The Joke That's 'Transparency International'

THOSE WHO BETRAYED GOT RICH: "Who were the winners? The rating agencies, the senior officers who walked away rich, the least moral appraisers, the least moral of the outside auditors at the big accounting firms. They were all the winners. They got rich by betraying their responsibilities.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"


Every time Transparency International (Bangladesh) produces a report, I guffaw. TI chases gnats in the Third World while ignoring the elephants in the First.

TIB makes us the most corrupt nation on earth - a veritable Sodom (by the way, Sodom was not destroyed for sodomy). And then if we aren't the most corrupt, then we are at least as corrupt as we were last year, while some other Gomorrah has moved up the ladder. It's just a relation among countries, and tells us nothing about the countries themselves. Mount Everest is the highest mountain; buy that says nothing about Everest but something about it and other mountains. 'Bangladesh is the most corrupt country' says nothing about Bangladesh, but about a particular relationship with other countries.

And who finds these reports of interest? They are not even accurate.

In the United States, trillions of dollars have been lost through fraud and regulatory capture, and the world economy has been brought to its knees - and still the Third World is the most corrupt? Who writes these reports? You can't take TI seriously.

'And, of course, bottom line, all of these things are what the FBI aptly term the "epidemic" in mortgage fraud and warned in September 2004, in open congressional testimony, would cause a financial crisis if it were not dealt with.' Thus says William K. Black, an expert on fraud.

Thus, in 2004, the FBI knew something criminal on a gargantuan scale was afoot - and the regulators did nothing. That's a classic case of regulatory capture.

Mr. Black explains, in case we don't know how to count (and some of us, for instance at TI, don't): "...a crisis measured in trillions of dollars of losses—and a trillion dollars is a thousand billion...."

And that's dollars, not takas.