The company that bribed the world (opens in new tab)

I do disagree with that. It may be true for somebody living at the US and a few more countries that used to be more honest, but in general, corruption was always about as widespread as it is now.

You are seeing a lot of it recently because it is getting uncovered. It is even hard to find a corruption scandal that is new (but I don't speech as many languages), and has not been going on since forever. And corruption getting uncovered is a good thing - it is how it ends.

This seems to be a rather whitewashed view of "our civilization". For instance, I'm sure you've heard of Stanford? Not the university, but the guy who founded it: Leland Stanford. The famous philanthropist with an exceptional business and political background:

http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/hall_of_fame/l...

Stanford’s business career rose in tandem with his political career. He participated in the founding of California’s Republican Party and was elected Governor in 1861. That same year, he became one of the four principal investors in the Central Pacific Railroad, which Congress authorized in 1862 to build the eastbound section of the first transcontinental railroad.

In 1885, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Political maneuvering made Stanford a very rich man. He participated in the worst practices of the Gilded Age: stock watering, kickbacks, rebates, bribes, collusion, monopoly. There is no acquitting Stanford on this front; his participation in such schemes is amply recorded in his letters. One historian of the transcontinental railroads argues that the principals of the era made clear their unsavory activities in correspondence in part “because the dimmer lights among them, such as Leland Stanford, had to have so much explained to them.” Stanford is best remembered today, however, not for corruption but for a tribute to his only child.

I think you might have the cause/effect backwards. War is by far the mightiest and most profitable expression of corruption (My experience/knowledge is mostly limited to Afghanistan, but I have a feeling it applies equally to the other states as well).

Nope. For example the reason Catholic priests cant marry/have children is because the church felt this would stop priest filtering money from the church to their families.

Otherwise a great rant to read. I've very much with you in believing corruption is the cancer of society. And no country will excel while they allow it to to be a significant part of a nations economy.

Check out the unfolding 1MDB scandal in Malaysia.

you don't have that right.

Current government was the first to allow the federal police to go after corrupt politicians, even the ones in office.

that triggered a chain reaction that scared a lot of people (since you pointed out, almost everyone in government is corrupt to some level). Those more corrupt powers (e.g. the candidate that lost to the current president was a drug trafficker) started a bogus impeachment protest that hardly represent what is on the streets. You have manifestations pro-impeachment with 500 people, and against impeachment with 20,000 people, then the press only report about the pro-impeachment one.

What is more interesting? all that seems to be funded by US money. And remember that former and current presidents where the first to forbid american companies to explore Oil in Brazil. It all comes full circle with the article subject.

Grassroots movements organize all the time using donations from its members which they then use to send a lobbyist (a member of the org or a professional) to Washington, where they can use their personal contacts and influence to get an audience with a legislator to provide them with information. Most lobbying, I would wager, is of that form: a lobbyist simply informs the legislator about the on the ground perspective of a grassroots movement's members, a corporation, or industry group. It only becomes distasteful when a lobbyist has influence over campaign contributions or the ability to provide "perks" like hiring a politician's friends or family.

You can argue that campaign contributions are a form of bribery but there remains the big difference that in well regulated nations, all of the donations have a maximum and are tracked publicly [1][2]. In the US, all campaign spending is released publicly, both by politicians/political NGOs and campaign finance improprieties destroy political careers quite often. In the US, the FEC has the authority to enact civil penalties and the DOJ has the authority to prosecute any politicians caught willfully misusing campaign finance to better themselves. [3]

[1] http://www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/norindsea.shtml

[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/

[3] http://www.fec.gov/ans/answers_compliance.shtml#penalties

Many seem to think it's only campaigns you don't agree with that are.

However, in the US and other countries with (relatively) developed election and legislation processes, I think there's some key differences:

Lobbying usually requires a level of policy rationalization (however disingenuous) that bribery does not. Lobbyist can say behind closed doors that they want X for selfish reasons, but in order for it to be politically tenable the legislator usually will require at least some publicly defensible rationalization for the action.

Similarly, lobbying usually involves the legislative process and getting a political actor to make certain political/legislative decisions that would benefit the lobbyist's clients. Bribe's usually involves getting a person in power to make decisions that often don't involve the political process or legislations, like the awarding of a contract by an agency under their control, or withholding an investigation.

Seen this way, lobbying can be and has been characterized as interest groups subsidizing the legislative process by providing competing research and proposals to an understaffed legislature. Whether that's a good or bad of making law is another discussion, but I think it's fair to say that bribery could not be considered that way, and therefore serves no acceptable public purpose other than the enrichment of the briber and bribee.

Corporate lobbying is questionable for other reasons, but it's not bribery. It's on elected officials to not let businesses influence them too much, no matter how many lobbyists they hire.

If you think that this must be adversarial, and that The People must get completely impartial ... justice in dealing with all economic entities, then you must expect to match those entities blow for blow. But there are information and resource asymmetries in play that are profound. This ignores that some people simply view activities differently, which will greatly increase the cost.

> The Unaoil emails don’t show corrupt third-world kleptocracies shaking down helpless Western corporations. They show the opposite: Unaoil, working for Western companies, is seen slowly corrupting foreign officials, starting off with small gifts and shopping sprees and eventually hooking them on major graft.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/unaoil-bribery-scanda...

Only in unstable states? Has oil money corrupted the United States federal, state, and local governments at all?

To get away you probably need a third party plus good lawyers. Which your training was successfully in teaching you that lowly programmers can't afford, so they should not take bribes.

It's interesting because I have some exposure to law-firm ethics ( I wrote software for law firms for a while decades ago ) and they're like this. Their admins ( who really run law firms ) are past masters at dealing with it. Since it's lawyers writing that law, we should not be surprised.

You get a (distorted for the purposes of plot-conflict) view of that in "Better Call Saul."

I would assume it to be near untraceable if these third parties used shell companies in various offshore jurisdictions to make these payments. Good luck putting that together again, if you try to get data from an unwilling to cooperate jurisdiction.

In other words, one of the big points of the piece is that the idea that "these countries are just that way and you have to pay to play" is actually not true across the board, and that in cases where the country wasn't that way, Unaoil and their clients made it that way.

But with climate change, I find it hard to get upset about any corruption that causes the price of oil to rise. The current situation of rock bottom oil prices encourages more consumption and reduces the incentives to improve energy efficiency. It makes it harder for renewables to compete.

Bring on more corruption. Let oil prices boil over.

We're not powerless, but trying to create a Perfect System out of such crooked timber as Man may be utterly futile. To think you can design such a system looks like Hubris to me.

That's probably more Stoic than Cynical.

"They can take my silver or take my lead" said Pablo Escobar ( paraphrased ). It's like that.

The cynic/economist in me says that this would be a classic case of "waterbed" economics. That is to say, any pressure pushing down in one part of the system results in a subsequent rise somewhere else. If you define corruption as a particular localised phenomenon, then pushing down in one area and measuring that area looks like things have gone down.

But there are many undesirable things in our societies (network effects, self censorship, rich ruling families, artificial barriers and rent seeking,etc). I know I've had many conversations with my wife where I've said "if this happened in any other society/market, we'd call it corruption, but here it's just "the way things are/our governance system".

So to bring it back to Singapore and economic theory, I would posit that the appointment to those highly paid positions would become the point of corruption as the wages/power/connections increase, though we'd probably start to call it something else (having the right connections, belonging to the right families, going to the right schools).

I know, incidentally, very little about Singapore...I'm just making general theoretical predictions here...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temasek_Holdings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Ching

The former Prime Minister (Lee Kuan Yew) was in power for 31 years. His son is in power now. People don't hold on to power for that long by playing fair.

Singapore is also known as the Switzerland of the East, not least for the fact that their banks are among the favourite destinations in the region for the proceeds of corruption.