We’ve whitewashed corruption. When will we tackle the problem for real?

We’ve whitewashed corruption. When will we tackle the problem for real?

Brian Klaas — Read time: 4 minutes

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has introduced new bipartisan legislation to ban members of Congress and their spouses from owning and trading stocks, speaks during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Feb. 15 on Capitol Hill. (Win McNamee/AP)

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Global Opinions contributor

If politicians abuse their office for private gain, but it’s allowed by law, are they guilty of corruption?

This month, Democratic lawmakers in the House scored a small victory for cleaner government. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally dropped her months-long opposition to legislation that would outlaw stock trading by members of Congress. Efforts to ban the practice have been growing since revelations that several prominent lawmakers (Democratic and Republican alike) had sold off large amounts of stock after receiving briefings about the likely impact of covid-19. Sure enough, markets tanked and the politicians profited.

Sleazy, right? But not at all illegal, it turned out. Subsequent investigations resulted in zero criminal charges for the legislators — because they hadn’t broken any laws. The episode revealed an ugly truth. We love to condemn faraway countries where politicians all too obviously leverage their public positions for private gain. But far too often we ignore the same phenomenon at home — because the corruption in question is legal.

A few weeks ago, watchdog group Transparency International published its flagship report on global corruption. In the latest Corruption Perceptions Index, which measures global perceptions of corrupt practices, Denmark topped the list as the “cleanest” country, while South Sudan narrowly edged out Syria for the title of most corrupt nation in the world.

There’s a depressing irony to those rankings, which whitewash more “respectable” forms of corruption. After all, Denmark’s largest bank by asset value is Danske Bank — the same financial institution that was recently found to have facilitated what some have called the largest money-laundering scandal in world history.

Transparency International does accurately capture what it’s measuring: global perceptions of corruption. We hear the word “corruption” and immediately think of kleptocrats being handed suitcases of cash or bribe-taking public officials in developing countries who are living well beyond their meager official salaries. But we don’t think of the London bankers or the Wall Street accountants or the Miami lawyers who ensure that the oligarchs and kingpins can move their money freely around the world, unencumbered by taxes or regulation or the prying eyes of journalists. They might not steal the money themselves, but they are certainly accomplices. And it’s all done in plain sight.

This grotesque misperception effectively divides the world of corruption into two camps: the corrupt foreigners who steal the money and the ostensibly clean Westerners who actually enable them. The former can’t prosper without the latter, but as long as that divide continues, we can wash our hands of the stain of corruption and not worry about the role we play.

Oliver Bullough, who has written extensively about how Westerners facilitate corruption in his book “Moneyland” (and in his forthcoming “Butler to the World”), says that this is no accident. “At the moment, it’s like we’re looking at the mafia in foreign countries, and ignoring the mob bankers in our own financial centers, which is partial and hypocritical at best, and racist at worst,” he told me. He says that traditional measures of corruption deliberately avoid scrutinizing the Westerners who help stash cash offshore or facilitate the purchase of high-value items such as superyachts from illicit funds without asking too many questions.

But as the stock-trading scandals make clear, we’re not just guilty of enabling corruption abroad. Even though few corruption rankings capture it, our domestic systems have been designed to obscure corruption, to use linguistic and legalistic smokescreens to disguise behavior that would be plainly labeled as corruption if it happened in a post-Soviet country or sub-Saharan Africa.

In the United Kingdom, ministers have awarded major contracts to their friends, a practice that has given birth to a new euphemism: chumocracy. If you don’t like that new term, you can always return to a more familiar one: “sleaze.”

Some of the issues that have come to light in recent U.K. scandals are routine features of lobbying and political financing in the United States. Sarah Chayes, another anti-corruption expert, makes the point with the title of her recent book on the subject, “Everybody Knows: Corruption in America.” As Chayes argues, we all know the system is corrupt by design. The corrosive influence of money in politics and obscene conflicts of interest are clearly rotting our democracy from within, but the United States still places a lofty 27 on the Corruption Perceptions Index.

Now some members of Congress face the realistic prospect of being forced to — gasp! — place their assets into blind trusts so they can’t so easily mix policymaking with profits. Some of their objections have been inadvertently revealing. A few Republicans have reportedly grumbled that it would make running for Congress less attractive.

I hope they’re right. Given the ways that we’ve legalized corruption in the West, perhaps it would be a nice change to weed out the people who are more worried about their stock portfolios than actually serving the public. As a way to sort out who’s in politics for the common good and who’s in it to serve themselves, the proposed legislation might provide a good start. The next and harder step will be acknowledging that perhaps our societies aren’t quite as clean as we like to pretend.