I have talked about the corruption in our world quite a bit. I was asked the other day about this for our future in a sustainable society. Simply; we will eliminate corruption at the highest levels. And why? We cannot be sustainable if corruption runs the whole global economic system. Will we ever eliminate corruption? If we live and govern locally, and are not beholden to any economic system that benefits financial shareholders only and ignores stakeholders, we can have an equitable system. Corruption is generated because of a competitive scarcity mindset that pits us against each other. Even decent people can be corrupted within this mindset if they see themselves as victims needing to protect themselves and their families and friends.
When I was teaching about environmental/sustainability policy I would always bring up the concept of the ‘Revolving Door’ within politics. (The term ‘revolving door’ in ethics regulation refers to situations in which a public official or employee leaves or sets aside their public position to represent their own, or other, private interests before the same government.) It happens in every country and is a form of ‘open-secret’ corruption. There is a good site that discusses it within the USA (see link), but anyone savvy in their local politics can find similar situations, since the system is the same wherever you go – The slow infusion (or maybe not so slow) of corporate power into legislative processes e.g., bribery, coercion, favor buying, etc.
You might well wonder how we ever got to this predicament in the first place. Since most of the early legislators of our new democratic countries (e.g. The new USA, France after the revolution) business owners and their lawyers tended to be the ones who held seats on any particular country’s representative governing councils (e.g., Parliament, etc.). The problem was there from the beginning. Before that, the nobility were the ones that rigged the system for themselves not giving a damn for common peoples’ needs. The advent of democratic institutions with supposedly common people talking legislative control, was a nuisance, but one that greed could usually overcome. This meant democracy pers se, was rife with possibilities of old wealth controlling the system as a way to manage legislation that affected their business interests. And what better way to control a system than to ‘capture’ the officials who were responsible for regulating and managing the system.
It’s not too hard to see how ‘Agency Capture‘ occurs. Agency officials’ become powerful and deliberately, or inadvertently beholden, to the very people they are meant to control. These usually start out as co-opted agency employees or low-level officials that come from the very businesses being regulated. Eventually, the ministerial positions are the bosses or higher managerial positions of the businesses being regulated. The complexity of regulating business systems becomes so complex that the businesses argue that they are the only ones that can understand the mechanisms of the industry. When describing this in my classes, I would ask, who is best able to understand the regulation of a farmer’s hen-house? – the fox or the turkey? The fox has a very detailed and insightful knowledge of the hen-house, while the turkey may have similarities to the hens, but not be fully knowledgeable in hen ways compared to turkey ways. With the turkey in charge there might be a little chaos but the hens will be safe. With the fox, I don’t think we need to guess the eventual outcome for the farmer’s hen-house.
Now do this across the whole spectrum of businesses to be regulated and managed and you have officials that serve a short time within an agency or ministerial position and then leave to go back to the business they served. Lower level officials leave and find they have well-paid business positions to lobby the newer officials for policies favorable to businesses they once regulated – the revolving door! Do this for a long enough time and you have a corporatocracy (a system or society in which corporations have economic, political, and often judicial control) with policy makers and business executives being the same group and running the whole show for the whole gamut of business interests. Then throw into that how a global Oligarchy controls most political power, and you have an impending shit-storm coming at you, which means all of us common people. If Covid hadn’t convinced you, then you need to wake up and look closely at how legislation everywhere is controlled by big-money interests.
So, how do we get out of this corporate controlled system? A big start would be to remove big-money interests (finance reform) from political campaigns. Then creating citizen supported legislation and enforcement policies that prohibits politicians from gaining financially from their positions (anti-graft laws). Next, prohibiting any politician leaving office, to have any private sector position interact with any legislative process (anti-lobbying laws). In a nutshell, laws that stop corruption. How likely is that? Well, an active and politically involved citizenry would be needed, so, it could happen. But looking at how the mass media has dumbed down populations around the world and also, captured their minds with social media, doesn’t inspire me. But complacency is our biggest enemy, not the corruption pers se. We the people (wherever you live) let it happen over time.
“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war, but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac” George Orwell. Who benefits from a war? War is great for a lot of businesses but they don’t fight. That is left for the common people who die and suffer in the mud and ruins. If you cannot stop the corruption that makes things like toxic chemicals, toxic food, negative healthcare, and war booming businesses, then it is up to the people to change it all. The politicians are all in on the deals. Electing honest candidates and making them accountable could work along with all I said in the paragraph above. If taking back your sovereignty and control seems impossible, then creating a parallel society may be the only other option (e.g., Thinking Anew, Parts 15, 16 and 17 {March 2022}).
There is a website called ‘The academy of Ideas.” Good for giving interesting perspectives, but like I say about critical thinking, don’t rely on it for all your thinking. Use discretion and common sense and read varied and valid sources to get an understanding of your own thoughts and beliefs and why you have them.
“Once a parallel society is sufficiently established, a society is no longer under the same grave danger as when it relies solely on the structures and institutions that are appendages of the tyrannical State. For if these establishment structures collapse, parallel structures will soften the blow of an economic or social breakdown. Furthermore, parallel structures cater to the authentic needs and wants of the people rather than the political class, and so they tend to be more life promoting than the establishment structures. As parallel structures develop and solidify more and more people will instinctively turn towards them and as the parallel society expands so too does the sphere of cultural, economic, and political freedom” Academy of Ideas
“The ultimate phase of this process is the situation in which the official structures…simply begin withering away and dying off, to be replaced by new structures that have evolved from ‘below’ and are put together in a fundamentally different way” Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless.
“Given advances in technology and the capacity to spread information, goods, and services across the world, the potential to create a wide variety of parallel structures on both a local and global level is significantly greater today than it was in Communist Eastern Europe. And so rather than passively waiting for a political saviour to bring us freedom and save us from societal collapse, a more realistic strategy is to actively participate in the construction of a parallel society – [we must create] all kinds of independent parallel structures — that is, structures unmanipulated by totalitarian power…” Martin Palous.
“Contributing to the creation of a parallel society could amount to, among many possibilities, consuming independent media instead of legacy media, using alternative mediums of exchange rather than government-backed fiat currencies, using social media platforms and decentralized digital infrastructures that promote freedom of expression, or supporting local businesses rather than global corporations that further the agenda of the political establishment. It could amount to creating self-sustainable communities, conducting scientific inquiry or scholarship free of institutional pressures, or consuming and creating educational resources, art, music, or literature that pays no heed to the establishment status quo. Any action or enterprise that expands the realm of freedom while creatively circumventing censorship and top-down authoritarian or totalitarian control is a boon to the parallel society” Academy of Ideas.
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