Is the internet making corruption in western societies more difficult to hide?

[Rilvor]

Look at my signature and take a guess at my thoughts on the topic.

 

[CannonFodder]

I've got a sick feeling that in extreme circumstances people will be erased to cover up the corruption.

You know what they say, "dead men tell no tales".

 

[Rivers Bluetail]

Did anyone hear a while back of "Rita Cromwell" I think it was? Had some governmental position in Illinois and ended up whisking away millions of dollars, since about 1970! She spent it all LAVISHLY, she was big into horses and whatnot. She got busted pretty recently, and now she's in the slammer.

How does nobody notice that? That's millions of dollars that she was sending to an offshore account!

 

[ADF]

Something else I wonder is if the west has become more soft towards corruption, fraud and criminality (by certain groups). Or we're just more aware of it, so they've had to find new ways of downplaying it.

For example, look at the change in language.

"They have mis-sold payment protection insurance"

Fraud. They fraudulently added an insurance product the customer never asked for, and was never told about, costing them thousands in unnecessary expenses.

"The horse meat in beef products is a miss-labelling problem"

Fraud. They sold a product containing horse meat as being beef.

Mis-sold and Mis-labelled, it almost sounds accidental. As if these people just tripped and accidentally made a profit screwing people. No one has to go to jail because it wasn't fraud, it wasn't criminal, it was just an accidental mistake. Whoops...

"Joan Corzine lost his clients money".

No, he fucking stole it and lost it gambling on European debt, but never went to prison for some unknown reason. After all, it was just an accident, whoops right?

If Bernard Madoff had lost a load of poor and middle classes money, as opposed to screwing the rich, I suspect he would have "mis-something" as well and all would be forgiven.

 

[CannonFodder]

Something else I wonder is if the west has become more soft towards corruption, fraud and criminality (by certain groups). Or we're just more aware of it, so they've had to find new ways of downplaying it.

Probably that we're more aware of it and they're trying to downplay it.

 

[Golden]

Yeah, that's what bugs me. Even though we have the technology in mere seconds to find out some mayor spending tax dollars on a plane trip. our society and our news sources are lagging behind culturally and acting like it's still the 1990's or something. I think as the internet becomes more and more widespread, even in countries that have little internet connectivity, it will be harder and harder for society as a whole to ignore corruption in the private sector and such. Basically we'll eventually evolve as a society past petty news because technology will make it downright near impossible to keep a lid on corruption. We all may laugh at online petitions and facebook petitions and such, but they show a future trend that we will probably see in the future of people on the internet acting as a collectivist towards certain ends and in turn effect the real world politically.

The main problem is that institutions are resistant to change: all of the people running the media are accustomed to doing business in a certain way. Indeed, many people today still believe in things like "running government like a business will prevent corruption" etc, despite the fact that this has been proven wrong time and time again (beginning with the 1997 Asian financial crisis). Corruption is not endemic to government; it proliferates through all organizations. Some people are simply better at hiding it than others.

 

[Digitalpotato]

When our generation is the one running congress and are the corrupt ones, they're gonna be a little more knowledgable and will be able to hide corruption.

Sides... as long as we have legalized corruption *cough*Lobbying*cough* it's never going to go away.

 

[Rasly]

You know reading up on the latest news about such b.s. like the tsa giving a patdown to a toddler on the basis she was disabled(no seriously, apparently being physically disabled means you get searched and was even the reason given by the tsa), or the b.s. going on about CISPA right now I realized something. Could it be that the people claiming the world is going to hell in a hand basket are wrong, and that it's just with the exponential increase of information people are able to receive and transmit news about this kind of stuff going on at a much faster pace?

How does an extension of information bandwidth makes them wrong? If you think, people 100 years ago were totaly clueless, youre wrong, they were going out side and to work and talk with eachother about important stuff, not like today, people only talk about useless crap outside. We do have better information source, the internet, but there are so many other factors, like crazy uncontrolled population growth, oligarhy, halfassed humans produced by our overloaded schools, that make it harder to understand what is going on, i am not even sure if the people back then were worse informed then we are.

From my experience, quality of internet is falling repeatedly since 2000, back then, most of people in internet were smart educated interesting people, now internet is full with halfassed people, fanboys, douchebags, trolls with no idea about anything. There is still lot of good in the internet, but those goodies are hidden in one huge montain of shit the internet has become.

 

[Rivers Bluetail]

Not to mention that we're constantly followed and monitored on the internet by just about anything that wants to, it's a sickening thought really. What is "anonymity"?

If it's only our names that are withheld, then I would be truly worried.