Friday 21 September 2012

Accepting Corruption

I was very happy to see Nick Clegg apologising for his flat out lie regarding tuition fees where he pledged to scrap them if he ever got in power, and then swiftly trebled them when he did. Far too little far too late i thought and looked forward to him being unceremoniously bundled out of power at the next election for his deceit.
Surprisingly, i heard quite a few reactions where the theme ran along the lines of  'all politicians lie, he isn't any different' which is true but doesn't mean i understand how we seem so quick to accept outright lies, corruption and fraud as the status quo these days.
The people who run our country, the politicians, were shown to be abusing and fraudulently abusing the expenses system to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of pounds, knowingly flipping their houses to gain the greatest financial reward and after an initial show of anger in the media, it was neatly forgotten. 
Then there are the people who serve and protect us, the police who this week were accused with fraudulent behaviour in substantially altering statements to remove unfavourable comments regarding the policing of the match so the blame was intentionally forced upon the Liverpool fans for the crush that killed 96 people.
The death of Ian Tomlinson was being swiftly swept under the carpet with the victim and the protesters being lined up for the blame by the Police until a video emerged showing policeman Simon Harwood beating and pushing the newspaper salesman to the ground immediately prior to his death and the police chain of events quickly dissipated.
Further corruption is rife among the people that report the news, the media, who has seen 90 journalists arrested in conjunction with illegal acquisition of confidential information, or hacking peoples phones including a dead schoolgirl and handing a phone to the mother of a murdered child just so you can hack her messages.
The banks whose purpose is to protect our money, have set aside £9 billion to pay out in compensation to their customers who they mis-sold products to. They were recently exposed to be rigging the LIBOR rates which cost Barclay's a record £290 million fine and an ongoing investigation by the Serious Fraud Office not to mention the financial cost to the banks cutomers in loss of interest and in some cases, the loss of their homes.
We can also look at the drug companies with GlaxoSmithKline recently fined £1.9bn for marketing drugs for the treatment of conditions for which it had not been approved and doctors taking bribes to knowingly promote the drugs. There was the damning conclusion from the World Health Organisation that 'unethical practises such as bribery, falsification of evidence, and mismanagement of conflicts of interest are common throughout the medicine chain'.
Last year, Supermarkets Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Safeway, were fined £50million for price fixing and so it goes on, so many examples of corrupt behaviour and they seem to just keep coming.
Corruption seems to have penetrated our society to such a degree that even our politicians, police officers, media, financial institutions, food retailers and health professionals have to be treated with suspicion and that's a very sorry state to be in.
Even worse is that we have seen it so much and so often that we no longer get angry about it but just reluctantly accept being conned, swindled and lied to. How, when and why did that change happen?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

no, this can't be. i thought government was the solution to all problems including corruption. why be corrupt when the profit motive is gone?

help me understand...

q