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by Sarah Chayes
31 March
2022
from
AEON Website
A vigil in Valletta, Malta, on 16 July 2018,
marking
nine months since the assassination of
the
anti-corruption investigative journalist
Daphne Caruana Galizia
in a
car bomb.
Photo
by Darrin Zammit Lupi
Reuters
Corruption
is a truly
global crisis
and the wealth
addiction
that feeds it
is hiding in
plain sight...
In Kandahar,
Afghanistan,
in late 2001, I watched a girl of about nine strip a Kalashnikov
rifle, inspect the bullets and reload the sound ones in a matter of
minutes.
That child lived in a
mud-brick house in the middle of a graveyard. I lived there, too. I
was staying with her family as I covered the fall of the Taliban
regime for
National Public Radio in the United States.
I thought I'd learn more
in the company of ordinary Afghans than in the single hotel in the
capital formerly held by the terrorists, where the other Western
journalists were.
So I asked a militia
friend to find me a host family.
That scene in our rug-strewn sitting room, where I slept at night
and we gathered by day, stayed with me throughout the decade I
remained in Afghanistan.
It has stayed with me
ever since...
Here is its significance.
Afghans know how to fight.
Once back in
control of their country, that girl's people did not need close air
support to beat off a resurgent Taliban, or armored vehicles packed
with delicate electronics that could be maintained only by highly
trained mechanics.
What they needed was to
be proud of their government.
But Afghan government officials began
stealing their money.
And US government officials ignored - even
enabled - the crimes.
This issue,
corruption, was not on my mind at all when I decided to quit
journalism and move to Afghanistan.
I was not thinking about it as I
set about rebuilding a village that had been reduced to rubble in
the US bombing campaign, or setting up the country's first
independent radio station.
I was not trying to
impose some Western norm.
It was Afghans who
brought the problem to me. Young people I asked about what they
wanted to hear on the radio complained of shakedowns by the new
governor's militiamen - who wore US combat fatigues.
A quarryman told me
he couldn't sell stone for the houses I was rebuilding:
the governor
had awarded himself a monopoly.
Then he crushed it to gravel and
sold it at an exorbitant markup to the US military base outside
town.
When I learned
Pashtu and moved to an unguarded compound in the middle of town, and
the Taliban were filtering back into the region, delegations of
elders would come calling.
'The Taliban
hit us on this cheek,' a dignified spokesman would say, setting
down his cup of green tea to deliver a slap to his own face,
'and the government hits us on
this one!'
So I started
working on corruption:
because I knew
that if the US government kept helping it flourish, we - and the
Afghan people - would lose the war.
And
we did...!
But the loss of the
longest war the US ever fought was hardly the first time corruption
has shaped history.
'They
preach only human doctrines' - not Holy Writ - 'who say that as
soon as the money clinks in the money chest, the soul flies out
of purgatory.'
So reads
Thesis 27 in a carefully sequenced
series of statements that a law student-turned-priest and theology
professor named Martin Luther wrote in 1517.
At the time,
the
Catholic Church, the dominant power in Europe from the edge of
Ireland nearly to Moscow, was engaged in a vast extortion racket.
Worshippers could avoid the torments of a ghastly pre-Judgment Day
refugee camp called Purgatory, if they just shelled out the price of
an 'indulgence', a papal safe-conduct...
In 1517, a sales
push was launched in Germany.
Half the proceeds were earmarked to
cover the staggering debt a young cleric had taken on to buy a
powerful archbishopric from the pope. A bling-loving scion of the
Medici dynasty, that pope routinely auctioned off Church offices and
waivers of canon law.
The rest of the return on indulgence sales
would go straight to Leo X himself,
to help pay for a gaudy piece of real estate.
Thesis 66:
'The
treasures of indulgences are nets with which one now fishes for the
wealth of men.'
Why, wonders Luther's
Thesis
86, did the stupendously rich pope not,
'build this one
basilica of St Peter with his own
money rather than with the money of poor believers?'
Without the
outraged Indigenous allies
who joined him,
could Cortés have brought
down
that great empire...?
Nearly all 95 of
those epoch-making premises are taken up with aspects of what we
would call corruption:
harnessing public office to the purpose of
self-enrichment.
In this egregious case, the offices in question
were sacred and the stakes eternal.
Public indignation burst across
Europe in a shockwave that dramatically reshaped the continent's
politics, culture and economy. History lurches
with such turning points, in which systemic corruption, or the
reaction against it, changed the course of world events.
Three years after
Luther's propositions went viral, a mixed army of Spaniards and
Native Americans laid siege to a metropolis.
In terms of population,
and cultural and architectural sophistication, the Aztec capital of
Tenochtitlan rivalled any city in Europe.
Evidence in accounts
written both by the commander of that army, Hernán Cortés, and
Indigenous scholars, suggests that much of its magnificence derived
from the Aztec elite's abuse of public power for personal gain.
So
arises a question: without the outraged Indigenous allies who joined
him, could Cortés have brought down that great empire?
In
Corruption
and the Decline of Rome (1988) - to offer a final
example - Ramsay MacMullen
devotes a chapter to the system that would become Pope
Leo X's default
1,000 years later:
'Power for Sale'...
Assessing its impact on the fortunes of Rome, MacMullen wonders how
it was possible for a rowdy, materially and technologically inferior
coalition of untutored tribesmen,
'so quickly and effortlessly [to]
gain control of Germany, Gaul, and Spain'.
The question mirrors the
general astonishment when, last summer, gangs of shaggy-haired
fighters mounted on motorcycles overran Afghanistan in a matter of
days.
In both cases, a
fatal impact of 'power for sale' was the hollowing-out of defense
forces.
'The size of Rome's armies was contemptible,' writes MacMullen.
And the disgruntled, ill-equipped soldiers who remained
on the front did not stand and fight.
'We are told of a field of
battle, a district, an entire province simply abandoned.'
Just what
happened in Afghanistan in August 2021.
For
corrupt elites, defense budgets represent an enticing opportunity
for pillage. Citizens rarely question investments they think will
protect them, and the details of expenditures are usually
classified.
A common technique
is for officers to pad the payroll with what The Guardian
in 2016 identified as 'fake names or dead men', then pocket the
excess salaries.
That's how districts end up ill-defended by units
of contemptible size.
Or,
why not loot the
equipment budget, by failing to buy materiel for which funds have
been allocated, or by selling supplies - including to the enemy - or
by purchasing shoddy alternatives to the reliable food, shelter and
weaponry that those who put their lives on the line for their
community deserve?
That's how soldiers run out of ammunition in the
middle of a firefight with raggedy foes.
Sums of money,
weapons and weatherproof tents can be counted; they help quantify
corruption's toll.
But to think only in numbers is to overlook the
greater harm and the real danger: the moral injury corruption
inflicts.
How do you suppose
Roman or Afghan soldiers felt, in their scattered handfuls,
stomachs empty because of the stench of their putrid breakfast, as
they offered themselves up on behalf of their ruling authorities?
What sensations scalded their flesh as they
realized that their
privations were perpetrated by the representatives of those very
authorities - by superiors they longed to admire?
Can you imagine
the pain?
The shame?
And when the
soldiers put their minds to their predicament?
What if the only
purpose they could find in this sadism was the accumulation of more
gold or dollars than the supposed superiors or their progeny could
ever spend?
How are souls
deformed
under the obligation to violate
cherished values
in order
to survive...?
The word that comes
to my mind is 'betrayal'. Have you ever experienced betrayal?
Is
there a more searing psychic wound?
Psychic wounds - betrayal and
pain and shame - are powerful goads to action, not always
considered.
And what about such
a country's civilians?
What breeds in their hearts when, as an
Afghan colleague bitterly noted,
'the very people who are supposed
to be upholding the law are the ones breaking it'?
Once, members of
the cooperative I set up in 2005 needed to retrieve a piece of
equipment from customs.
I was away...
They could not extract the item
without offering an 'emolument', as the US constitution calls it. In
disgust - partly at themselves - they paid.
What is the impact
of having to do something like that day after day?
How are souls
deformed under the obligation to violate cherished values in order
to survive?
The way some react
may look like secession.
Soldiers abandon their posts. Voters
withhold their ballots. Caravans set forth in an exodus of biblical
proportions.
Or a whole people,
'dissolve[s] the political bands
which have connected them with another', to quote the US Declaration
of Independence.
The pain of
betrayal and disrespect can also spark violent rage or a desire for
revenge. And not just in Afghanistan or ancient Rome.
Pick any country
that is beset by crisis today:
Now look at the government of the
country in question.
Is justice under orders or for sale?
Do top
officials' close relatives hold key government jobs?
Are petty
bribes for low-level officials 'just the way things get done'?
Yet the violent
reactions corruption often prompts may be the lesser of its evils.
The greater harm may result from the betrayal itself: a natural or
human-made disaster that does irreparable harm - like a chemical
explosion in an ancient port city, or a region wrecked by a
hurricane; a financial implosion brought on by systemic fraud.
Or,
let's take the greatest calamity looming over our species today: the
ruin of the natural world.
Since just 2018,
for a single example, thousands of square miles of Amazon rainforest
- the wettest, lushest and most biodiverse region on this lumpy
planet - have burned.
To call the Amazon a carbon sink does not
begin to encompass the magnitude of this disaster. Think of that
place as not just a lung, but as more vital organs of the living
Earth than current human knowledge can even identify.
What happens
without it?
If a single comet slamming into the Gulf of Mexico
exterminated 80 per cent of species,
ending the age of the dinosaurs, then it doesn't bear thinking
about.
Yet, under the current notoriously corrupt governments of
Bolivia and Brazil, the race is on to sack it.
Betrayal.
No wonder
the Earth is lashing out...
How
is it, then, that in the West we pay so little attention to
corruption?
We brush it away, as an
innate feature of the human
condition, or of the culture of certain foreign countries. Or -
sometimes and - as a distasteful aberration, a scandal
beneath notice.
Writing in 2016 for
a unanimous US Supreme Court, chief
justice John Roberts voiced that disregard.
'[O]ur concern is not
with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns'
pooh-poohs
his opinion overturning the corruption conviction of Bob McDonnell,
a former governor of the state of Virginia, for accepting nearly
$200,000-worth of presents from a businessman seeking his help.
The real concern,
all eight sitting justices agreed, isn't corruption, it's the fight
to curb it.
Prosecutorial overreach against government officials and
corporate executives, that's what endangers
the US.
Really...?
Within weeks of
that ruling, two very different mavericks blasted US presidential
politics apart.
One started chanting 'Drain the swamp!'
The other
called for a 'political revolution'.
Voters came running.
Traditional politicians stood there, agape.
The revolution happened,
but not the one that guy was
hoping for.
Corruption, in
other words, unmoored the US political system, with the ultimate
consequences still unknown.
Yet, here and in other Western
countries, it is easier to ignore than it is in Afghanistan. Here in
the US, citizens are not regularly shaken down in the street.
Corruption is cloaked in
legal abracadabras...
The safe is cracked
with velvet gloves.
A handful of US
defense industry giants, for example, all with long rap sheets,
garner the vast bulk of Pentagon procurement and service contracts.
Those contractors peddle
armored vehicles packed with delicate
electronics. They sell defective weapons systems.
They submit
budgets whose line-items are inflated or even left blank:
TBD...
US
soldiers don't go hungry. But the wars are lost just the same.
In the US today,
such comments imply,
bribery is just the way
things get done...
The perpetrators of
this brand of war profiteering wear business suits and enjoy
respect. They have embroidered an elaborate fabric of connections
with government officials who decide on the size of the defense
budget and the uses to which the money will be put.
These
connections are not just purchased via campaign contributions.
Personnel shuttle back and forth between private industry and the
Pentagon, to weave a dynamic and powerful network.
Its objectives
routinely trump the public interest.
Does your country's
defense ministry exhibit a similar pattern?
How do banking industry
leaders and your government's finance ministry officials interact?
How did those officials and executives fare last time a financial
bubble upended your or your neighbors'' lives?
Who controls your
energy and mining sectors?
Have any of those individuals
deliberately crippled government agencies tasked with protecting the
health of citizens or landscapes?
Now consider how
we, the victims - at least in the comfortable classes - often react.
Instead of objecting and demanding that such practices cease, we are
tempted to explain them away. The pose can seem deliciously
counterculture, a sign of realism.
When I interviewed
Washington lawyers and veteran court-watchers about the unanimous
reversal of McDonnell's corruption conviction, I got such
rationalizations.
'If that conviction were allowed to stand,' the
chorus went, 'it would amount to criminalizing politics.'
In the US
today, such comments imply, bribery is just the way things get done.
Often, we gloss
over the phenomenon altogether. We devise purely metaphysical
understandings of Luther's revolt, or of the violent act committed
1,500 years before that by a young
rabbi from Nazareth.
Surrounded by a rabble of his
neighbors, he
strode into the august government complex where the corrupt ruling
elite of his day stole people's money.
And Jesus started throwing
the furniture around.
Did this
insurrection truly contain no commentary about the political economy
of the earthly kingdom of Herod the Great?
Whose interest does
it serve to downplay the corruption that outraged Jesus and Luther?
What is lost when it becomes fashionable to insist that the human
values of integrity and fairness are phoney, not sacred?
Who wins
when we work to identify useful functions corruption might serve, or
shrug and call it 'human nature?'
In whose interest is it to presume
that people who amass staggering fortunes must be smarter or better
than the rest of us, rather than dangerous criminals?
With
these questions in mind - and begging Martin Luther's indulgence - I
offer up the following propositions for dispute:
-
Current
usage is wrong to suggest that 'the Midas touch' is a
positive thing. On the contrary, the compulsion to reduce
everything of beauty and value to gold - or to electronic
signals in virtual bank vaults - is a disease that threatens
our very societies.
-
Competition
among elites afflicted with this Midas Disease is a race
with no finish line. There is never enough.
-
To feed
their compulsion, they build powerful (though informal and
flexible) coalitions.
-
These
groupings cross social categories. They include government
officials, executives of businesses and supposedly
benevolent charities, and out-and-out criminals.
-
Attaining
public power in order to maximize their personal wealth is
the primary aim of such coalitions. Corruption, in other
words, is basic to their operations.
-
Members
often take up different roles in the different sectors of
activity, moving from government office to industries they
oversaw, and back into government.
-
Members who
occupy government office use its levers to enrich themselves
and their fellows, ahead or instead of advancing the good of
the citizens at large.
-
Such abuse
includes absconding with public funds or property, or
steering a disproportionate share of government expenditures
towards the coalition.
-
Another and
greater abuse consists in repurposing government itself to
serve the coalition's money-maximizing interests (and even
rival coalitions of a similar stripe).
-
This
abusive repurposing includes writing the rules to benefit
coalition-members' private business activities, dismantling
rules or neglecting to write them at all, or prioritizing
enforcement in ways that advantage coalition-members and
their interests.
-
The endless
competition for zeroes in bank accounts rages among and even
within these groups, fuelling the drive to abuse public
office.
-
The rewards
of corrupt practices are not dispersed in one-to-one
transactions only. More effectively, they are spread through
the coalition in an ongoing process of indirect exchanges.
-
Law courts
are therefore wrong to define the crime of corruption in
minimal terms as a standalone exchange between only two
parties.
-
They are
wrong to suggest that citizens have no legal right to the
honest and good-faith performance of duties on the part of
government officials and the executives of businesses whose
activities shape their lives.
-
Investigators, prosecutors and judges are wrong to
prioritize violent crime over corporate crime and
corruption, for the latter causes more harm to citizens and
society.
-
If
corruption is criminal, those who enable it are guilty of
complicity.
-
Examples of
such enabling include helping to hide ill-gotten wealth in
untraceable bank accounts, or converting it into poorly
regulated real assets such as real estate or football teams,
or pleading in favor of corrupt practices in court or the
public square.
-
The
wealth-addicted and their enablers are adept at exploiting
crises - including those wrought by their own practices - at
the expense of those worst affected.
-
Corrupt
capture of political and economic institutions and the
culture at large is not a historical constant. Victims have
reversed it by penalizing perpetrators and enacting systemic
reforms. Or by establishing new forms of government.
-
But corrupt
networks are resilient. When challenged - and even after
suffering such blows as the fall of a government or the
prosecution of leading members - they usually succeed in
maintaining or reinstating the corrupt system.
-
Corrupt
networks deftly use complexity and impenetrable language to
confuse citizens and gain cover for their activities.
-
Another
technique they employ to confound proponents of ethical
values is to exacerbate antagonisms among different groups
within the population.
-
Citizens
who are manipulated into allowing identity divides to
overshadow their shared interest in curbing corruption will
continue to suffer harm.
-
For
corruption is not a victimless offence.
Victims include,
-
people left impoverished or homeless by financial crises
-
people dispossessed of ancestral lands
-
people whose air or
water is unfit for consumption, or whose soil is too
toxic to farm
-
people disproportionately harmed by fire
or flood or construction failures or other natural or
human-made disasters
-
people who go unhealed or even
poisoned by dangerous 'medicines'
-
citizens whose own lives
and those of their descendants are stunted by diminished
access to public goods, such as education, healthcare, law
enforcement protection, and opportunities to launch
businesses or buy or rent property
-
people whose jobs are
eradicated by the imposition of other economic
activities that benefit only a few coalition-members
-
people whose dignity is robbed by these and other practices
-
human society as a whole
-
thousands of species of nonhuman
beings whose right to life is extinguished in order to
further enrich Homo sapiens infected with the Midas
Disease
-
the miraculous planet that gave us birth
-
future human generations who will be condemned to live on a
vastly damaged and destabilized incarnation of that planet -
if they are able to keep living there
at all...
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