----- Original Message ----- From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Anti-corruption information at http://www.nobribes.org/ and > www.transparency.org . Transparency International has branches in several > countries. > > For the Global Corruption Report 2003, see > http://www.globalcorruptionreport.org/download.shtml > ==================== Some of the analytical methods in these reports point precisely to the weakness of the definition of corruption given earlier. *Corruption is defined as "the abuse of public power for private gain."* Rather than simply contest the definition, I'll relay a story and try to keep it short. A couple of years ago I was at a debate between a former Canadian MP, then working at the Canadian Consulate in Seattle, and a friend as well as one of those eminently replaceable PR people from the Chamber of Commerce. During the Q & A the guy from Canada told how -I'm paraphrasing and compressing, in Canada, he was given $25,000 to run his election campaign, the reporting requirements and the like "and if I spent one dollar over that amount I would be thrown in jail for [X] years. By this standard your American system is totally corrupt." He then went into a not too short excursus on the problems of political patronage as they relate to trade issues. Now, given the above definition, nothing US elected representatives do is considered corruption precisely because they are not abusing public office for private gain. They are simply using it to grant advantages to their campaign contributors. Sure it lines the coffers of the two parties, which after all, are caught up in the accumulation game themselves. Yet the system of political patronage in the US is not that different from the corruption many see in African states. Indeed one could make the argument that what has gone on in Africa for the last 50 years is not much different from the settling of the US in the nineteenth century. And yet the US scores rather well compared to say, Nigeria on the corruption index. Most US citizens casually perusing left-liberal muckraking journalism on campaign contributions etc. have no problem seeing the current system in place as corrupt, yet their intuitions, which I have enormous sympathies with, are not captured in the above definition precisely because those in power have legalized the ever evolving norms of patronage as the political economy changes and grows. Hence the above definition is too thin precisely because it creates a blind spot regarding how the corruption got legitimated -cumulative causation and all that. I take the current structuring of patronage as just so much of a 'objectified corruption' as many commonly refer to capital as 'objectified labor' or 'dead labor.' Yet the moment we let the above definition serve as the baseline norm from which many other forms of corruption are excluded by definition, we concede too much to the political parties that are ruining governments across the planet. A perfect example is the SC passing Buckley v. Valeo. Am I the only one to see the corrupt conflict of interests involved in having Republican and Democrat judges legitimize the idea of money as speech which just so happens to ensure an enormous stream of cash for the parties of which they are members? I don't think so and neither do all the solid people pushing for substantive campaign finance reform, yet the above definition kind of pre-empts their ability to call the current system corrupt. If we say that the political process by which property rights are constructed and delegated to agents in the economy is not corrupt precisely because those who hold office have legalized the process whereby money is exchanged in order to secure legislation favorable to some interests vis a vis other interests by any definition of corruption [attuned to historical facts as much as the analytical coherence of our definition etc.] we care to articulate, then what is the normative basis from which we can declare that capitalist systems of property and contract are violative of the norms of democratic liberalism itself -freedom/justice etc.? Clearly the definition of corruption above attempts to define away the historical process whereby capitalist property rights became institutionalized even as we see how corruption today with the above definition, in many cases, bears an uncanny resemblance to the manner in which so-called primitive accumulation many centuries ago brought forth capitalism as we know it today. Usual caveats, Ian
