The
title of this post must be a dead giveaway – I am not going to say how to
handle this corruption or that, or even something beyond. I am interested in
figuring out how some items catch fire in the imagination of people and others
do not.
OK,
I understand that local relevance carries a premium. Yet, some things that do
not cause even a ripple in the local media can be easily justified as deserving
a mention among the chattering classes in India, particularly given the
attention globalization receives in the same media. Why, then, the media
ignores globalized dimensions of corruption? They are unable to define corruption.
First,
local corruption – the list is long and I will give only the marquee names that
roped into the dragnet the big political cheese: Spectrum, Coal, Granite, Adarsh, BCCI, IPL,
any number of defense procurement … I will claim that these scams and scandals
thrived on the “rentier” business of allocating scarce public property for
private gains by the putative public-servants, the politicians, for that
euphemism - consideration. Of course, there was the other side to this
transaction – mostly corporates (pharma companies, for example), but some individuals (including lobbyists) too – but they never
grabbed the headlines, perhaps because media outlets were effectively underwritten by them.
Go
overseas and let us look at the situation. The names are no less marquee, and
equally arrogant as their Indian counterparts. One difference though – more corporates
and fewer politicians comprising the list. To start with the lesser evils in
the west, I cannot miss Silvio Berlusconi. If you think of Donald Rumsfeld and
Dick Cheney as politicians, I club them with business people. That suits me
better and is no less defensible.
Then,
let me state the dominant others, at various levels: News Corp, Rupert Murdoch,
death penalty, Bernard Madoff, WorldCom, Google, Siemens, Creation Science, religion and
the clergy, climate skepticism (fueled [word used advisedly] by the hydrocarbon
lobby), Apple, Enron, Raj Rajaratnam, Rajat Gupta, Goldman Sachs, Lehman
Brothers, rating agencies (Standard & Poor, Moody’s), any and every oil
company of the west (Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell…), the accounting firm Arthur
Anderson, World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz (offering a lot of nice financial cushions
to his girlfriend’s seat at the bank), Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin
Powell taking the UN for a ride, the US Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United (on campaign
contributions and asserting that corporations enjoy freedom of speech guarantee
as much as individuals do; if this is not corruption, what is?), IMF road
rolling over Greece and then doing a mea
culpa …
You
can put a dollar value to each of them and I would not be surprised if many of
them dwarfed the numbers thrown up by Indian corruption numbers. For example,
tax avoided by Apple is in billions of dollars per year (or is it Euros?). The
cost of Bush’s war in Iraq – don’t ask.
A
rider to the above: I do not accept the defense of many of these companies that
they are following the law; the reason being it is they who wrote the law. Lobbying
is not corruption. Why? The law says so. Who wrote the law? The lobbyists. See,
how simple it is.
The
above is a short list, a very short list. And, even given an unassailable logic
and the fastest supercomputer, it will be impossible to decide which of the
above is corruption and which is not. Then, how do I go about extirpating
corruption?
This
is where intelligence plays its crucial part. Management gurus claim that what
is not measurable cannot exist. Likewise what is not definable cannot exist.
Presto, no CORRUPTION!
Raghuram
Ekambaram
2 comments:
we're limited in our ability to know whether corruption in fact exists, which is separate issue of course from whether corruption exists. Perhaps frustrating, but at least we can take comfort in the opposing view being similarly limited. Sacrificing being right for being aware is a good trade in my book.
Accepted, the global non-expert. Yet, my point is simply that people deliberately eschew awareness - I hate the breast-beating that goes on about corruption in India because and only because it limits learning from solutions being mooted elsewhere.
Acknowledge and analyze, and then contextualize. If not, deny.
RE
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