Transparency International has published its yearly transparency index. Again, we beat most countries. As you can see, Venezuela is at the top 2O out of 180 countries! Only Somalia, Myanmar, Iraq, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, Guinea, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Congo, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Cambodia are more corrupt than Venezuela! Because I am lazy and the list was published starting by less developed countries in the area of corruption, I decided simply to rotate the graphic.
I do not show the rest of the very long list. At the bottom you would find a lot of EU countries. The very bottom is occupied by Scandinavian countries and New Zealand.
Very clever, Kepler. Alas, these lists seem very consistent year after year. I wonder, is there anything showing the states that moved the most rapidly (either up or down) in a number of given years? Or anything showing consistent trends (up or down)?
ReplyDeleteMaybe TI has not been around long enough, but it would be interesting to see if there is a group of nations that moved from worse to better and try to isolate the common characteristics. I don't mean countries that pretty much stay up on the top (e.g., Scandinavian countries), but countries that moved noticeably in a positive direction.
Kolya
Hi, Kolya. I will see if I have time to plot the evolution for a couple of countries. Truth be said, OW had some doubts about the transparency of this institution (financing). Still, it is easily to infer from publicly available numbers that Chavismo has taken corruption to unchartered waters: the increased oil revenues do not correspond to the increased in social crumbles thrown to the poor, the way in which Chavismo has almost vanished open, transparent tenders, and so on.
ReplyDeleteMiguel has written a lot about this, but it would be nice if we could portray the whole thing in some kind of mind map: mind map of Chavismo's plundering.
In a way I believe the dramatic rise in the murder rate during Chavez's regime is one of the symptoms of increased social injustice, which is fostered by corruption.
Thanks, Kepler.
ReplyDelete"I believe the dramatic rise in the murder rate during Chavez's regime is one of the symptoms of increased social injustice, which is fostered by corruption."
I agree.
Actually, I really do not to think crime has to do with social injustice except in some cases.Chavez has many social advantages and plenty of money yet he commits crimes everyday.
ReplyDeleteThere are certainly multiple causes for crime, one of which might be poverty, but generally speaking many poor people have high morals.
Some important factors:
drugs
brain activity
hormones
childhood abuse
peer pressure
lack of crime prevention
easy access to guns or others means
personality disorders
alcohol
Sometimes :A person weighs the possible penalty against the anticipated benefits or gains of performing a crime.
Is this "Anonymous" Firepig?
ReplyDeleteI disagree. I think you are confusing causes and consequences.
"Chavez has many social advantages and plenty of money yet he commits crimes everyday."
What kind of logic is this?
Not only Chávez. He has excelled on that, but there are plenty others who do that, now and before him, in and outside Venezuela.
I would rather talk about ethics, as moral is something I see dependent on a time and place.
Indeed most poor have good ethics, at least as good if not much better than the average "very rich" (albeit there is everything in every group).
That is not the point of social justice. Social injustice means there is a friction because becoming rich is most often completely disconnected with the actual effort, it is based on
100% corruption, blunt stealing,
etc and there is a big sector of society witnessing how it is left behind. Wealth distribution in Venezuela is particularly flawed (now more than ever).
I agree drugs play a big part and the "socialist state" has done nothing about it and the guys celebrating the big parties in Caracas's East do not seem to care to use a fraction of their fortunes for some social programmes either (with some exceptions).
But "brain activity, hormones" does not play here a role more than anywhere else in the world. Brain activity and hormones you have in Venezuela, in the US and in Belgium or Germany in the same proportions.
"childhood abuse, peer pressure,
personality disorders, alcohol"
are more consequences of a profound social malaise, lack of state, missing engagement from the privileged and own responsibility. All but the latter have to do with social injustice.
Causes and consequences are always mutually reinforcing, otherwise we would have broken the cycle a long time ago.
ReplyDelete1. I was discussing crime in general everywhere,not just in Venezuela.Human beings have the same general characteristics( brain activity hormones etc)..
2.Morals depend on time and place, just as crime does
3.ethics also play a part... ie " roba y deja robar "
4.Personality disorders have nothing to do with social malaise, they are partly due to an increase in narcissistic disorder due to greed and spoiling by parents and socially liberal values( in the sense of producing automatic entitlement) but also have hereditary components.
5. schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders are very prevalent in Venezuela and other third world countries- much more so than in many developed countries, though the treatments are excellent in Venezuela.People are so used to these disorders in Venezuela they hardly recognize them as 'off'( ie the case of Chavez)
Friction between "have and have nots " type of 'social injustice' depends on regional ethics( where ethics are different there is little friction here ) and even still while many poor have high morals this does not always produce a cause.So where the rich have no charity for the poor, and the poor are envious of the rich, we fall into the area of a defective set of ethics.
Cause here has to do more in this case with poor ethics( the philosophy of morality)than with social injustice.
The justice system in Venezuela is most corrupt.Here is where social injustice plays a part.When people know they will not be treated fairly within this system,this produces less individual motivation for self improvement.After that,or simultaneously would have to be strongly addressed ,the ethical considerations both with the poor and rich, who automatically and culturally accept a falsely determined and detrimental hierarchy, fueled on by the mind destroying drugs of alcohol and drugs, and the dependence on tradition.
Yet it is interesting to note that depersonalization as a neurosis is not associated with murder, yet depersonalization in the narcissistic sense appears to be.
The human mind is fragile.Parents should be educated and held accountable for abuse and or neglect.