A look at secret societies affect on history shows that the corruption and cultural decline has not been an organic one. They have infiltrated every walk of life, bombarded society with sexual perversion, muddied the waters on ethics and moral issues, and made an all-out war on Judaeo-Christian values, private property, liberty, and civil rights. The result has been significant. While the media has been a major tool of corruption, Hollywood has been one of their major tools in corrupting society, particularly the youth. Disney movies, and the Disney channel are full of scantily dressed young girls and have been exposed for adding sexual and satanic subliminal messages within their productions.
Corruption has played a pivotal role in sustaining appallingly high levels of poverty in many developing countries, particularly in relation to the deficient provision of basic services such as education and health care. It is also a major reason why growth-rate increases in Africa and South Asia have failed to benefit large segments of the population. Corruption drives the over-exploitation of natural resources, capturing their value for a small elite—whether timber from Indonesia or coltan from Congo. In the developed world, corrupt funding undermines political systems and lays policy open to heavy financial lobbying.
Laurence Cockcroft, a development economist who has worked for governments, international organizations, and private- and public-sector entities, argues that corruption has to be seen as the result of the interplay between elite “embedded networks,” greed, and organized crime. The growth of corruption has been facilitated by globalization, the integration of new and expanding markets into the world economy, and the rapid expansion of offshore financial facilities, which provide a home to largely unregulated pools of money derived from personal fortunes, organized crime, and pricing malpractice in international trade.
His book, ‘Global Corruption: Money, Power, and Ethics in the Modern World‘, shows how the current international interest in corruption follows the fifty years of the Cold War in which efforts to rein in corruption were regarded in international policy-making circles as off the table. Cockcroft describes the change of attitude from the 1990s onward and the initiatives that have been designed to combat corruption over the past twenty years—from individual prosecutors, to governments, to civil society, and to progressive business—and assesses their impact to date. By identifying the main drivers of corruption worldwide and analyzing current efforts to control them, Global Corruption: Money, Power, and Ethics in the Modern World suggests ways in which the problems caused by corruption can be addressed and ultimately prevented.
Though it can be taken with a grain of salt, it is interesting to see Transparency International’s 2016 corruption perceptions index – the world’s largest survey asking citizens about their direct personal experience of corruption in their daily lives. It shows what people experience and just how far countries have to go to fight corruption. Most ‘ordinary people’ aren’t aware that the US and UK are secretly responsible for most of the corruption throughout the world and rank both very low in corruption. The US and UK, through their powerful military and intelligence offices, are responsible for coup’s, wars, and genocide in dozens of countries to advance the trafficking of humans, drugs, and weapons.
Putting the scores in context
The lower-ranked countries in our index are plagued by untrustworthy and badly functioning public institutions like the police and judiciary. Even where anti-corruption laws are on the books, in practice they’re often skirted or ignored. People frequently face situations of bribery and extortion, rely on basic services that have been undermined by the misappropriation of funds, and confront official indifference when seeking redress from authorities that are on the take.
Grand corruption thrives in such settings. Cases like Petrobras and Odebrecht in Brazil or the saga of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine show how collusion between businesses and politicians siphons off billions of dollars in revenue from national economies, benefitting the few at the expense of the many. This kind of systemic grand corruption violates human rights, prevents sustainable development and fuels social exclusion.
Higher-ranked countries tend to have higher degrees of press freedom, access to information about public expenditure, stronger standards of integrity for public officials, and independent judicial systems. But high-scoring countries can’t afford to be complacent, either. While the most obvious forms of corruption may not scar citizens’ daily lives in all these places, the higher-ranked countries are not immune to closed-door deals, conflicts of interest, illicit finance, and patchy law enforcement that can distort public policy and exacerbate corruption at home and abroad.
