Bad for All Species

Love to see what Obama said the other day in Ghana, about corruption, and love to think the projection that it will mean more coming from an African American is actually true.  A snippet:

“No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or police can be bought off by drug traffickers,” he said. “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end.”

Good stuff. He hits on some of the dynamics of corruption, the way it distorts any sense that a leader is working for their people, or that the institutions charged with protecting a population are doing so, or that people have control over their own movements and enterprises. He rightly talks about corruption as something that is connected to other systems, economic and societal. And he conveys the sense that he knows what it’s like to encounter street-level corruption (a holdover from the community organizer days, perhaps, and more generally part of his rhetorical skills). And equating that to “tyranny.” That’s striking. I dig that word choice.

I dig it because corruption is a form of tyranny. Think of it as one person, a person with the power in a given interaction, putting their needs above the needs of the other party. They use their position to force a set of conditions on the other–pay, or you don’t get your passport/education/license; or pay, or you will have to face the consequences. They limit what the other person can do, where they can go, proscribing their lives, for a moment or longer. That’s street level tyranny, be it in Accra or Lagos, Karachi or Kabul, Jenin or Jerusalem. It comes in governmental and corporate and many other flavors as well, of course.

Let’s put this in other terms. Right after reading about Obama’s remarks in Ghana, I read Charles Siebert’s excellent cover story in the New York Times Magazine, about whales, which mentions a recent Supreme Court ruling that condoned the Navy’s use of sonar equipment during undersea training exercises. Despite documented evidence showing that sonar can drive whales nearly insane and severely damage their health, in some cases leading to death, Chief Justice John Roberts said lower court rulings in favor of the National Resource Defense Council, which brought the case, failed “properly to defer to senior Navy officers’ specific, predictive judgments” about the import of such tests to national security.

We have to be ready, the thinking goes, and while it’s a shame that whales are harmed in the course of this, well, that’s the price of keeping America safe and ready. In this case, specifically, we’re talking about whales, animals that, the story says, have brains that in several ways resemble our own, far more so than other species. More broadly, though, we’re talking about altering ecosystems, introducing something of our making into others worlds, as people have done for ages, in fisheries, in rainforests, wetlands, or deserts, because it’s considered worth doing for one reason or another. In such situations, we, people, have the power. We can impose our will, our sense of what’s right, and what’s necessary–in this instance, for national security–irregardless of evident short-term impact (more dead whales), and without considering, it seems, longer-term consequences.

What do you think? Is that corrupt? I think it is, personally-or it “amounts to” corrupt behavior, to use political phraseology–because whether it’s the carry-on effects already apparent in the water due to overfishing–Carl Safina’s Blue Ocean Institute puts has a useful, easy to print seafood guide so you can know the overall health of the fish you’re eating and can do so responsibly–or the costs of habitat loss for large cats or frogs or any number of other species, we’re talking about one body looking after its needs over another. These days, we know what’s happening. We have a sense of what the impact is going to be, and we know it’s not good, not for the environment, not for animal and plant life, and not for us. But then again, we eat meat mined in factory farms, despite the grave health risks, despite the horrifying conditions the animals are kept in–seriously, how is factory farming not torture? And why are we surprised that a species that would use factory farms for efficacy’s sake would torture people?

If I’m not rambling yet, I’m in danger of doing so very soon. Point being, whether we’re in Ghana or the Galapagos, Kabul or the Kalahari, Baghdad or Baja, corrupt acts, when the powerful assert their needs over less powerful beings for some immediate gain, change ecosystems, and those bills eventually come due–like, say, the results of funding Muslim holy warriors to fight the Soviets, or the landslides that routinely kill scores of people in deforested regions of the Philippines. I shudder to think of the impact the corruption entrenched now in Iraq will have, itself a function of the tyranny of Saddam’s rule. If this is happening now, we shouldn’t be surprised when something bad comes of it down the road, something will real costs and consequences. Beyond the fact that Obama was right, talking about corruption is a very good way to get people to think the US is on their side again. And he should be speaking out for people (and other forms of life) whose worlds are proscribed by this and other forms of tyranny. And our government should be taking the dynamics of corruption–here and elsewhere–into account when devising policy. Beyond all that, it’s just good to see this message coming from the top, from someone who has seen it at street level.