Corruption Rules the World
Pryce-Jones, David
Corruption Ri MUCH AS FASCISM AND COMMUNISM PLAGUED THE 20TH CENTURY, CORRUPTION WILL RAVAGE THE 21ST. BLAME THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IF YOU WISH, BUT ABOVE ALL BLAME THE WEST FOR ALLOWING THE...
...Corruption of course comes in several forms, not only financial but moral, culDAVID PRYCE-JONES is the author of The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire and The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs...
...It seems to me they have an awful lot of catching up to do...
...If admitted criminals get away with it, why should ordinary people bother any longer to distinguish right from wrong in their own conduct ? On behalf of the East German Party and its bosses, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski had the job of raising capital by any methods, legal or illegal...
...Europe seems to have about ten million legal immigrants, and five million illegal...
...so read it to ponder as well as enjoy...
...Throughout society, the more or less accepted peddling of influence gives rise to the "sleaze factor...
...there is no documentation...
...In France, too, businessmen and politicians had become accustomed to exchanging donations and contracts...
...Once the Cold War was over, every kind of chicanery came to light in these parties, in an uneerie pendant to the revelations coming out of the Soviet world...
...Perhaps the most overwhelming book about war ever written, because it deals with the most overwhelming combat experience in history: the average German soldier on the Russian front, going through a meat grinder that produced io million casualties in an army of 12.5 million (Amer-ican figures were 800,000 in a military of 16 million...
...In Mexico, President Carlos Salinas had to flit to escape prosecution, and his brother is charged with murder and illicitenrichment...
...Signing between twelve and fifteen thousand decrees a year, he cannot have any clear idea of what is going on, or who is manipulating whom...
...If democracy is to be meaningful, individuals must be as responsible as possible for themselves, and their representatives must be made accountable...
...Peter Viereck is a poet and historian...
...I can tell you: It doesn't help a bit...
...The former governor of the national bank was one of dozens of ministers and senior officials to be arrested...
...She appointed her husband into her government, and he has been accused of using the post for personal gain...
...His anti-drug officials made millions from pay-offs...
...twenty or thirty Saudi princes are multi-billionaires, and literally thousands more are multi-millionaires...
...Two former presidents of South Korea are serving long sentences for corruption and violence...
...Every great power in history has imposed law and order according to its values...
...Albania specializes in stealing cars in Germany for onward transfer to eastern Europe...
...Paying extortionate fees, as well as bribes to officials, they forfeit their savings, and sometimes their lives...
...Concentrated efforts were made to cover up the evidence...
...Now, after reading four of his novels, I regard him as one of the great virtuosi of the medium...
...President Papandreou of Greece blatantly enriched himself and his cronies...
...Admittedly imperfect and cumbersome, the system nonetheless secures through primaries and subsequent elections genuine representation, and the separation of powers which is the best policing of corruption...
...TOM WOLFE (1978) Nothing that I have read this year has given me more pleasure than three novels by Zola: La Bete Humaine, Nana, and L'Assommoir...
...Votes, the services of the police, water for agriculture and other necessities of life are obtainable only by paying a bribe...
...Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman...
...Francis Harris, a British reporter, recently described how gangsters from Russia, the former Soviet republics, ex-Yugoslavia, Italy, and China are fighting it out with local criminals in Prague and Budapest, and are responsible for murders, drug deals, money laundering and more than 150 attacksin the last eighteen months...
...Voter turnout is low...
...According to the International Organization for Migration, another nongovernmental body, between two and three hundred thousand Central American nationals attempted to enter the United States last year alone with the aid of traffickers...
...In the manner of a Yeltsin, the president often rules through executive orders, bypassing Con(Continued on page 84) 28 December 1997 • The American Spectator your enemy and one ally who is your rival to defeat one enemy who will be your ally...
...The University of Southeast Asia in the Philippines runs an index of corruption in the region, and China is top, way ahead of Indonesia in second place...
...it is the by-product of Globalization, and perhaps its fulfillment too...
...84 December 1997 • The American Spectator...
...Communism's fractious little brothers, socialism and social democracy, aspired to erect collective societies through persuasion rather than force...
...Even rich countries like Angola, Mozambique, and Romania were driven to the point of destitution and famine...
...Nazis and their European collaborators were at least brought to justice in significant numbers after the war...
...Three quarters of the PLA production is sold in ways which fudge legal and illegal...
...The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer...
...Corruption is the specter at this feast...
...There are over 150,00o laws on its statute book, and in spite of that— or because of it— no rule of law...
...December 1997 • The American Spectator des the World In far the greatest part of the world, absolutism and tyranny remain the human norm...
...For re-election as president, Yeltsin collected about $100 million, twenty times over the legal limit...
...The total spending in the 1996 elections has been estimated at $4 billion...
...A judge in a Frankfurt court earlier this year found that police in Lower Saxony had uncovered two Turkish families who controlled drug smuggling in Germany and Belgium because they enjoyed the protection of Mrs...
...Britain alone spends £2...
...Benazir Bhutto, was a successor in office to her father, himself wholly corrupt and hanged for it...
...Social democracy collapsed at the same time as Communism and for some of the same reasons...
...European governments still prevaricate over restoring stolen property to rightful owners or their heirs...
...The secretary general of NATO, Willy Claes, had to resign over bribery...
...According to the Moscow press, he acquired a personal fortune of $4 billion out of the Gazprom privatization, making himself a Paul Getty at a stroke...
...Unless perhaps, "You're smart...
...Money extracted either from organized crime or through embezzlement of state funds ends in the Western banking and financial system, the one and only safe repository of gain siphoned off...
...Party doctrine, the collectivity, and fashion replaced the human being as the central subject of art and literature...
...The process of getting things done in a society without the rule of law, property rights or a regulated market, is known as guanxi...
...Westerners depend on the goodwill of officials, and he quotes one businessman who gives away what the secret is: "to sit down over a cup of tea with the top guy...
...Special interest groups mobilize in order to oblige the state to buy them off...
...the deal is done...
...Man is born free, and everywhere finds himself with e-mail and the Internet...
...James Webb is the author of Fields of Fire and A Sense of Honor...
...Orwell alone could have done justice to the sight of British politicians and officials with business links to Peking applauding the party leaders to whom they were handing over Hong Kong...
...The Friday Times, a leading local newspaper, lately described her as "arrogant, reckless, capricious and corrupt...
...Those who want to keep the loot, and those who want to lay hands on it, partake in the same anti-social calculations and procedures...
...In Japan, fixing behind the scenes takes the place of messy parliamentary procedures...
...Marginalizing or bypassing parliamentary representation, this evolving form of globalizing absolutism breeds impotence and yet more cynicism...
...Even better, it raises unanswerable moral questions of ends and means...
...Not properly buried in the past either, the cadavers of Communism in China and Russia also continue to pollute...
...Bulgaria, almost bankrupt, lives off the drug-run coming up from the Middle East, and shares a side-line with Macedonia on sanction-breaking in former Yugoslavia...
...One authoritative source estimates that a sum in the order of $100 billion is stolen out of the Russian economy every year, to end up in the West in one way or another...
...This calls for an effort of will as serious as in the previous struggles against Nazism and Communism...
...Voter turnout to its elections is the lowest in the democratic world...
...A typical non-governmental body, the Transparency Organization, publishes an index of world corruption, with Nigeria top (and Pakistan second...
...The Mind ofthe South, by Wilbur Cash...
...and they in turn, when all is said and done, were applauding crime...
...The United States draws illegal immigrants in far larger but equally uncertain numbers...
...According to FBI director Louis Freeh, 24 Soviet gangs are already active in the United States...
...The French and Italian and other Communist parties used to receive annual subsidies of millions of dollars...
...Since people could not be trusted to do what was in their own best interest, government had to do it for them...
...Fleeing to Munich, he took with him files so compromising to West German politicians that he lives as untroubled by the law as in the days of Communism...
...BY DAVID PRYCE-JONES G lobalization is the buzzword of the moment...
...Herbert Stein is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Engaged in exactly the same black arts, they want their turn...
...Sovereignty in a democratic state is not a matter of power or independence of policy (as so often and so wrongly supposed) but consists in that common element of trust binding everyone who respects the state's particular set of laws, and so makes citizens of them...
...Lobbyists and consultants swarm in to plead for special treatment, most often protection or shelter from competition, for the entire range of industry, professions, and trades...
...F finally, the effort to introduce democracy into the developing world has come to nothing...
...Between the wars, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria had four royal residences...
...Vietnamese boatpeople, mainland Chinese, Kurds, Iranians, Arabs and Africans, Indians and Pakistanis, prefer to place themselves in the hands of criminals rather than endure conditions at home...
...In the former satellites of eastern Europe and in Germany, fewer than a hundred party leaders have stood trial...
...Poor peasants by birth, both these men were among the many Communists with untraceable Swiss accounts...
...L ike piracy and slavery before it, corruption could be mastered...
...In China, it is no obstacle that as many as twenty million are still held in laogai, the local Gulag...
...Governments and people gouge subsidies to produce and also not to produce...
...Self-reinforcing, the forms of corruption are altogether challenges to the rule of law...
...In a process as invisible to outsiders as it is unaccountable, politicians exchange commissions and bribes for contracts with the array of salesmen and manufacturers petitioning them...
...Profiteering became an accepted way of life through Nazism and then Soviet Communism and the Cold War...
...The head of the Guardia Civil, or police, absconded with funds...
...When the financial backing collapsed, there were neither apologies nor amends from the whole wrong-head26 December 1997 • The American Spectator ed artistic milieu, but only the silence of the moral void which now passes for culture...
...Concentrating wealth unjustly, corruption creates first an unbreakable hierarchy of inequality and then violence on the part of the dispossessed...
...The strong still seize the spoils, and their subjects go to the wall...
...Saddam Hussein spoke recently for absolutism with the immortal words, "Law consists of two lines above my signature...
...the last secretary general of the Bulgarian Party, Todor Zhivkov, had over thirty...
...Two French ministers of defense have been exposed as Soviet agents...
...Politicians are caught in wild scams, with sacks of money in the house...
...Under the pressure of events, the Union has instead improvised, in its headquarters in Brussels, a structure alien to the principles of democracy which have been so hard-won...
...Officially celebrating fifty years of independence, President R.K...
...In a derivative of Communism, the state's resources in fact had been gathered into the hands of the few, to be dispensed to the many in the form of benefits and allowances...
...The president faces trial or impeachment, the Speaker of the House is fined even for somewhat technical corruption, and state governors and senators who break the law go to jail...
...In Russia itself, there are some ten thousand gangs...
...Also from a peasant family, Rifaat, the brother of President Hafiz Assad of Syria, has enormous assets, although the country has few resources...
...they meet and deliberate in secret, accountable only to themselves...
...In protracted scandals, some of the best-known Italian politicians and industrialists have confessed to extortion and bribery, and a few are even in prison...
...Buckley, but it's his novel I'm here to praise...
...The growth potential of world-wide but underground operations is limitless...
...With its natural resources, the Soviet Union was able to project its power as and where it pleased...
...The Russian government boasts that it possesses over two million works of art robbed from Germany, and will return them only on recovery of what the Germans stole from Russia...
...24 December 1997 • The American Spectator C orruption is sometimes defended as inherent in human nature and "normal," or as local custom, as part of the culture, a way to temper absolutism, and even as a kind of parallel distribution system whereby goods and services are at least delivered, however expensively and wastefully...
...Might is right, and there is nothing that can be described accurately as the rule of law...
...The collaboration of intellectuals with Communism, otherwise known as fellow-traveling, was a corruption of nothing less than European and American culture...
...The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris...
...Whitewater, Mena Airport, the Rose Law Firm and other issues related to the Clintons are a murky complex of cutting corners, cronyism, and inexplicable death, apparently beyond accountability...
...Uncounted numbers of Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Poles, and Ukrainians took possession of houses, farms, and shops when the murdered Jewish or other owners could not reclaim them...
...In its latest disguise, here is that most ancient of questions—are men to be ruled by force, or by consent...
...As in Europe, politics is becoming the playground of lobbyists...
...billion a week on welfare...
...22 tural and institutional...
...Antigua alone has licensed over fifty off-shore banks...
...The archives now reveal that the Soviet-controlled bank in Paris held 219 accounts of prominent Frenchmen who had been bought for tens of millions of francs...
...According to another expert, Hilton Root, "Rights are defined by your place in the administration...
...The immense territory between the German-Polish frontier and the Russian-Chinese frontier has been subjected to asset-stripping, the like of which has never been seen before...
...India, sometimes put forward as the one possible exception to this pattern, is a peculiar hybrid of traditional absolutism and the importation by the Gandhi family and Jawaharlal Nehru of social democracy...
...A sometimes tedious book about "Teedie" from his birth to his ascendance as president which provides much to ponder as we re-examine what it means to be a leader in this country...
...Originally a peasant, Saddam Hussein has an estimated $i8 billion in personal accounts...
...Indonesia is virtually the property of President Suharto and his family, now in power for over thirty years...
...Flocking into both countries by the plane-load, carpetbaggers find a congenial atmosphere of crude barbarism and profits without any consideration of ethics...
...Here is altogether a political novelty, a command-bureaucracy which does not rule by consent but by decree...
...Government, the police and the army are privileged Mafias rather than law-enforcers...
...A range of class actions, and mendacious claims about food contamination or the responsibility of tobacco companies for the damage smokers have done to themselves, undermine respect for the law...
...India has central and state governments, with armies of underpaid petty officials whose every function is a pretext for graft...
...So did 50,000 illegals from China, and 40,000 from south-east Asia...
...She jobbed her husband, the son of a cinema-owner, into a ministerial post, and he is accused of extracting at least $i billion of public funds...
...The various Councils and the Commission in charge in Brussels are self-appointing, and cannot be dismissed...
...Andrei Lukanov, the last Communist prime minister of Bulgaria,seems to have embezzled $50 million and whoever murdered him for it has not been caught...
...Yegor Gaidar, one of the architects of Soviet privatization, explained that success in former Communist societies means "the conversion of power into property...
...President Mitterrand and the men around him, in the words of the commentator Jean-Francois Revel, formed "an association of law-breakers...
...Misled and degraded as they have been, culturally impoverished to the point of defenselessness, the countries of Europe have further embarked upon a project of union, perhaps ultimately federation...
...Over 300 million Indians, or a third of the population, still live on incomes less than $25 a month...
...The congressional committees investigating illegal Democratic Party funding have evidence that access to the president is valuable and expensive, as in Moscow...
...A leaked document revealed that two weeks before handing over power, Mrs...
...BLAME THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IF YOU WISH, BUT ABOVE ALL BLAME THE WEST FOR ALLOWING THE CRIMES OF COMMUNISM TO BE SWEPT UNDER THE RUG...
...The alternative to tyranny was chaos, not democracy...
...A free press has not pushed political correctness to self-destruct...
...The prime minister was accused of impropriety and also of sending death squads to murder Basque separatists...
...Governments throughout the continent of Europe, however, have become so inured to turning a blind eye that there is little or no will for the task...
...Zola helped create such simple-minded notions among the bystanders, incidentally, by continually theorizing about his own work...
...Nothing survived of these promises, not even lip-service...
...Non-governmental bodies are colonizing more and more areas of public life...
...Between thirty and forty countries were direct tributaries of Moscow...
...Organized crime is flourishing...
...Morocco is poor in comparison, but King Hassan and his family keep it as almost a private economic preserve...
...Expenditure in Brussels is less concerned with merit or need than with paying-off special interests, as if involved in agreed protection rackets 27 and extortion...
...The traffic of immigrants brings in perhaps up to $10 billion...
...The handful who have received prison sentences are mostly small fry...
...Some have dynastic claims, genuine or invented...
...He is one of the world's profoundest psychologists of history (read also his Last European War), which is not the same as a psycho-historian (again: less modish...
...In the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda amassed some $50 billion...
...A California professor lately reported that students in a seminar about Nazism understood what Nazis had done but did not have confidence to blame them...
...Tom Wolfe is author ofRadical Chic, The Painted Word, Mauve Glove & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, and The Right Stuff (forthcoming...
...Its former Soviet director was Viktor Chemomyrdin, now Russian prime minister...
...Officially $10 billion went missing in 1995, the last year for which figures are available, but according to some estimates, the figure was closer to $25 billion...
...Directors of Soviet enterprises have simply transferred to themselves those state assets which they used to manage...
...PETER VIERECK (1978) Historical Consciousness, by John Lukacs...
...Let's keep this between ourselves...
...Tansu Ciller, the Turkish prime minister...
...thriving in the absence of law or on the contrary because there is too much law...
...Gradually replacing national law in every country, a European Court of Justice has the specific role of enforcing the command-bureaucracy...
...23 z 0 z The postwar world further set about creating a range of nongovernmental organizations of one sort or another, whereby decisions affecting the citizen are taken, but without him having any effective and direct representation...
...The total EU budget is about $89 billion, projected to rise dramatically if or when the Union has a single currency and more members...
...The author of this penetrating and loving examination of the Southern mindset, circa 1938, committed suicide before the book was published, ostensibly because he feared the criticism of his fellow Southerners...
...The world drug trade is estimated to be $50o billion a year...
...A moving and true book for anyone who has an affinity with, or curiosity about, the career military...
...Many The American Spectator December 1997 prominent highfliers were arrested and some have received prison sentences...
...Globalized corruption is a more elusive enemy to democracy than either Nazism or Communism, but quite as absolute and lawless in its own way...
...I can't help wondering whether his fictional hero Wintergrin is partly based on someone I admire in real life: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn...
...L ike symptoms of disease, plenty of these features are present in the United States...
...JAMES WEBB (1981) I offer the following five books, all of which I consider classics: The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer...
...Auberon Waugh is a columnist for the (London) Spectator and other British publications...
...Politics throughout this Europe is a process of horse-trading behind closed doors...
...Colombia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Syria depend on drugs...
...It is no obstacle either to deal with the People's Liberation Army, which keeps the party in power and is also the largest entrepreneur in the country...
...Belgian politicians appear to have been the most unrestrained and hypocritical of kleptocrats, often conniving to protect sexual perversity as well...
...A book that ascribes meaning to the experience without embracing the politics that engendered it...
...He himself declares his total wealth is less than $50000...
...Faced with two systems of law, ultimately rival sovereignties, people disrespect both...
...Others have committed suicide...
...Another cold war is shaping in defense of democracy...
...The corrupt old social democratic order of the constituent countries has putrified into this bloated corpse...
...Long since an extravagant monster, the welfare state has given rise to a culture of corruption, tragic in its consequences...
...The Soviets and East Germans enrolled large numbers of West Germans as spies and agents, some highly influential...
...Those who attempt to bring corrupt politicians to account are themselves motivated more by greed than justice...
...Officials and companies customarily cut mutually beneficial deals over payment of tax...
...The tangle of bureaucratic regulations offers all sorts of opportunities for graft on the part of officials, and fraud on the part of would-be beneficiaries, in search of a hand-out with or without entitlement to it...
...Prostitution and gambling are also run across frontiers like transnational companies...
...This involves trading on relationships, offering and accepting commissions which are concealed bribes...
...Although different in language, religion, law and historical experience, fifteen countries already participate in the European Union, with about the same number hoping to join later...
...Perhaps they should start with the Bible and move on to Shakespeare before tackling Joyce and Milan Kundera...
...AUBERON WAUGH (1985) Alas, I can think of no advice to your fellow countrymen on their reading...
...But Nigeria, like Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Rwanda, is only one among numerous countries which have fallen apart, so decentralized through corruption and civil war that even a fair administration of Western aid is beyond their capacity...
...Politicians and officials in Brussels have granted themselves a range of allowances and benefits, including tax-free salaries...
...Germany already has seventeen parliaments, Spain eighteen, Belgium seven, and even Britain may soon be destabilized with four...
...How TV is undermining democracy by converting what should be serious discussion into show business...
...About the same number again adopted of their own free will the Soviet one-party state and command economy...
...Kleptocracy" is the word coined for such misrule...
...He says he is worth about $40,000, but Forbes magazine puts his fortune at $3 billion...
...The nation-state is said to be giving way to the multinational company...
...Ministers and presidents promote their national interests as if these too were so many lobbies...
...The United Nations and its agencies, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, G-7, the World Trade Organization, the Pugwash and Bilderberg and many more conferences, international bodies supposedly in control of atomic energy and weapons and communications and a hundred other things, even the George Soros and other foundations, are a kind of top-down amalgam of activity, where citizens have no say, and cannot throw the rascals out...
...There is a Parliament, but it is a figurehead without legislative or revisory powers...
...Something like a thousand RussThe American Spectator . December 1997 25 ian companies, and dozens of Russian banks, have headquarters in agricultural Cyprus, whose gold and dollar reserves are accordingly larger than industrialized Israel's...
...Slovenia specializes in trafficking in stolen Soviet weaponry, including nuclear materials...
...as organized crime or individual buccaneering...
...A novel that follows a true American hero from the Mexican border wars of 1916 through World War Two, with an epilogue in Vietnam...
...Corruption in fact blocks the building of democracy and a legitimate state...
...Money-laundering is in the order of a thousand billion dollars a year...
...Deng Pufang, son of Deng Xiaoping, late secretary general of the Party, openly declared that he is entitled to five percent of the profits on transactions he brokers...
...Far the most reliable and lucrative gains are to be made in the undefined zone where government encounters business...
...Throughout Europe, its birthplace, democracy is transforming before one's eyes into something still uncertain but unmistakably absolutist...
...Pakistan is in the hands of a small group of feudal landlords, "shamelessly corrupt men" in the words of an experienced correspondent writing about its fifty years of independence...
...Benign as the intention here may have been, the practice instead bred either cynicism or dependency on the state...
...Fernando Collor, president of Brazil, and Carlos-Andres Perez, president of Venezuela, both embezzled state funds...
...It speaks for itself that there are ninety-one tax havens in the world...
...Easy to exploit, welfare programs sap the tradition of self-reliance...
...It will have to wage the new cold war virtually on its own...
...In Romania, his colleague Nicolae Ceausescu had a total of eighty-four—not to mention placing over sixty relations in the upper levels of the administration...
...One among the anonymous crowd in the Soviet era, Boris Berezovsky typifies the new politico businessman with clout to be in on every privatizing deal...
...Another is on trial for murder and gangsterism...
...Born poor, President Mobutu of Zaire and President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya were each said to be worth $30 billion after years in power...
...Not one of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet nomenklatura profiteers, or the Gulag mass-murderers either, has been charged with his crimes, but all receive state pensions...
...Corruption had grown into a sophisticated if circular system of keeping everyone sweet at everyone's expense, with the state and democracy the only losers...
...Minerals, forests, factories, television and the press, real estate, all former party property, have ended in the pockets of whoever was able to establish title to it, by hook or crook...
...Confident that the welfare state guaranteed votes and power, socialist and social democratic parties acquired the habit of funding themselves through donations from business which they repaid with contracts...
...One expert, Kenneth Lieberthal, believes that decision-making in Peking is in the hands of twentfive to thirty men...
...Donations then recouped from individuals and companies in pursuit of their own advantage have mired the White House in unprecedented scandal...
...Nazism and ComThe American Spectator • December 1997 munism were criminal associations of the strong to exploit the weak, and that twin-headed legacy is still working its way through...
...Superior force is decisive...
...Ciller had taken about $6 million from a secret government fund—for security purposes, she said...
...Racketeering is rife in stock markets and real estate...
...A British party official has described how he collected regularly from the Soviet embassy a suitcase with a million pounds in notes...
...Over a thousand newspapers and journals world-wide were under Party direction, and many more accepted slush funds...
...The state of California is by itself among the dozen leading economies of the world, for instance, but about one third of Californian families receive some form of public assistance...
...Few criminals have ever been so multifarious, through insurance and foreign exchange frauds, switch operations, even robbing state museums...
...Real sovereignty unravels accordingly...
...I don't remember reading a line of Zola until last year, when I read Therese Raquin (and promptly advertised the fact in these pages in December...
...Any question about the due functioning of democracy is answered with another Potemkin forum...
...Access is everything...
...Stained Glass, by William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Truisms on human motivation and mass movements by a self-educated working man with great insight...
...Forty-five separate labor laws, for example, are on the statute book...
...Pryce-Jones/Corruption (Continued from page 28) gress...
...Never before has so much wealth been available in such predatory conditions...
...Every act of privatization throws up unjustified new millionaires...
...People have increasingly been unable to trust those passing and enforcing the laws and regulations which they are expected to obey...
...Even the Vatican apparently accepted payment of over $ioo million to facilitate the escape of Nazis in the aftermath of the war...
...Holding executive and legislative power and not bound by the judiciary either, President Boris Yeltsin rules by decree...
...A trillion dollars cross the exchanges every single day...
...Approximately half the national expenditure in European countries goes on the welfare state...
...No prosecutions follow...
...Its principal achievement, the welfare state —so its supporters liked to assert had kept the world safe for democracy throughout the Cold War...
...Such apologias condescendingly suppose that nothing else is to be expected of people...
...Extending the old tribal loyalties in Africa, the ancient absolutism of the Islamic world, or the Confucian obediences of Asia, the new leader and his cronies plundered the state, or diverted its resources to their purposes...
...One former prime minister fled to Tunisia rather than answer charges that he had appropriated $70 million...
...Caught red-handed, enough chairmen and presidents of companies and banks commit suicide or apologize at press conferences to enable the others to continue as before...
...Whole countries live off imaginative schemes...
...Multi-culturalists all, busy shredding citizenship and human nature itself into specious identities of race and gender, they have attacked intellectual and moral standards to such an extent that many people are confused about right and wrong...
...I still can't see why economic Manchester liberalism (rootless, materialistic, atomizing) should ever be deemed "conservative" (which means a rooted, organic continuity) by Mr...
...In many Western countries, bribery for the sake of business is an allowable tax deduction...
...Like warlords in the past, Chinese generals make fortunes for themselves and their Western friends...
...Correspondingly, the Communist nomenklatura did no accounting for the wealth accumulated through privileged lawlessness...
...Washington, as Senator Daniel Moynihan put it, "has become a fearsome place...
...He has personally just bought one of the most expensive properties in the south of France, at Roquebrune...
...Boiling like lava under a conventional crust, that is the reality of Globalization...
...Ready to start overnights right away" may well be the words on President Clinton's tombstone...
...Once an Eagle, by Anton Myrer...
...Other leaders in the developing world, the likes of Kwameh Nkrumah and Abdul Gamal Nasser, seized power with promises of democracy and nationalism imitated from the West...
...Thanks to its tradition and values, to the free market and undisputed military supremacy, the United States stands apart, threatened by every sort of corruption, internal and external, but apparently the only democratic model in a position to offer resistance...
...A recent Roper poll found that 68 percent of voters believe that politics is more influenced by special interest money than twenty years ago, and over half those polled thought that special interests controlled the federal government...
...To the leaders of such countries, Soviet ideology was a most convenient tool to justify expropriation of national wealth into their own hands, and the consolidation of power through Soviet weaponry...
...Bertold Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lillian Hellman, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, and hundreds of others even more dubious were applauded as great artists and icons of the time...
...Narayanan and Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral alike deplored that corruption was open and endemic, the latter going so far as to encourage popular revolt against it...
...Fraudulent claims may be as much as twenty percent of budgets...
...The fortune of the al-Saud family is indistinguishable from the state petro-revenues...
...This time, the available moral and political resources are sadly depleted before the coming cold war has properly begun...
...The right connections are as valuable as they are expensive...
...One of the world's largest companies is Gazprom, with two-thirds of the country's natural gas...
...The authorities rent these out to friends and relations and pocket the income...
...Earlier this year, two professors, Hamhiro Fukui and Shigeko N. Fukai, depicted the country as "a haven for salaried thieves and crooks...
...The city of Paris is discovered to still hold a portfolio of 8,000 houses and apartments belonging to deportees who never returned...
...The secret police dealt with any opposition...
...One prime minister committed suicide, rather mysteriously, and a senior aide shot himself in the presidential palace...
...In this new Europe, the way to private wealth is through privileged access to public funds — a return to the practices of France before the 1789 revolution...
...In countries which once had been Western-dominated, for the most part as colonies, leaders remain synonymous with the state...
...The German government has no scruples about profiteering at quite low levels, for instance refusing to pay compensation to householders whose property in Berlin was confiscated to build the Wall...
...The pen is mightier than the automatic weapon...
...The Pahlavi Shahs of Iran deposited billions of dollars abroad, and now the ayatollahs are doing it...
...I find it intelligent, well written, and a "good read...
...History is ending, and we shall be one happy family living in regional versions of democracy...
...One single official was found to have salted away $130 million in return for granting licenses to pharmaceutical companies to market their drugs...
...Today's equivalent of the former Soviet fellow-travelers are the politically correct, "Feminists, Afrocentrists, Marxists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists, or Deconstructionists" in Harold Bloom's glum catalogue...
...Half a century after the end of Nazism, appropriated accounts, as well as gold bars struck from the wedding rings and dentistry of victims murdered in camps, turn up in banks in Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Monaco, Luxembourg, and elsewhere, including Britain...
...The formative political movements of the age have been cumulative onslaughts on such concepts...
...The consequence, as the Economist recently put it, is "an insanely repressive system of domestic planning and regulation...
...The intention, again benign, was to create a powerful bloc whose members would have every incentive to live in peace...
...Its former prime minister, Mrs...
...In my school years I had somehow formed the impression that Zola was the earnest hardslogging naturalist of the lower depths, "the French Dreiser," and I had had about enough of the American one...
...The Spanish Socialist Party had accepted illegal donations on a comparable scale...
...A so-called "corruption barometer" in South Africa claims that about $4.5 billion of public funds have disappeared since Nelson Mandela and his party took over...
...Endlessly challenging because Lukacs tells it not like it is but (less modish) as it is...
...The Sultan of Brunei and the Gulf emirs match them...
...Italy provided the most dramatic example...
...The unscrupulous are collaring the national wealth there too...
Vol. 30 • December 1997 • No. 12
