrong thing.

What is encouraging is that Banja describes what needs to be done to challenge and break these practices:

“System operators must become acutely vigilant about deviant behaviors and practices, and be ready to take aggressive steps to halt their occurrence before they achieve normalization:

1. Pay attention to weak signals (nip it in the bud)

2. Resist the urge to be unreasonably optimistic (don’t get cocky)

3. Teach employees how to conduct emotionally uncomfortable conversations

4. System operators need to feel safe in speaking up

   • have policies where speaking up is expected

   • promise protection to staff who do speak up

5. Realize that oversight and monitoring for rule compliance are never-ending

“In the 20 years prior to the Columbia space shuttle tragedy, the debris shedding that ultimately doomed the shuttle had occurred without incident on each and every previous shuttle flight (Predmore, 2006). As that occurrence became increasingly familiar to design engineers, its risk severity was steadily downgraded according to the illogical idea that “if no accident has happened by now, it never will.”

TYPES OF CORRUPTION

“The abuse of entrusted power for private gain.”

There are three basic types of corruption: grand, petty and political, depending on the amounts of money lost and the sector where it occurs.

Grand Corruption consists of acts committed at a high level of government that distort policies or the central functioning of the state, enabling leaders to benefit at the expense of the public good.

• It is committed at a high level of government

• Distorts policies or the functioning of the state

• Leaders benefit at the expense of the public good

• “Kleptocrats”

Petty Corruption refers to everyday abuse of entrusted power by low- and mid-level public officials in their interactions with ordinary citizens, who often are trying to access basic goods or services in places like hospitals, schools, police departments and other agencies.

In some countries, this kind of corruption is endemic.

Political corruption is a manipulation of policies, institutions and rules of procedure in the allocation of resources and financing by political decision makers, who abuse their position to sustain their power, status and wealth.

“Noble Cause” Corruption

This is a phrase that is often used to describe something that sometimes happens with the police - when police officers, who are supposed to uphold the law, will lie under oath or plant evidence in order to secure a conviction.

One of the ideas here is that police see themselves as good guys, going after bad guys. So they see their behaviour as justified: it’s ok for me to break the rules, because I’m a good guy, and I am breaking the rules to put away a bad guy. The thinking is basically that “A bad guy stealing or doing violence is much worse than a good guy bending the truth to make sure the bad guy gets punished.”

It has to be acknowledged that people serving in the front lines of police work, or in combat, can see the worst of what human beings can do to each other. They face real risks to their life and health from people who target them and the people they work with, and it requires a level of trust and solidarity that makes addressing wrongdoing difficult.

However, the idea of “noble cause corruption” is by no means limited to police. It is rampant in political parties and other organizations where loyalty to the cause means turning a blind eye or minimizing wrongdoing.

The FOUR P’s of Corruption: Preference, Power, Payment & Privilege

These are all worth listing because many are so common they aren’t recognized as corruption at all.

1. Preference

• Procurement: With procurement, it’s about picking a supplier who is personally connected in some way. It could be a direct conflict of interest. Let’s say you or a family member owns shares in a company, and the contracting process is interfered with to ensure they get that contract. Or it could be a political supporter or friend.

• Trading: you could be passing information that will have an effect on stock prices to someone before the government makes an announcement.

• Cronyism: is getting jobs for your friends.

• Nepotism: is getting jobs for your relatives,

• Discrimination: means paying certain people less (or not hiring them) even if they are equally or better qualified, based on their religion, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity.

• Favoritism: is tied to discrimination - but it is more unfair treatment based on, say office politics or personal relationships rather than actual work output or effectiveness at your job, and

• Exclusion: - this is reverse preference: it is blacklisting someone, which effectively means they can’t be hired.

2. Power

• Fraud - that’s when you’re tricking someone out of their money, cheating or tricking someone out of their money.

• Embezzlement - that’s when you secretly steal from the company you work for.

• Malfeasance - that’s when you are a public official and you break the law or abuse the public trust. When you are a public official, you have duties and obligations.

• Improper influence - let’s say you are an elected official and you call up a judge who is supposed to be making decisions on a court case.

• Harassment - threats, bullying - there is a wide range here, from abusive verbal or even physical behaviour, to threats whether you would get particular shifts or a promotion

• Suppression - that’s engaging in a cover-up

• Protection - a protection racket is basically when you threaten someone, and you agree to leave them alone if they pay you off.

Payment

• Money Laundering - You have to pay taxes on all the income you earn, even if it is earned illegally. Criminal organizations will run their money through a “legitimate” business so they can explain where it came from.

• Bribery - Bribery means offering a payment to someone either to do something they’re not supposed to, or get them to look the other way and not to do something they are supposed to so.

• Graft - A politician using their position for political gain.

• Swindling - Cheating or tricking someone into doing something.
  Extortion - Getting what you want through coercion - various kinds of threats to people or property - threats of violence, or death, to a person or people they care about, or damaging someone’s business or home.

• Kickbacks - a “commission” or share of the proceeds of a sale or a contract in exchange for awarding that contract.

• Skimming - taking a share off the top of payments for yourself.

4. Privilege

• Immunity - In some political systems immunity for politicians is baked into the system. As long as they hold office, they can’t be charged.

• Cheating - there are various ways in which authorities rig games or systems by rewriting the rules, or not enforcing them, for their own benefit.

• Theft - outright stealing

• Falsification - forging or altering documents or financial records

• Ineptitude - being hired (or not fired) despite being unqualified or bad at your job.

• Evasion - Someone else (or no one else) gets the blame. You see this all the time. Some massive political scandal, and the only person who gets in trouble is some person at the bottom - or the person who actually blew the whistle gets in trouble.

Bo Rothstein wrote about how anti-corruption reforms took root in 19th Century Sweden. “Corruption, favouritism and “clientelism” were endemic in the Swedish bureaucracy.”

Following a crushing military defeat there was a rise in many voluntary associations with open membership that

“put a strong emphasis on “the common good,” “communality,” and “serving the nation” in their discourse as well as in the written goals, rules, and regulations that many of them established.

“According to the most detailed historical study of this process, the phenomenon was so strong that one could speak of it as a “meta-ideology” (ibid., 242) and as their way to achieve respectability (Pettersson 1995). Strong support for the “free associations” also came from important members of the new capitalist class, not least from the founder of the famous Swedish Wallenberg dynasty.”

“Endemic corruption is not some flaw that can be corrected with a technical fix or a political push. It is the way that the system works, and it is deeply embedded in the norms and expectations of political and social life. Reducing it to less destructive levels—and keeping it there—requires revolutionary change in institutions.”

As a final point the revolutionary change in institutions is one of enlightenment and justice for all against corruption.

There is no question that the current age and its crises are being driven by more and more wealth and income being concentrated in the hands of a dwindling few. While people may retreat or curry favour for fear of retribution or biting the hand that feeds, it should be remembered that this hand isn’t feeding us: it’s in our pockets.

Those few are more and more outnumbered. If we shine a light on corruption and recognize it for what it is, in numbers, we can put justice back within reach for ourselves and for the future. It’s the issue of our age, and the sooner we recognize it, the sooner we can start making it better.

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- DFL