Corruption eruption shakes every region of the globe

Corruption eruption shakes every region of the globe

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): It is mind-boggling that President Bill Clinton,
commander-in-chief of the world's one remaining superpower, might
dare to risk his country's self-interest in financial and
political prudence. But he has done so by personally wooing
monetary support for his re-election bid from Chinese, Thai and
Indonesian businessmen and women, all with close ties to their
governments.

This is the age of what Moises Naim has called "corruption
eruption" that has shaken "every region regardless of cultural
background or Gross National Product". The last 18 months have
witnessed the fall of the secretary-general of NATO over
corruption allegations, indictments for corruption of one-third
of India's cabinet and graft charges against Italy's most
prominent post-war prime ministers and two former South Korean
presidents. This is not to mention parliamentary investigations
into financial abuse by the Colombian, Pakistan and Turkish
governments, graft at high levels of government in Japan and
allegations of massive corruption against the former Mexican
president, his brother and the assistance of Citibank in
laundering the spoils.

As Robert Leiken observes in a fascinating article in Foreign
Policy: "The post-Cold War period exhibits the disillusionment
and cynicism that result when transcendent events are followed by
shabby anticlimaxes or worse. After the Glorious Revolution,
Walpole's rotten boroughs; after Lincoln, the Gilded Age; after
Wilson's Fourteen Points, the Teapot Dome Scandal; after the fall
of the Berlin wall, this."

We appear to be surrounded and besieged by it. Organized
international crime has mushroomed in the last 30 years, partly
under the influence of the drug trade and the inept inability of
western politicians in consumer nations to face up to the fact
that the most effective way to target the cartels is to
decriminalize the product.

Illicit traffic in nuclear materials threaten our existence,
raising the stakes in common criminality to unheard of
proportions. Yet the decision to expand NATO and thus forsake the
Russian ratification of the second Strategic Arms Reduction
Treaty will put Russia's nuclear production factories back in
business and with it the careless stockpiling of even more
plutonium.

The arms trade has become a chaotic fungus, reaching into
every nook and cranny. A judicial inquiry last year showed how
British government ministers connived to turn a blind eye to the
arming of Saddam Hussein and there are suggestions that some
European arms companies, in the urge to clinch a deal, won't draw
the line at homicide. This is evident following the murder of a
leading socialist politician in Belgium to the murder of a young
British investigative reporter at work in Chile.

In Sweden, where probity is the most prized of all virtues, a
former senior executive of the Swedish arms manufacturer, Bofors,
told a national daily that he couldn't sleep at night for
thinking there was some connection between the bribes paid by his
company in India and the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme.

The tide is changing but there are those who are making reform
particularly difficult. In India, the voters punished Prime
Minister P. Narasimha Rao's tainted government with a crushing
defeat last year and in Mexico President Ernesto Zedillo is
hammering away at both bribery and drug barons.

Even in Colombia, where allegations of having received drug
money for his election campaign still hang over President Ernesto
Samper, police and justice officials continue to prosecute other
malefactors with a commendable earnestness. In Brazil, popular
agitation pushed parliament to depose the totally crooked
president, Fernando Collor Da Mello.

Was there ever a golden age? In 1788 Edmund Burke attacked the
colonial administrator of Bengal, Warren Hastings and said:
"Bribery, filthy hands, a chief governor of a great empire
receiving bribes from poor, miserable, indigent people, this is
what makes government itself base, contemptible and odious in the
eyes of mankind."

In early modern Europe the sale of office was defended on the
grounds of efficiency by Montesquieu and Bentham. But even if
there never was a golden age there was much less corruption and
it was less pervasive. The sums involved were not sufficient to
"buy" a whole government. It rarely corrupted the integrity of a
government in its foreign dealings -- the charge that Clinton is
now having to counter.

Nevertheless, in many ways, America has a cleaner slate than
most. In the U.S. it is illegal to use bribes in market
transactions abroad. But in Germany, as in much of Europe, if a
German bribes a foreign government official he can claim it as a
tax reduction. In Britain off-shore islands thrive on legal tax-
evasion and the address of arms sellers and the like.

It is simplistic to blame this on the capitalist system's
greed, or even Thatcherite-Reaganite liberalization. A majority
of capitalists are not seriously corrupt. But many governments
often turn a blind eye because it is convenient to do so. It is
governments that have to set the standard. Voters as far away as
India, Belgium and Brazil have made that sentiment clear. In
America, regrettably, they have missed their chance, for now at
least.