How corrupt are we? Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí / LMMIAMI.COM

• Crime in America is at an all time low.
• When I say America I mean the US of A.
• Not América which, for some, is a continent.
• In any case: murder, car theft and burglary stats haven’t been so low since the early 60s in most major US cities
• Odd thing is, nobody really knows why.
• There are dozens of explanations.
• Some theories are quite far fetched.
• As much as government and law enforcement would want to take all the credit for our perception of peace & quiet, evidence points in other directions too.
• If we wanted to sum it up in one easy catchall the answer would be: technology.
• For instance, some experts believe the reason why murders are decreasing is the ever-evolving ability of modern physicians to use state-of-the-art equipment and medication to keep gunshot and stabbing victims alive.
• According to these folks, murderers are still out there roaming the streets, only that they have become less effective in their pursuits.
• Plus, cell-phones make it easier & faster to call 911.
• Or to capture rampant police brutality against minorities on video.
• Hence, the data about crime decreasing in America might be a bit of an illusion.
• Especially if we take into account stealth, non-violent and white-collar crime, which is a totally different story.
• Or as we like to call it: corruption.
• What is corruption anyway?
• Breaking the law in its literal sense?
• Breaking unwritten moral rules?
• By this logic, America is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
• We are barely 5% of the global population and we consume close to 50% of all the illegal drugs.
• To consume said drugs, we need to buy them.
• To buy them, we need to give obscene amounts of hard-earned cash to drug dealers.
• Gangs. Cartels. The mob. Organized crime. Money launderers.
• In some cases, terrorists.
• People who kill people.
• People who kidnap people.
• Good thing is, these murders and kidnaps do not appear on our US-based crime stats.
• They mostly happen beyond our borders.
• Usually south of them.
• We must admit that we are still a huge part of the equation though.
• Same way we export jobs to China, we export crime to Latin America.
• In the early 00s the Office of National Drug Control Policy created an ad campaign with this very concept: when you buy drugs you finance crime.
• If my memory doesn’t fail me, it even ran on the Super Bowl.
• Methinks the campaign had a powerful, compelling argument against illegal substance consumption.
• I ain’t saying it was the be-all-end-all silver bullet of antidrug ad campaigns.
• But it certainly made a good point in the big scheme of things.
• Yet the usual forces of sanctimonious hand wringing attacked it viciously.
• No wonder why most PSAs are so toothless, bland and irrelevant.
• We expect them to be feel-good lukewarm balderdash.
• God forbid if a PSA even dares ruffling feathers or telling it like it is.
• We simply hate it when someone puts a mirror in front of us.
• We just can’t handle the truth.
• We don’t wanna know.
• We love living in a limbo of hypocrisy.
• Which is precisely the reason we don’t legalize drugs once and for all.
• OK, where was I?
• My point was, what do we talk about when we talk about corruption?
• Is corruption, to a certain extent, a perception?
• The corruption index Transparency International issues every year is the result of polls among business people.
• They ask a bunch of folks (mostly corporate types) how corrupt their country is in a scale from one to ten.
• What is the definition of corruption in Sweden compared to, say, The Dominican Republic?
• Sometimes we call corruption what simply is ineptitude.
• Or vice versa.
• According to Transparency International, corruption is the abuse of a position of power or influence for personal gain, mostly circumscribed to monetary mismanagement & malfeasance.
• Petty and not so petty white-collar crime (as opposed to, say, drunk driving or breaking & entering).
• Venality.
• We could also call it graft, but this term usually is restricted to government and the political arena.
• When it occurs in the private sector, corruption adopts multiple forms.
• Kickbacks.
• Transactions under the table to evade taxes.
• Padding expense reports.
• Did anybody say padding timesheets?
• Don’t get me started.
• Speaking of anti-drug campaigns and padding timesheets, last year two encumbered former Ogilvy executives were sentenced to a protracted vacation in the slammer precisely for said practice: “plotting to defraud the White House Drug Office on its advertising account billings.”
• Apparently they had no better idea than to try and swindle Uncle Sam over some PSAs.
• Because, stealing from the government is not really stealing, right?    
• Or from a big faceless multinational corporation, for that matter.