Watch out you cowardly crooked klepto-crats! TI is in the house, and are ready to deal with your dastardly deeds! TI stands for Transparency International, and they are a global outfit that is working damn hard to make the world a better place…by exposing and reporting on the most crooked government and corporate assholes on the plaid planet. Hell yes! It’s about time we had some more good guys on the scene… damn, I can’t do everything on my own! I need me some back up every now and again, and these guys are one of the best grime-fighting groups we’ve got. If you are really interested in understanding the world, or maybe even trying to help out the world, then you absolutely must keep up with the TI. Browse through their website as often as you can. And why are they in the news right now? Check it:

2007 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) page from Transparency International

Somalia, Myanmar, Iraq top corruption blacklist

How do we break the corruption cycle?

West ‘complicit’ in Third World corruption

Group calls on multinationals to fight the bribery that fuels corruption

So what the hell exactly is corruption? Simply put on a global scale, it’s when politicians and civil servants abuse their public positions for personal gain. While TI mostly focuses on corruption within political systems, we also have to consider the role of multinational corporations and illegal entities that play a big part in providing a lot of opportunities for those politicians and civil servants to screw up. In other words, you can’t tackle corruption simply by busting people who are on the take, but you have to also bust the bastards supplying the cash. You dig?

And how did TI come about to help fight this shit? As with everything good, it started with one dude: As director of the World Bank for East Africa, the German jurist Peter Eigen was given a prime opportunity to observe corruption firsthand. He saw how useful development projects in Africa proceeded very slowly while costly, useless, and even destructive projects proceeded very quickly—mainly because they were receiving funding from rich financiers from developed countries like Germany, Japan, Canada, France, etc. Eigen calculated that a third of the debt burden of developing countries can be traced back to corruption-driven projects. He tried to develop anti-corruption concepts at the World Bank but the legal team told him to mind his own business. They said that he could legally do nothing against corruption because the World Bank wasn’t supposed to interfere with the internal affairs of recipient countries.

For this reason, Peter Eigen told the World Bank to ‘piss off’ and he formed Transparency International in 1993. The goal of TI is to eradicate corruption because it believes that corruption hinders social and economic progress and weakens democracy. It defines corruption as “the abuse of public office for private gain.” Some examples provided by TI as corruption are poor people having to come up with bribes in Southern India to use birth clinics or parents in Africa having to bribe teachers to teach their children, as well as big examples like Nigerian government officials being paid off by Shell Oil Co. to allow toxic dumping. TI publishes a Corruption Perception Index, a Bribe Payers index, and a Global Corruption report.

But I’ll keep this rant brief: the news stories allude to this year’s publication of the Corruptions Perception Index (CPI) which ranks 180 countries on a variety of factors to see how corrupt they are. Scores range from 10 (perfectly clean) to 1 (covered in shit). See map below for a graphic take, or visit their website to download the whole report.

cpi_2007_worldmap.pdf

Some high-lites: New Zealand, Finland, and Denmark are clean as a whistle my friends! Rich democracies all typically rank high, with Western Europe doing the best as a region. The US is #20—not bad considering how many high-level politicians have been busted last year, and the fact that they have OJ Simpson still running around free.. And surprise, surprise! Poorest countries in the world are most often the most corrupt ones. Places that the Plaid Avenger considers ‘failed states’ (because they totally suck so bad that the government is almost useless) are almost invariably among the most corrupt in the world. Burma, Somalia, Iraq, Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan…yep, they are right down on the bottom of this list.

So why should anybody even care about this stuff? Because “corruption continues to exist and ruin lives. For the poorest nations, in particular, corruption remains an enormous drain on resources sorely needed for education, health and infrastructure.” Sure, you can give money to charities and build habitat for humanity with Jimmy Carter or even start a business that provides jobs to an impoverished area. But if you do these things in an extremely corrupt environment, then in the long run you are not going to help people out that much. Corruption is a disease that can eventually sap the life out of a community…or a country. Unless it is stopped in its tracks!

And don’t feel like you have no role in this game my friends! You do! As TI and other international organizations well know, multinational corporations (most of whom are from the rich countries) and even the rich democracies themselves fuel a lot of this corruption from afar… some of it unintentional to be sure, but some of it quite intentional. Crooked bastards! We in the superhero community encourage you all to pay attention to corporations that contribute to corrupting poor governments, and strike back. How? Don’t buy their shit!

Quite frankly, corruption may be the biggest factor that keeps poor countries poor. To many of us superheros in the business of justice, stopping corruption begins to solve virtually all the other problems that face the poorest countries in the world. And you simply cannot solve problems by sending aid to these places—because the damn crooked bastards will just steal it! See how problematic corruption becomes?

So keep up on the happenings of TI! Do your part to fight for international justice! Help stamp out corruption! And as always: Party on!