The company that bribed the world
The world is extremely corrupt. Widespread corruption is yet another issue hanging over our civilization which we&#x27;ve never had to deal with before in our history.<p>People in the western world usually don&#x27;t realize just how deep the rabbit holes go everywhere around the world and it&#x27;s very sad.<p>I&#x27;ve lived in many countries and I speak 6 languages, including Russian, Spanish and Portuguese, which gives me access to local press in many parts of the world.<p>From Brazil to Turkey, to former Soviet Union to India to China to Latin America, to Africa and the Middle East - the press is teeming with corruption scandals and political unrest triggered by corruption everywhere.<p>All this fantastic economic growth that we&#x27;ve experienced in the last 20 years - all those titanic infrastructure projects, olympic stadiums, high speed trains, highways, new factories, gold mines, oil fields.... had the effect of producing a kleptocratic global &quot;elite&quot;, which currently sits on piles of offshore bank accounts and &quot;own&quot; the power in most of the world, including military.<p>The western companies have gained a lot from this status quo, having shown positive growth year after year, much of it  from expansion into foreign markets, which made investors and regulators happy, yet all that growth helped feed and grow the corruption monster to an incredible size.<p>Russia is so corrupt that people have stopped perceiving it as something wrong, rather they internalized it as something unavoidable and &quot;part of the culture&quot;  - they&#x27;ve long lost hope of fixing it, given that the political elite owns the legal system, police, armed forces and any dissent or attempt of uncovering the scale of corruption, is quickly eliminated, as  was the case of Boris Nemtsov last year.<p>In Moldova, corrupt politicians allowed a group of criminals to extract $1 billion or 1&#x2F;8th of the country&#x27;s GDP into offshore companies and that money was never recovered. It was both sad and comic to see the people on the streets shouting &quot;we want our billion back&quot;. Yeah, right.<p>A former Romanian minister was sentenced to prison in the Microsoft licensing corruption scandal just two days ago. More than $50 million have been paid in bribes in that scandal. Note that we&#x27;re talking about a small country and just one company.<p>Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Ukraine, in fact most of the former USSR (except maybe the Baltic states) are corrupt beyond imagination.<p>People in Brazil are rioting on the streets right now because the current president gave immunity to the former president, accused of huge corruption and money laundering allegations.<p>Venezuela is currently a failed state mainly because of the corruption on all levels.<p>Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria are failed states with terminal corruption, which inevitably leads to war.<p>Africa .. I can just guess.<p>I don&#x27;t know many details about Asia, but I wouldn&#x27;t wonder if the picture is similar as in the rest of the &#x27;developing&#x27; world.<p>Corruption is injust, it leads to cynisism and criminal political interest groups, it strengthens the criminal organizations and people loose hope. Eventually it reaches a boiling point, which results in rioting and war, the radical method of reshuffling the power structure.<p>Sorry for the long comment, but I feel like this issue is on par with climate change - and actually a cause of the latter, so there, I&#x27;ve said it.