Staggering look in the Western mirror

The first (reported) case of fixing an Olympic event dates to 388 BC. Today, syndicates pay £68,000 per lower level football match to players and officials to throw a single game. It’s worth it, because sports betting is a £1.1 billion per day industry. There is so much about western society that is corrupt, we don’t even notice. We’re used to seeing the Transparency International ratings of country corruption, where western nations rank high. Now, two veterans of TI shine their light on the west, and it’s not very pretty.

Unmasked’s chapter headings are very telling: government, lobbying, business, banking, justice, organized crime, sports, and environment. Massive corruption rules them all. The authors show that political parties simply ignore the campaign finance rules and laws they promulgated, gorging on donations and bribes at will. They accept money from foreign powers, accept cash for services never rendered, and put party or even dead people on government payrolls.

There’s an endless litany of stats that say Washington is corrupt:
-$5.2 billion in lobbying garnered $4.2 trillion in returns in concessions and customized tax breaks from 2007-2012.
-Lobbyists spend an average of $12.5 million per member of Congress, because it works.
-More than 50% of former elected officials become lobbyists.

What we live with, others see as corruption. No bankers were ever imprisoned for the financial crisis. But American jails are filled to bursting with two million souls charged with far more minor crimes. The bankers get cabinet posts. Picking the next Olympic or World Cup site is a feast for bribes, suitcases of cash. Politicians have tax haven secret bank accounts for direct deposit. Police everywhere find it acceptable to shake down crooks and dealers rather than arrest them. Construction contracts are routinely padded 10%, to accommodate the payoffs. Judges don’t bother to recuse themselves from cases where one of the parties has donated massively to their re-election. A jury found Koch Industries made false claims to the government - 25,000 times.

It all costs. Organized crime accounts for 10% of the OECD economies. Untold billions flow to the few at the expense of the many. Whether it’s avoiding environmental cleanups, plying doctors to prescribe outrageously expensive drugs or lobbying for direct exemptions when no one else gets them, corruption diverts funds, up to and including wind farms in Italy. We can’t even imagine how much farther along we would be without it all. With Unmasked, we are just scratching the surface. It is not a feel good book. But it is a brisk-paced, riveting one.

David Wineberg