It's Not Just About Money

It was a long while ago that I heard journalist-cum-development activist-cum-historian Sarah Chayes talking on an edition of Thinking Allowed on Radio 4 about the subject of corruption, and I have kept meaning to write about it, but haven't had the energy. Ms Chayes's latest book is about the growth of corruption in the US governmental system, drawing parallels with what she saw in Afghanistan in the mid-2000s: what she said fitted in with some of the things I'd been thinking about in respect of the situation in the UK, which she mentions only in passing. At first, Chayes says, corruption seems small and local, and only when you step back can you see that the limited instance you might have come up against is part of something bigger:

I started thinking about corruption in Afghanistan where I lived for about a decade … What I began to see was that when, for example, you were driving down a dirt road and a police officer, usually about 17 or 18 years old, would stride out into the middle of the road and block you with a Kalashnikov and demand not much money, maybe it might add up to a pound at most, what I learned was that that didn’t go into the police officer’s pocket, not all of it. Some of it went up the line. And so I realised, this is actually a system, it’s a network, and corruption is the operating system of this network … and in Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world, it was adding up to something like 2 ½ billion US dollars in a year. In return, those at the top of this system were providing absolute immunity from any kind of repercussions from this behaviour. That was the model. And so that was what I looked at, everywhere from Honduras to Nepal. 

Chayes argues that large parts of the US political system, disproportionately but not exclusively in the Republican Party, are now dedicated not to any concept of the public good but to the extraction of financial advantage from political office, and that the ruling class defines corruption so narrowly that there is increasingly little judicial redress. She quotes the shocking example of the prosecution of Robert McDonnell, former Governor of Virginia, in 2016 for receiving a wide range of benefits-in-kind from a fraudulent businessman: he was convicted, a judgement then unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds that what he had done was not corrupt because no specific political decisions had been influenced by it.

 

When I last thought about this issue in September and related the story of Njal's Saga, I was prompted by the UK's announcement that it was prepared to break international law in pursuit of its Brexit ambitions. I was thinking about the implications of eroding the rule of law and how that could lead to the entrenchment of violence and criminality, but I hadn't cottoned on to the direct relationship between financial corruption and violence: I was imagining a cultural rather than an instrumental process. But when money begins to trump law and those who have money are able to circumvent the consequences of stepping outside it, that is exactly when criminality and violence seep into the system, because the source of the money becomes immaterial. It is the erection of money into the measure of value that embeds violence into the institutions of the State, especially the police, to whom we customarily grant a monopoly of the use of force.

The antidote, Chayes suggests, is an ethic of solidarity, but this is always apt to be eroded by self-interest, and only bitter experience can bring it back once it's gone. Forgive the long quote: it's to the point.

In that period roughly between about 1870 and the mid-1930s, this phenomenon stretched across the globe, regardless not just of political party but of political system; so you had the German Empire, the French republic, the British constitutional monarchy, the United States republic, all behaving in fundamentally the same ways. The networks were interwoven in exactly the same ways, and they included very much the same revenue streams I mentioned, energy, finance, and high-end real estate. I would say that today the additions might be pharmaceuticals, industrial agriculture, and tech, but you have exactly the same weaving back and forth between the private sector and the public sector. I looked at how we got out of the kleptocratic control of our economies and politics in those days, and the rather sad answer is that it took the repeated global calamities of the first half of the 20^th century to generate a solidarity ethos: two world wars, two genocides, use of a nuclear weapon, a gigantic pandemic, and a gigantic global economic meltdown.  That bought us about 40-45 years of gradual hard-fought reform. Then, starting in about 1980, it’s like the generation aged out and we went back to, first, the use of money as the yardstick to measure our social success; and once you do that you get coalitions of the super-rich getting together to figure out how they can rig the rules to benefit their network, and we’re back into systemic corruption. That really begins to take hold in the 1990s, and continues through to today. ...

That means it’s up to us to absolutely hold our own leadership up to its highest standards, maybe asking candidates to sign some kind of an ethics pledge [to] reinforce laws against the revolving door, conflicts of interest … in the private sector we can choose to take our money out of banks that continue to violate our laws.  … And we must, because if it took wars and economic meltdown to get us out of kleptocracy last time, what would the calamities look like in this century?