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.

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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.

All for a few dollars

Suppose somebody makes me this offer: "If you give $100 to a poor person, I'll give you $200."

Would my action, then, be a moral action?

Yet that is exactly what western donors are urging us to do: to pretend to be altruistic, when we are being supremely egotistic.

A moral action must be performed by an agent who has no ulterior motive: otherwise, it is sheer corruption.

And that is what we are: massively corrupt, with the donors corrupting us daily.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the mere act of making money is corrupting: far from it. Trade and industry are dignified pursuits. The western donor corrupts us by making us seem altruistic, by making us lie to ourselves and to others.

The NGO-wallahs know, deep down, that they have been corrupted in the worst possible manner: the man who takes a bribe and does not pretend to be honest is far less corrupt than the donation-receiving NGO-wallah. Self-deception is the supreme corruption.

Then comes pride in your corruption: the command of so much wealth, the adulation of other members of society, the prizes received…all conspire to elevate you above the rest of humanity. We begin to take pride in our fallen nature, like Satan.

"Let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth." But our 'philanthropy' consists precisely in letting everyone know what we are doing – noble deeds, generous acts, all for the most selfish and self-centred of reasons.

The Satanisation of our souls is complete. We have sold away our most precious possession – and for what? For a few moments of glory? For a few dollars? In a cost-benefit analysis we would appear supremely idiotic.

The worst cases are those that exhort us to go against our own civilization: for a few dollars, they denounce our culture and our traditions, our sacred and our profane heritage…all for a few dollars.

Take Transparency International, Bangladesh (TIB). Do we need to be reminded that corruption is evil by Berliners? Doesn't the Muslim ethical code serve the purpose? Why do we need an alien civilization to instill in us what we can learn better from our own? And aren't those serving the TIB corrupt to the highest extreme? They have given away not only their conscience but their very own heritage.