Googlegate

Talking of corruption...

Corruption

I StumbledUpon Transparency International, an organisation dedicated to fighting corruption worldwide. On their About Us page, they detail the downsides of corruption:

Why does fighting corruption matter?

Corruption hurts everyone, and it harms the poor the most. Sometimes its devastating impact is obvious:

• A father who must do without shoes because his meagre wages are used to pay a bribe to get his child into a supposedly free school.
• The unsuspecting sick person who buys useless counterfeit drugs, putting their health in grave danger.
• A small shop owner whose weekly bribe to the local inspector cuts severely into his modest earnings.
• The family trapped for generations in poverty because a corrupt and autocratic leadership has systematically siphoned off a nation’s riches.

[At] other times, corruption’s impact is less visible:

• The prosperous multinational corporation that secured a contract by buying an unfair advantage in a competitive market through illegal kickbacks to corrupt government officials, at the expense of the honest companies who didn’t.
• Post-disaster donations provided by compassionate people, directly or through their governments, that never reach the victims, callously diverted instead into the bank accounts of criminals.
• The faulty buildings, built to lower safety standards because a bribe passed under the table in the construction process that collapse in an earthquake or hurricane.

Corruption has dire global consequences, trapping millions in poverty and misery and breeding social, economic and political unrest.

Corruption is both a cause of poverty, and a barrier to overcoming it. It is one of the most serious obstacles to reducing poverty.

Corruption denies poor people the basic means of survival, forcing them to spend more of their income on bribes. Human rights are denied where corruption is rife, because a fair trial comes with a hefty price tag where courts are corrupted.

Corruption undermines democracy and the rule of law.

Corruption distorts national and international trade.

Corruption jeopardises sound governance and ethics in the private sector.

Corruption threatens domestic and international security and the sustainability of natural resources.

Those with less power are particularly disadvantaged in corrupt systems, which typically reinforce gender discrimination.

Corruption compounds political exclusion: if votes can be bought, there is little incentive to change the system that sustains poverty.

The conclusion - Corruption hurts everyone.

Wow, corruption really does sound like a downer.

If corruption is the effective opposite of the "transparency" of this organisation's title, by inference, corruption can be equated to opacity. But transparency and opacity of what, exactly?

Of action, clearly. But also of opinion, in that opinions underlie actions. I would further suggest that action and opinion can be understood of subsets of identity—in that what we perceive, think, feel and do makes up the sum total of our experience of our own and others' identity.

So when we talk about fighting corruption, are we actually talking about encouraging people and organisations to be more transparent about their identity? Seems like a more creative and approachable way of putting it to me. Of course, it's probably a lot easier to think like that when you're not at the receiving end of any of the horrendous things described above (although I guess we all are at the receiving end, in an extremely indirect way, when it comes to the environment)... : (

A final thought: isn't it actually the case that the very opacity of aspects of a brand makes it appealing to us just as much as its transparency in other respects does? After all, I don't want everyone to know my bank details and I don't necessarily want to weigh up every detail of the production and shipping processes that brought the pair of jeans I purchase to the shelf in front of me. I guess the key here may be choice: the choice of the customer to "dig down" at will to determine how much information about products and services is disclosed to them (and to others, in the case of personally-identifying information).

Naughty Google?

Sounds like Google may have been naughty boys and girls...

I guess that Lord Acton's saying that "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" has been proven to apply fairly universally—even to the "don't be evil" ones? : (

Image courtesy of Murdoc (who created it for another reason altogether)